Who Discovered America?: The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas

389 Pages·2013·5.34 MB·English

by  Gavin Menzies

DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my beloved wife, Marcella, who has traveled with me
on the journeys related in this book and through life.
— GAVIN MENZIES
This book is dedicated to my dear parents, Martin and Primrose, to whom I owe
everything.
— IAN HUDSON
CONTENTS
Dedication
Timeline of World Civilizations
Introduction
PART I
Across Oceans Before Columbus
Prologue: Life at Sea
1. A Land Bridge Too Far
2. Along the Silk Road
3. Plants Between Continents
4. European Seafaring, 100,000 B.C.
5. Mastery of the Oceans Before Columbus
PART II
China in the Americas
6. The Genetic Evidence
7. In Search of Lost Civilizations
Photographic Insert
8. The Olmec: The Foundation Culture of Central America
9. Pyramids in Mexico and Central America
10. Pyramid Builders of South America
PART III
China’s Explorations to the North
11. Kublai Khan’s Lost Fleets
12. The 1418 Chinese Map of the World
13. North Carolina and the Virginias
14. The Eastern Seaboard
15. Nova Cataia: The Island of Seven Cities
16. The Pacific Coast of North America
17. Stone Age Sailors: The “Windover Bog” People of Florida
Conclusion: Who Discovered America?
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes
Index
About the Authors
Also by Gavin Menzies
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Timeline of World Civilizations
INTRODUCTION
I
have been on the road for more than forty years now in search of a new
understanding of early human exploration of this planet. My first book, 1421:
The Year China Discovered America, published in 2002, was the product of my
initial work in chronicling China’s circumnavigation and systematic mapping of
the globe early in the fifteenth century. On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the
world had ever seen set sail from China, led by the great Admiral Zheng He. He
traveled with a highly detailed map, dated to 1418, that showed easily the extent
of his travels as far as the North and South American coasts. But the annals of
the fleet’s triumph were destroyed. Not long after the Chinese fleet returned, the
empire descended into political isolation, obscuring the written evidence that
Zheng He and his fleet had reached the Americas on that voyage. But the
Chinese explorers who came to North and South America had left behind
unmistakable markers of their presence, seven decades before Columbus reached
the Caribbean Sea.
My second book, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy
and Ignited the Renaissance, tracked the fact that China had visited Europe as
well. Long underrecognized for their early mastery of technology, including their
prowess in seafaring and navigation, the Chinese conveyed a unique cultural
spark that fed the Renaissance and ultimately changed the development of
modern civilization. Europeans embraced the Chinese ideas, discoveries, and
inventions that provided the foundations of Western progress.
My goal in these volumes was to expose readers to the systematic nature of
my research, but as an unintended consequence, the books also exposed the fact
that professional historians are not willing to adapt to new information. Here was
data—gathered from studies of maps, historical records, ethnological
comparisons of folklore and traditions, botany, and human DNA—that made
such a case for Chinese exploration of the Americas no later than 1421, seventy-
one years before Columbus visited the islands of the Caribbean in 1492.
Yet, the well-reported data was taken as fraud and nonsense by some
professional historians, in part because I am not a member of their club. I am a
navigator and have traveled the world with friends and family, gathering
information on the Internet and at home. My network is wide, but nothing has
satisfied the critics. Their challenges are often ridiculous and illogical, and when
they fail to convince people to go against me, they mount campaigns to ban my
writings and public speaking engagements. What are the critics afraid of?
These first two books provided detailed and convincing evidence about
Chinese explorations before Columbus. But I am now in the position to provide
even more information and a new look at those explorations, taking advantage of
an additional decade of research and investigation. More than ever, the record
provides broad proof about China in the New World. That is the rationale behind
this book—Who Discovered America?
Admiral Zheng He was arguably the greatest mariner of the previous
millennium, and the proof grows that his fleet of regal vessels visited both South
and North America. My conclusion does not stand alone, nor do I claim primacy
in my research. I bring along fellow travelers on my journeys in search of new
evidence about the exploration of the Americas, and some of the travelers are
skeptics themselves. I welcome challenges and I share data with a network of
readers and fellow explorers.
With that in mind, we have been gathering a mountain of new data in these ten
years since publication of 1421, so much material that it is now time to publish
more evidence of the Chinese exploration of America. In part, the new data is a
result of advances in genetics and DNA testing and analysis.
We can now cite genetic information that leads to ironclad confirmation of
much of our earlier analysis. I have no doubt that we will have just as much
material ten years hence and will be ready to publish once more. Each time the
evidence will further cement the case and strengthen the reality before us—
China engaged in a remarkable exploration of the globe and reached America
long before most Europeans could match their prowess.
T
he publication of the discovery of Zheng He’s 1418 map led to a flood of
new data relating to Chinese voyages to North America over the past two
thousand years. No reasonable person can deny the facts.
I have organized our new data in sections based on our travels during the first
decade of the twenty-first century, providing a basic structure in which we can
expand on our evidentiary details—genetic, linguistic, cultural, and
archaeological. Taken together, these make a convincing, incontestable account
of who really discovered America.
Part I revisits the basic question: Did the early settlers of the Americas arrive
by ship or overland? For a century, scientists have clung to the theory that a
barren land bridge across the Bering Strait provided access to hunters and
gatherers crossing from Asia to the Americas. Could these people have arrived
in the New World via a virtually impassable land bridge from Siberia to Alaska?
I submit that they could not have. In this section we update our discussion of the
strait, which I am not alone in thinking was far too inhospitable for a major
migration. Land bridge theorists agree with us that the early settlers of the
Americas came from eastern Asia, but they don’t take seriously the evidence that
we have gathered.
Human presence in the Americas involved not millennia of land-based
migrations from Asia to North America southward, but instead a more organized
series of arrivals by ship from Asia. We begin to blend in evidence, such as the
sudden appearance of diseases and of plants that would not have survived a
centuries-long migration across the frozen north. The subject expanded with our
trip along the Silk Road in Asia Minor, where we also believe that Chinese
commerce and communication by ship had far more importance than is
commonly understood. Similarly, we also discuss here the other early great
seafaring civilization, the Minoans, whose ships were far more likely to carry
their settlers and merchants by sea.
From that basic exposition about seafaring, I turn to the great destinations of
Chinese explorers. Part II is devoted to Mexican and Central and South
American civilizations and their unquestionable links to Chinese culture. Here
we describe new research about maps, about correlations between customs, and
about folk traditions that are strikingly indicative of the arrival of a mighty
Chinese flotilla.
Part III turns to essential new material about the Chinese arrival in the New
World and tracks with our own visits to North America, both in the West and
also along the Eastern Seaboard, from Florida northward to Nova Scotia. The
footprint of the Chinese, along with the structures, flora, and fauna they left
behind, is omnipresent. The information also focuses on Marco Polo’s account,
well documented, of his voyage when he was an agent of Kublai Khan to North
America.
Throughout the book, I return to Admiral Zheng He and his map of 1418,
along with the increasingly important evidence that even he was working with
charts produced much earlier.
We use the map of 1418, for example, to uncover evidence of Zheng He’s
voyages to the Outer Banks and North Carolina. Also on the East Coast, we
discuss Dr. S. L. Lee’s identification of a medallion of the era of the early-
fifteenth-century Chinese emperor Xuan De, who appointed Zheng He as his
plenipotentiary in North America. By comparing the 1418 map to the evidence,
we also debunk charges that it must be a fake.
I agree with scientists who say that the Americas were settled forty thousand
years ago if not even earlier, however, not by nomads from the north, but by
Asian explorers whose skills were truly legendary. Among our details is material
from Charlotte Harris Rees’s description of her father’s map collection of very
old Chinese maps of the Americas dating back three millennia. I also discuss the
results of my conversations, among many others, with Emeritus Professor John
Sorenson (Brigham Young University, Utah) who, with his colleague Emeritus
Professor Carl Johannessen (University of Oregon), has gathered evidence of
multiple transoceanic voyages to and from the Americas in the past eight
millennia.
After 1421, and then 1434, my third book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, was an
enjoyable change of pace. In that book, we turned to the Minoan civilization, and
described the compelling evidence about the fabled civilization of Atlantis. It is
really the chronicle of the volcanic eruption at Thera (Santorini) in 1450 B.C.
combined with a devastating earthquake and tidal wave that swept across the
Aegean Sea and destroyed the sophisticated Minoan civilization.
Interestingly enough, this present volume had its origins before The Lost
Empire of Atlantis. My wife, Marcella, and I had set off to Central America and
Mexico in 2008 to research new material about the Chinese voyages of the