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Amazon.co.uk Review
If you're going to make a stir, you might as well do it in style. And Gavin Menzies has caused one, big time. In 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, this retired Royal Navy submarine commander, who only visited China for the first time on his 25th wedding anniversary, claims that the Chinese navigator Zheng He discovered America some 71 years before Columbus. And not content with this, he goes on to suggest that Zheng He learnt how to calculate longitude several centuries before John Harrison supposedly nailed the problem. Unsurprisingly, this has not gone down too well in some areas and the book has been the target of some scepticism.
Although Menzies has unearthed a few unknown primary sources, the bulk of his thesis depends on amalgamating several disparate areas of research into a grand unified theory. So he combines what we do know--principally that the Chinese built huge sailing ships with nine masts and that Asiatic chickens were discovered in South America--into what he considers compelling evidence. Menzies has also turned up some maps from the pre-Columbus era that appear to show the Americas, along with a few shipwrecks and Ming artefacts from along his supposed route.
It all makes for a gripping read, even if the sum doesn't quite add up to the whole. For all the detail, Menzies is some way off providing proof. None of the supposed 28,000 colonists has left any documentary evidence because all records, boats and shipyards associated with his voyage were burnt by imperial order in 1433. This surely begs the question--if we know so much of Zheng He's voyages around the Indian Ocean, how come we know nothing of his trips further east? Nor, conveniently for Menzies, did any of the colonists return home in triumph. They either died en route or skulked home to obscurity after they were disowned by the emperor.
So you either accept Menzies as an act of faith or brush him aside with scepticism. Either way, you'll have a lot of fun in the process as the book is never less than provocative. And even the sceptics will find themselves hoping Menzies has got it right, because there's something intrinsically uplifting about the notion of an amateur historian getting one over the professionals. --John Crace --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Inconsistent and deeply flawed,
By
This review is from: 1421. The Year China Discovered the World. (Hardcover)
The central argument in this book is that huge Chinese fleets charted pretty much the whole world in 1421-3, and their maps guided the European explorers, from Columbus to Cook.
The most interesting and credible material in this book (p. 382-7) is for the most part identical word for word to a 1977 article in the Geographical Journal, Vol 143, No 3, p 451-9. Menzies does not credit the source, mind you. Read the original rather than Menzies corrupted version. You can find it on the web too. Search for Martellus world maps by Arthur Davies. It presents a convincing argument that the Columbus brothers faked a map to dupe the King and Queen of Spain into funding their project to sail west to Asia. The rest of the book is nonsense. Menzies is not even consistent. For instance, he claims that the 1513 Piri Reis map shows the coast of Patagonia "with great accuracy," providing evidence that the Chinese had charted it before Magellan got there (p. 116). But on p. 377 he says (rightly) that the latitudes of the Orinoco and Amazon deltas on the 1513 Piri Reis map "are precisely correct," which places the Amazon delta on the coast he had identified as Patagonia! The two regions are on opposite ends of South America! Too make his case appear plausible, Menzies only shows a bit of the Piri Reis map, but when you see the whole map it becomes obvious he is placing Patagonia in the tropics! The whole map is in the colour plates between pages 200 and 201, but he does not refer to it. Menzies reasoning and standards of proof are amazing. For instance he identifies the Satanazes Island on the 1424 Pizzigano map as the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe (p. 246-9), meaning again that the Chinese had charted it. Now Satanazes is rectangular whereas Guadeloupe looks a bit like a butterfly! To explain away the differences Menzies has his Chinese fleet sailing back and forth around one wing of the butterfly without ever catching sight of the other wing! But the rectangle still does not look like a wing (check out p 249). So Menzies has his Chinese hindered by darkness at night or blinding sunlight during the day or some other lame excuse, and in the end he has the nerve to assert that the island was charted accurately! And he does not tell the reader at this stage that he is shrinking Satanazes by a factor of seven, turning it upside down, and dragging it some 4,500 km across the Atlantic, from a place some 1,500 km northwest of Portugal on the Pizzigano map to the Caribbean where Guadeloupe is! I'm not kidding. As with Patagonia, he shows a bit of the map only, so you don't see where or how big Satanazes is. You can find the whole map in the plates between pages 296 and 297, but again he does not refer to it. You can get the map on the web too. These are not isolated examples. Throughout the whole book Menzies misrepresents sources and facts, draws illogical conclusions from doubtful evidence, and makes bare assertions based on no evidence. If you want more examples look at an excellent online review, "Gavin's Fantasy Land" by Bill Hartz.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
119,
By
This review is from: 1421 : The Year China Discovered the World (Paperback)
It's after page 119 that this books goes from a thoughtful and fairly rigorous theory about Chinese exploration and lurches further and further into fantasy.
I think Gavin Menzies has done a real service giving the world a pretty robust idea that Chinese fleets did a huge amount of exploration of the world in the early 15th century. Up until page 119 he even has some solid written evidence of these fleets. However after 119 he uses his own knowledge of currents combined with a plethora of other sciences he has dipped into to find out what happened next and this is unfortunately where is starts to go wrong. The Piri Reis map is by his own admission an amalgam of many other maps, this makes it a secondary or even tertiary source and yet he pours over it as if Zheng He himself drew it. You cannot dismiss errors and point to the tiniest detail as truth in the same source it is either flawed and needs to be treated with care or solid evidence and can then be examined in forensic detail, never both and yet he breaks that rule. Then he starts going into genetics, anthropology, farming, art and physics- areas where even the experts all argue about the basics and yet he sweeps it up together and then declares this proves pretty much whatever he wants. Fundamentally there is a difference between what could have happened and what did happen. Saddam COULD have had WMDs but he didn't, the French COULD have won at Waterloo but didn't. The Chinese fleets COULD have done everything Gavin Menzies states but that doesn't mean that they did. The theory is helped in that the areas explored have little or no indigenous written history so there's no one to counter his theory explicitly. However for his second book on a Chinese fleet kick starting the Renaissance in Italy is beyond absurd, if western Europe found Byzantium exotic and wrote in awe of any of their ambassadors then a Chinese fleet arriving would have gathered more than a few lines in the chronicles. In short nice idea and at least it stops the Atlantis and aliens theories in their tracks but this is a curiosity that doesn't need 500 pages.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting read,
By
This review is from: 1421 : The Year China Discovered the World (Paperback)
The basic premise of this book is that prior to the European voyages of discovery a massive fleet of ships left China and ended up circumnavigating the globe and on the way discovered North and South America, Antarctica, Australia, New Zealand and Greenland. The author, Gavin Menzies, is a former Royal Navy submarine commander and as such much of his evidence is based on his knowledge of currents and wind direction when compared to maps that predate the voyages of Columbus. He goes on to use a number of other sources of evidence to back up his case including, among other things, the presence of mysterious wrecks scattered the globe, the presence of animals and plants outside their native lands before Europeans reached them and the diaries of the first European explorers themselves.
While much of the evidence presented in this book is thought provoking and definitely worthy of further study there are many pieces that are open to other interpretation and some that can only be described as circumstantial. I feel some of the problem that this book has is that it doesn't generally present its evidence in the best way possible being overly repetitious in places and being a bit too informal in others. Overall 1421 is an interesting book that does present many new questions for historians on the accepted view of the voyages discovery but it does require more research.
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