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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.
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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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*
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
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. :)
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?