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Chinese Explorers 'Discovered America'?
FLY9999 writes: "According to British historian and map expert Gavin Menzies, Chinese explorers discovered America way before Columbus did. He will disclose his information to the prestigious Royal Geographical Society (RGS) at a conference next week."
I hope this doesn't mean that they are going to claim us as a "renegade state" now...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Well, it seems that now scientists think that not only Egyptians and Vikings 'discovered' America, but now Chinese. Well, I wonder how many other sea-faring cultures have landed on these lee shores in search of a land of riches? Sort of brings to mind various historical-fantasy novels.
The Vikings touched base 400 years prior to the Chinese. The Arabs had the technology and knowledge to do it. The Romans, Phoenicians, and Egyptians may have done it.
But ultimately, none of those is important as Columbus' "discovery". Why? Because what was the end result of Chinese exploration of the Americas? Or of the Vikings? Or of Saint Brendan? It cannot be denied that Columbus had an effect on the history of the world (for better or for worse). Does this lessen the accomplishment of crossing an ocean? No. But exploration is only one side of the coin. There is also what you do with it. It's the difference between pure science and applied science. You can't have the applied without the pure, but the applied has a hell of a lot more bearing on the world.
That said, I am fascinated by all things to do with geography and history. This is an unquestionably cool discovery. But it's not earth shattering.
There is strong evidence that people as diverse as the Phoenicians, the Vikings, the Irish, the Welsh, the Chinese, the Japanese and English fisherman were actually in the New World, in some cases, millennia before 1492.
Search internet for lots of sources: One with a short description here
This is a great bit of news. We have know for a long time that the history of a war is written by those winning the war. This simply extends this theory a bit.
It is very interesting that the history of the world is written by the dominant group of the time. All the European discoveries are posed as someone discovering something new. The ver fact that there were people in the USA when Columbous landed proves that he did not "discover" it at all - he simply opened the minds of the dominant group of people of the time (The Europeans)
South African history is an example of this. Up till about 15 years ago, the only known history of South Africa was that it was discovered by Europeans, liberated from the savages and made a civilised country. REcent events have shown the barbarism of the European nations in the colonisation of the country, and has started to show the positive side of the indigenous people.
I think it is great that something like this will shake some of the beliefs of the American people. It is nice to see that places outside the European nations actually did some discovery prior to the Europeans.
On a final note - it is interesting that all the histories of the oriental races I have come across, everytime there is a meeting between the europeans (or other leaders of the known world) the Chinese are seen as very shrewd, civilised people - very few of the other cultured have had this benefit. Does it really surprise me (against this background) that the chinese charted Australia and the Americas before the Europeans? No...
According to the article:
When explorer Christopher Columbus landed in America in 1492, he was 72 years behind a Chinese expeditionary force, which had already made its way to the area.
And although Captain James Cook was credited with discovering Australia for the British Empire in 1770, the Chinese had mapped the island continent 337 years earlier.
Sailing in 1,000-foot-long ships with nine massive junk-style sails, the Chinese also circumnavigated the world a century before explorer Ferdinand Magellan's epic journey, and reached South America.
The reason why Columbus, Cook and Magellan get the credit is because they were Europeans. And, in those days, Europe was the center of the world. Western civilization sprung from Europe so to speak. Think about it: most (both north and south) American citizens have ancestors in Europe, so do the citizens in Australia.
For Europeans, America and Australia didn't exist until Columbus and Cook hit their shores (the Vikings did it before Columbus ofcourse but that was forgotten). After that, lots and lots of Europeans emigrated to America and Australia (most of them for economic reasons ofcourse). Contact between them and the homefront was never lost and therefore Columbus, Cook and Magellan deserve some credit. Maybe not for first discovering the continents but for putting them on the map.
Someday they'll dig up a Chinese skeleton in California, with a Viking-axe stuck in it's skull.
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
...do you discover a country when there are already people living there?
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I dislike cries of "too US-centric" as much as the next Yankee, but come on, the story here isn't that they discovered the American continent first. The wow-that's-incredible part of the story is the idea that Chinese explorers circumnavigated the globe 100 years before Magellan's voyage.
As it has been pointed out, lots of people beat Columbus to the New World, (Vikings and Native Americans to name a couple.) but going all the way around the world is something of an accomplishment. Incidentally, when you sail around the world you're bound to bump into the American continent anyways.
The history books are always slow to change. We know, for instance, that Basque fishermen fished the Grand Banks (off Newfoundland) for at least a hundred years before Columbus sailed. It was a well-kept secret, but it was often argued that Columbus' wife (who was Basque) let him in on the secret. The Viking settlement on Newfoundland lasted a long time, so there was never much of a hiatus in contact between Europe and North America. Indications of trade with Asia on the West Coast of North America are long-standing - Chinese goods reached as far as Mexico. If this presentation is true (and it would be interesting to see what he is actually presenting, as opposed to what is reported) it would be welcome just as a response to those historians who speculate, what would have happened if zheng he had not stopped at East Africa and gone on to Europe? Would we all be speaking Chinese? The answer would be nothing, and no (or not yet, anyway). The difference between the two voyages of discovery was that for the Chinese, their motive was altruistic: to discover the world and share their civilization with others. For the Europeans, their motive was greed. The difference being, when discovery was starting to bankrupt the government in China it was first on the cutback list. Greed showed to be a more durable basis for exploration than altruism.
And I thought the Native Americans, aka Indians would have discovered it since they lived there, silly me!
The chinese couldn't have discovered it first, per our definition Discovering means "found and claimed by a white person with european descent".
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All these films about things that happen in America are just a myth. The country doesn't exist. It's just a children's story, like Atlantis. There is no mythical continent across the atlantic. Think about it. If there really is a country there, then surely if you stood at the west coast of Ireland you would be able to see it. You can't. If you can't see something that you're looking at directly then it isn't there.
I'm sure some people will disagree with me. Well, I ask you this - Have you been there? Have you actually seen this place? Why did nobody ever mention it until really quite recently? And I mean the past 100 years or so. I challenge anyone to find a resource more recent than 1900 that indicates that the place exists.
It was clearly an invention of European governments to use as an excuse to devalue their currencies in the 1920's. They didn't want to blame themselves, so they invented another country to blame.
Face it. America is a ridiculous liberal myth.
Henry Sinclair beat the Chinese by another 30 years. When he got there he found people in Nova Scotia speaking a Celtic dialect, He, in turn, was directed there by a couple of Venetians. The Vikings beat him by a few hundred years, and there is plenty of evidence that European fishermen had been sailing across the Atlantic pretty much all through history.
The only thing that makes Columbus different is that by the time he got there the mechanisms and motivation to publicise the discovery and start the process of conquest and colonisation were in place.
Great! Now we are just waiting for (north) americans to discover the rest of the world!
So, you've been to LA recently :o) *ducks*
When playing Civ 3 starting out in North America, every friggin country discovers me before I discover them ... damn them.
If anyone is interested, here is what the book "Thunder from the East" by two winners of the Pulitzer prize wrote about Zhang He's fleet: "Between 1405 and 1433 Zheng He commanded seven major expeditions, involving the largest navel fleet that the world would see for the next five centuries. Not until World War I did the West mount anything comparable. Chinese records show that Zheng He's fleet included 28 000 sailors on 300 ships, the longest of which were 400 feet long. By comparison, Columbus in 1492 had 90 sailors on 3 ships, the biggest of which was 85 feet long. Zheng He's ships also had design elements such as balanced rudders and watertight bulwark compartments that would not be introduced in Europe for another 350 years. The ships sailed as far as East Africa and could have gone around the globe. It is difficult to conceive of their magnificence, for each of the grandest ships-the "treasure ships"-had nine masts,huge red silk sails, 24 bronze cannon, carved wooden animal heads, and painted sides with large "eyes" in front to see the ocean ahead. The treasure ships had luxury cabins with balconies for the top officers and for foreign princes who would be brought home, and these ships were backed by specialized vessels including horse-carriers, troop transports, cargo ships, two kinds of warships, and water tankers carrying drinking water. The crews included 10 translatrors, 5 astronomers, 180 doctors and pharmacologists to treat the sick and gather foreign herbs, and even 2 protocol experts to ensure that the Chinese treated foreigners with just the proper degree of respect. The sophistication of the fleet underscores how far the East used to be ahead of the West. In a broader sense, it indicates the stakes for the entire world as Asia struggles to get back to its feet. The present situation-with Asia making up a minor part of world's economy-is unusual in historical terms. For the great majority of the last few thousand years, Asia has been far wealthier and more advanced and cosmopolitan than any place in Europe. Several ancient Chinese cities had populations of more than one million at their peak, and by some accounts the Tang Dynasty capital of Changan had almost two million taxable residents in the later part of the first millenium. In contrast, as late as 1500 the largest city in Europe was probably Naples, with a total population of 150 000. So ancient Asia was the longtime champion of commerce and technology, and one of the central questions is whether it is now ready to recover a part of what it lost. .....
Chinese records show that Zheng He's fleet reached the Kenyan ports of Malindi and Mombasa. Zheng He knew about Europe from Arab traders, and he could have continued around the Cape of Good Hope and established direct trade with Europe. But Europe was a backwards region with nothing to offer, as the Chinese saw it. China wanted ivory, medicine, spices, exotic woods, even samples of African wildlife, but it had little interest in European products like wool, beads or wine. So China turned up their noses at Europe."
On nine sails?
The freakin' Titanic was only 900 feet long and needed 31,000 steam-driven shaft horsepower just to get halfway across.
Thousand foot wooden ships with a single sail every hundred feet or so were either a remarkable engineering accomplishment or a mariner's nightmare.
peacefully inhabited the land!?
Perhaps you should base your ideas about Native Americans on more than Disney's Pocohontas.
I'll give you a hint. There were a lot of different tribes. Some farmed, some hunted, some made human sacrifices, some raided other tribes, murdering, raping, etc. Just like most humans.
I am not arguing that what happened to the Native Americans was not tragic. But to claim that the Native Americans were pacifists to make your point is sheer idiocy.
A good book exploring some of the reasons the Europeans annihilated the Native Americans is, "Guns, Germs, and Steel", by Jared Diamond. It contains some very interesting theories about the availability of domesticable animals and crops and what a profound influence it had on the development of societies.
Where does Australia appear on that map of Eratosthenes? All I see is Taprobane, and that is the ancient name for Sri Lanka.
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An excellent book that discusses why some civilizations (particulary european) dominate others ... a good summary
is here
The boat that was found under the pyramid in Giza was only slightly smaller than the Mayflower. While it wasn't built for ocean voyages, it does seem to be built stronger than the repoduction of the Mayflower I saw.
A common picture in tombs have a picture of the deceased holding a knife to the neck of an Indian or Ethiopian. There are reports that they knew of at least four other races 3000 years ago. There are almost no detailed drawings of ships or maps. There are also reports that the Egypteans didn't go far in their ships but hired crews from other areas. Maybe they had some superstition about going too far from home.
Some of the survey maps from 3000 to 5000 years ago have areas that are very accurate. As in better than the ones done in the 1800's by the French and require round earth calculations. There is an map of the entire coast of Africa in the British Museum so someone was going long distances in boats and getting back. I'm not sure the ones that got to Australia ever got back since a long boat at that time had a high risk of being a one way trip to fish food.
Take a look at the homepage of the Kon-Tiki museum in Oslo.
Heyerdahl (who btw. now in his eigthies are still active digging up a historic settlement in Russia I believe, and overseeing excavations of pyramids on Sicily, the Canary islands and South America), sailed from Peru in 1947 to Raroia in Polynesia to prove that settlements in the South Pacific could have originated with explorers from South America.
Btw. The movie about Kon-Tiki won an Oscar for best documentary in 1950 I believe.
What you might be thinking about was Ra I and Ra II from 1969, where he tried to prove that South America may have been populated by boat from Africa, since South America is within reach of Morocco by Papyrus boats built after ancient Egyptian design. Ra I almost reached Barbados, and Ra II succeeded.
He also did a fourth voyage on Tigris, a boat built to show that there could have been cultural exchange historically between the old cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indus valley and Egypt via the see. The voyage wasn't completed because of the Iran/Iraq war.
You're right in linking Heyerdahl to the Easter Island, though, as he did lead an expedition there as well, trying among other things to link his theories of expeditions from South America closer to findings on Easter Island.
Central for Heyerdahl is that he believes that there has been much wider cultural exchanges between ancient cultures than what are known today, and that many cultures had much more extensive sea faring experience than many believe.
Here is one quote relevant to your question:
Even 163 metres is only 530 feet, of course, but it shows that 1000 feet isn't that unbelieveable.Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Well said. That's exactly what I've thought for decades but it is obviously entirely non-PC to say (or even think) it.
We also had a land war with Mexico 150 years ago and took close to half of their land. You don't see anyone crying about how we treated the Mexicans.
Oh well, the contradictions of the "politically correct" crowd. :)
2000 years ago, Teotihuacan was the largest city in the entire world, with a population exceeding 100,000. The Aztec, several hundred years later, created an economic empire that may well have streched from southern Colorado to Panama. The Inca existed in a huge military empire that spanned a large chunck of the Pacific Coast in South America. Granted, the continents on the whole never had the population density of the world, but there were people farming on the Mississippi, hunting in the Apalachians, and making a decent living in the Great Basin as well.
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and that would be true if in fact we had actually gone to war or declared war at any point (military exercises are what we would consider the activities today). Dismissing the fact that 'americans' however far in our past lied, cheated, stole, murdered, misrepresented, and raped the 'native' population of the americas allows us the comfort of continuing in the same vein of action without remorse or consideration. If we do not look to our past, we cannot learn from it and grow to be a better people.
Everyone DESERVES respect. Our own constitution is based on 'unalienable' rights afforded to man (all man, mankind). In the government and individual actions in the slaughter of societies, tribes and individuals (something we should very closely equate to the Jewish Holocaust) 'we' denied those people of their 'unalienable' rights.
The sad part is that lets say we "move on", we "move past" what happened and the wrong doings of generations past... what are we doing today to make sure that 1) we preserve what little of that culture is left 2) we ensure that the native american as a bloodline doesn't dissappear entirely. And the answer is 'very little'. I don't believe in 'affirmative action' I believe in 'equality'. 'We' put more effort into building 3rd world countries up than we do in building up the nations that exist within this country. We need to look to the past to see what we can avoid repeating and what we may need to correct so that WE (all of us) have a more prosporous and rich future.
1st, it is well known that multiple cultures "discovered" what has come to be known as America before Columbus did in 1492. First and foremost by far, of course, were the ancestors of the native peoples of America, who appear to have arrived in several waves of migration via the Alaskan land bridge and possibly via maritime travel from Polynesia. There are arguments about exactly how old the earliest sites (including Monte Verdi in South America, and Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania) are, but most scholars accept them as being at least 10,000 years old and perhaps as old as 25,000 years. This beats anyone else by a long shot.
After this migration, however, the ONLY incontrovertible archaeological evidence we have for precolumbian contact comes from Viking Sites of around 1000 AD, including L'Anse Aux Meadows, which I believe is in Newfoundland.
The only other group that has any kind of solid archaeological claim to precolumbian discovery is the Chinese. Their presence seems to be attested by anchor stones found off the coast of California which closely match those from Chinese ship types which existed before the era of Columbus. There is, however, NO secure precolumbian artifactual evidence from the Chinese. This one's really a tossup, so I'd like to see what Menzies has to say.
Now when it comes to all of these other claims - Egyptians, Subsaharan Africans, Phonecians, Welsh, etc. etc., what we're seeing is a lot of bad scholarship. Most of this can be traced to 19th century racist hyperdiffusional accounts which attempted to explain how monumental architecture and such could have been produced by such "primitive" (or in some accounts sub-human) people as the Native Americans. Most of these centered around the Egyptians, mainly due to superficial similarities between Egyptian Pyramids and Mesoamerican "pyramid" platforms, which in actuality are designed and built in entirely different ways. Furthermore, neither the Egyptians, nor even the Phonecians, who are often supposed to have ferried the Egyptians across the Atlantic, possessed the kind of ship technology which would make regular oceanic voyaging possible. These were unreinforced, open-decked, square-rigged boats with no navigational instruments. We're not talking Spanish Naos or Chinese Junks (or even Viking boats) here.
The rest of the so-called evidence rests on overinterpretation of existing evidence (Olmec heads as evidence of African Contact, St. Brendan's Chronicles as an actual account - yeah, they just ran into Judas Iscariot in Massachussetts), proven hoaxes (Cuneiform tablets in Tennessee), or the psychotic ramblings of UFO cultists like Zecharia Sitchin.
Anyway, despite my little tirade, I don't want to rule out that other civilizations couldhave made it to the Americas. There is just no evidence. So here is how it stands on Precolumbian contact:
North Asians : Yes Vikings : Yes Chinese : Chances are pretty good Egyptians, Phonecians, Africans, Welsh : Highly Doubtful Everyone Else : Who the hell knows?
Propaganda like this is part of any empire's claim on the world. We found it, we own it, right? Oh yeah, the party invented the helocopter. There is a reason communist countries try to claim all ideas and discoveries. It is to legitimize their ownership of all things. Even if true exploratory rants should cause apprehension. I expect the Chinese government to pick this up and produce, "evidence" that they knew it all along.
Who shall stop the Chinese if they do want to conquer? No one bothered as they crushed Tibet. China is one of the largest best armed countries in the world, and it's under horrific central control. Make no mistake few are willing to stand in their way.
Thank you very much Stright Times for presenting this information as you did. I imagine your Royal Navy sources are not pleased. No thank you, for the offer of an active X advert.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Ever wonder why the names of so many New England towns end in the word "field"? Most of what is now New England (and anywhere else on the continent with good dirt and a decent growth season) was cleared fields long before European settlers showed up. Further, most recent estimates (recent, because previous estimates have been uniformly politically self-serving, but based on the same historical observations) show that aboriginal populations in North America rival europe's population at the time of westward expansion.
The density of population from one place to another was much more consistent than in Europe, so there were no streets being used as open sewers , no Bubonic plague, no resistance to the diseases that appear among densely populated cities.
What you learned in High School about native populations is simply wrong. When the plagues started depopulating native villages (mortality rates were about 95%), the settlers thought that all of this wealth sitting and waiting for them to come along was the will of God and in their prayers thanked God for their good fortune.
To get back to the current topic. Just about everyone has been to the Americas before Columbus. The obsession with his successful trips to enslave a few natives and steal a lot of gold shouldn't be interesting to anyone actually interested in history.
Don't get me wrong. The natives made plenty of mistakes. The Mayans were likely wiped out by an ecological disaster of their own making. Other native tribes made their own mistakes. They were human, but several of my ancestors uniformly and repeatedly screwed them over by breaking treaties and contracts time and time again. Pretending it didn't happen or even outright denying it doesn't change the facts.
Here's another one for you. The sale of Manhattan for a few beads? Two problems: First, the deal was made with a tribe that had no claim to Manhattan at the time (though they said they did) . Second, the treaty as signed was for one season's hunting rights (the natives were very savvy with land contracts and land rights). At the end of the contract, we had to vacate, but we pulled out our guns, enslaved the natives, and shipped them back to Europe (the slave trade went both ways across the Atlantic).
Regards, Ross
All the intentional wartime/peacetime atrocities committed by Europeans in the Americas put together don't even add up to 1/100th the amount of Native Americans killed by foreign diseases. Not even close. It doesn't excuse them, but the Europeans were no more guilty of genocide than, say, the English in the Hundred Years' War.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
What a crock. Disease was introduced *accidentally* in the early 1500's and pretty much wiped out most Native Americans by the beginning of the 1600's. Using polio-infected blankets against certain tribes didn't take place until the 1800's. By this time the flu had already done it's work.
There were no concentration camps, no ovens, no Gestapo. The number of people actually killed - as in, murdered - by Europeans can be measured in the tens of thousands. This isn't insignificant but it's by no means unique in history. As I said before the Assyrians did much, much worse and with more brutality than even the Spaniards were capable of. Hell, the Incans and the Aztecs *both* committed atrocities far beyond anything than Cortez and company envisioned, and these boys were complete lunatics.
This pathetic attempt at revisionist history isn't appreciated.
And please note: accepting historical fact by no means exempts people from moral action *today*. Passing laws to protect Native Americans and provide them with equal opportunity are a sign of ethical behavior; indulging in blame-fests is a way of avoiding concrete action which might affect one's pocketbook. Blaming ourselves for what thousands of peoples have done during the entirety of human history is a great way to 'accept responsility' without having to take corrective action to make the lives of Native Americans *alive now, today* more equitable - especially when self-blame is free and money is not.
I do not hold myself responsible for what my ancestors did to Native Americans, intentionally or unintentionally. Life isn't fair, and such is the lot of the conquered. I do, however, blame myself if I don't act to improve the lives of Native Americans in our nation today. So lets stop whining and start doing something constructive, eh?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
But I'm a bit suspicious of the claim that a Cherokee chief said Madoc's people were called "welsh". Welsh is an old English word meaning "strangers" or "enemies". Welsh people (as I guess you know) would have called themselves "cymraeg", or even "British" (Prythaeg ?).
Anyway, even if you don't accept that argument, it's not worth being seriously upset about. The fact that they don't have to pay taxes doesn't bother me too much, since it makes their miserable lives at least a bit brighter.