New script! Did China discover America? 1421 Debunked (Patreon)

1421

If you ever wander into a bookstore, you might just find this book: 1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies.

https://archive.org/details/1421theyearchinadiscoveredamericabymenziesgavin 

Actually, newer versions of the book have a new subtitle: The Year China Discovered the World.

https://archive.org/details/1421yearchinadis0000menz_r4i4

As the name suggests, Menzies—an ex-submariner—argues that, decades before Columbus, Chinese explorers sailed across the entire planet. Not only did they discover North America, but South America and Greenland too, and they also spread technology and established colonies too, all before quickly returning home—this circumnavigation of the planet apparently took between March 1421 and October 1423.

Now, a Chinese fleet under the command of Admiral Zheng He did sail throughout the Indian Ocean in the early 1400s. I’ll talk more about the real history throughout the video, but the reason we know this, is because of plenty of historical evidence. Historians have to use real proof for their claims.

Gavin Menzies doesn’t have any actual proof that Zheng He’s sixth voyage—or any Chinese voyage— sailed beyond the Indian Ocean. He has hundreds of pages of random, twisted clues—an entire ocean of evidence that’s just one centimeter deep. He uses myths, mundane artifacts, misinterpreted maps, chickens—he even argues that the Chinese population of California might’ve gotten there before the white people because… vibes.

But anyways, instead of just dismissing him as a crackpot, let’s actually go through his book and look at his claims with an open mind. At least, for as long as I can handle it.

This is What Why How, and that’s what the video’s about.

If you like this sort of thing don’t forget to subscribe. Also on my Patreon you’ll find an expanded script.

The Historical Zheng He

Now, let’s talk briefly about what actually happened so nobody’s confused. Between 1405 and 1433, a huge Chinese fleet under the command of Admiral Zheng He sailed from China on seven voyages. This was a huge achievement; the fleets sailed from China to Southeast Asia and throughout the Indian Ocean, making it as far as Mecca and Madagascar before of course returning home to China.

The Chinese emperor Zhu Di built, financed, and sent these dozens of ships and tens of thousands of sailors abroad not to conquer new lands, open up trade, or even for exploration. These were diplomatic, political missions whose purpose was to bring new lands into the tributary system of China: Zhu Di wanted more princes and kings to submit to his authority as the Son of Heaven. We call this fleet a treasure fleet because they brought tribute, in the form of treasure, back to China. You can read more about this in the book Zheng He by Edward Dreyer.

https://archive.org/details/zhenghechinaocea0000drey

How do we know anything about Zheng He’s voyages at all? Well historians primarily turn toward the plenty of actual historical texts written about them. There are three written accounts of the voyages, the best of which was written by Ma Huan—like other sources, I’ve posted a link right to it below.

https://archive.org/details/ying-yai-sheng-lan-1433 

These accounts are pretty detailed for a source from 600 years ago. We know for a fact that Ma Huan was on the sixth voyage Gavin Menzies claims sailed across the planet. On this voyage, which Zheng He himself probably returned home early from, the Chinese ships brought visiting ambassadors back to important places in Southeast Asia and the northern coast of the Indian Ocean before turning back home for China, filtering back over the course of late 1422 and 1423.

So, if we already know from Ma Huan that this voyage didn’t go beyond Asia, then what is 1421 even talking about?

Menzies bypasses the tricky obstacle of actual textual sources by claiming “as Ma Huan’s account makes clear, with his role as official chronicler apparently over, he left the treasure fleets at Calicut” (87) There’s no evidence for this. Ma Huan even writes about places the voyage went to after Calicut, including Mogadishu in Somalia. Menzies is either lying or deluding himself.

Even if Ma Huan decided to quit halfway through the voyage, he did include information on voyages he didn’t go on given to him by those who did. And guess what, he never mentions any ship sailing across the entire planet, which you think he would’ve put in his book about all the places the ships visited.

These voyages are already major accomplishments worth celebrating. You don’t need to exaggerate to tell an interesting story.

Okay, so I’ve already veered away from actual history toward 1421.

What are the stakes?

Before we get into the actual book, let’s raise the stakes a bit, because if this was just a random paperback in the bowels of a cheap bookshop, it wouldn’t really matter.

But it isn’t—1421 is, as the cover proclaims, an international bestseller. Lots of people have read this book and lots of people believe it’s true. PBS even made a documentary version:

https://www.pbs.org/about/about-pbs/blogs/news/new-pbs-documentary-1421-when-china-discovered-the-world-re-writes-global-history-in-2004january-10-2003/

But it isn’t just pop history and public broadcasting—historical scholars have agreed with Menzies. Well, let’s clarify that: scholars in China. Yunnan University even made him an honorary professor.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/644297.shtml

Obviously, there’s a clear motive for Chinese “scholars” to promote Menzies. It’s the same reason why Afrocentrists claim Cleopatra was black, or why Eurocentrists claim Jesus was blond and blue-eyed.

It’s because Menzies is a Sinocentrist. He believes that China is wiser and better than the barbaric, deceptive Westerners that stole China’s place in the sun. As Menzies writes, “Instead of the cultured Chinese, instructed to ‘treat distant people with kindness’, it was the cruel, almost barbaric Christians who were the colonizers.” (405).

Do you see the problem now? Medieval China was not some idyllic Eden. Here at What Why How, we reject all centrisms. Every culture and every society has great capacity to cruelty, including China, as history shows.

Now, the Chinese government hasn’t officially endorsed Gavin Menzies; his argument is still fringe to serious scholars, even in China. But the topic—the voyages of Zheng He in the early 1400’s, is still important to China’s conception of itself on the world stage. When China began its Belt and Road Initiative to invest in the infrastructure of countries across the world, President Xi Jinping cited the historical precedent of Zheng He. China has exited its isolation and is now competing with the United States for global power—this history is alive today.

Ok, so we’ve talked for a minute about why the book is important solely as a text, but what about its historical argument? If Chinese explorers really did sail across the world in the early 1400s, as Menzies argues, and if they did plant colonies and spread technology and inspire much of the history of the Americas without us even knowing—and maybe even the Renaissance in Europe too, as he argues in his sequel 1434, then our understanding of history would be hugely different. This would be gargantuan.

If it were true.

So, let’s start with the introduction.

Imaginary Islands

Gavin Menzies’s foundational argument, and the one he leans on the most, being a submariner, is that maps depict the Americas before 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Basic logic says this would only be possible if someone besides Columbus explored America to gain that cartographical knowledge, right?

So, what’s the first map?

In his introduction, Menzies writes his entire book was inspired by a 1424 map made by a Venetian named Zuane Pizzigano:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pizzigano.jpg 

https://www.academia.edu/69385685/1424_Zuane_Pizzigano_Chart_1424mPi_James_Ford_Bell_Library_Cartographic_Evidence_of_the_Pre_Columbian_Newport_Tower

This map, alongside the coast of Western Europe, also depicts four blobbish islands off in the Atlantic: Satanazes, Antilia, Saya, and Ymana.

Menzies argues that these islands, painted before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, are actual islands in the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe. This means someone must’ve gotten there before 1424, when the map was made—you guessed it, it’s the Chinese.

Except we know for a fact that Europeans have been yapping about mythological islands in the Atlantic for centuries. You can probably think of one off the top of your head: Atlantis. Believe it or not, there’s not a giant Greek island in the middle of the ocean.

Antillia also had legends associated with it, but since the first written evidence of any legend of Antillia is in the 1400s, it’s slimly possible that the island was actually real.

https://archive.org/details/legendaryislands00babc/page/144/mode/2up

Now, before you give a point to Menzies -- even if we assume that these islands are real, why would we even entertain the notion it wasn’t the Portuguese who found them but actually China?

Well, Menzies writes, “I found a command issued by the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator to his sea-captains in 1431, ordering them to go and find the islands of Antilia… had the Portuguese discovered them, Henry’s edict would scarcely have been necessary.” (pg 5).

But wait. Zuane Pizzigano isn’t Henry the Navigator. The entire nation of Portugal is not solely embodied in the flesh of Henry the Navigator. A much more likely explanation than China sailing all the way to the Caribbean is that local fishermen sailed to the Caribbean before 1424, or that the islands were just legends. Those rumors of Antillia made it to Prince Henry, who decided they ought to check it out as part of Portugal’s contemporary expansion into the Atlantic. Doesn’t that make more sense?

I mean, Gavin Menzies even makes the bizarre argument in his chapter “Colonizing the New World” that Henry the Navigator’s sea captains actually sailed across the Atlantic and colonized the Caribbean in the 1431, decades before Columbus. If he thinks Portugal had the knowledge and ability to do that in 1431, then why is it so bizarre some fishermen might’ve gotten blown off course beforehand, or the islands were just myths? Why is it so easy for people like Menzies to believe in extraordinary legends over simpler, more rational explanation?

[Some books on this topic:] https://archive.org/details/princehenrythena0000russ/page/82/mode/2up?q=Antillia

https://archive.org/details/lifeofprincehenr00majo/page/236/mode/2up?q=1431

https://archive.org/details/cu31924028668642/page/50/mode/2up?q=1431

China’s Voyages

Okay, what’s next?

We can skip through the first two chapters of his book; it covers Emperor Zhu Di, the Ming dynasty, and Zheng He’s first voyages—we covered that earlier in the video.

Here’s a bit we should address: Menzies correctly points out that during the last voyages of Zheng He there was a huge isolationist backlash in China against the expenditures and perceived waste of these massive trips abroad; there’s a reason why China stopped.

According to a source written nearly a century after these events, an isolationist official named Liu Daxia hid or, according to a source written even later, destroyed the accounts of Zheng He’s voyages.

https://archive.org/details/zhenghechinaocea0000drey/page/174/mode/2up

But wait we know he didn’t destroy all of them, because we just talked about Ma Huan’s written accounts earlier. Why would this guy just burn accounts about visiting America? Gavin Menzies knows Ma Huan’s account exists, so he uses all the tricks up his sleeve to explain why Ma Huan didn’t write about visiting America. If you have to twist reality so much to make your argument make sense… it doesn’t make sense.

Let’s go to Chapter 3. In it, Menzies describes all the different goodies they had onboard Zheng He’s fleet, which he knows because of the actual historical documents that weren’t burned. But wait—he also just makes up a whole bunch of stuff. For example, he says, the crewmen “were provided with a uniform – a knee-length white robe.” (64) No source says this. No proof.

Why do I care so much? Well, Gavin Menzies puts that on page 64 so on page 163 he can say a legend about white people wearing white clothes crossing the sea to Chile was actually about the Chinese. Same thing for a legend from New Zealand.

https://archive.org/details/1421yearchinadis0000menz_r4i4/page/162/mode/2up?q=%22white 

Shout-out to this article by Robert Finlay for pointing this out.

https://historycooperative.org/journal/how-not-to-rewrite-world-history-gavin-menzies-and-the-chinese-discovery-of-america/

Finlay writes, “Piling supposition upon supposition, Menzies never considers a question that he does not beg: every argument in 1421 springs from the fallacy of petitio principii. The author’s “trail of evidence” is actually a feedback loop that makes no distinction between premise and proof, conjecture and confirmation, bizarre guess and proven fact.”

Let’s keep going.

Did China round the Cape?

Chapter 4 of the book covers his claim that the Chinese ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Since he argues that Ma Huan left the boats in India but somebody must’ve brought to maps to Europe, he says that a Venetian named Niccolo da Conti hopped aboard the boat, sailed with the Chinese across the planet, then later told Europeans about China’s voyages—that’s how they knew about Puerto Rico and put it in a map.

Supposedly. 

Conti actually had a very fascinating life story—kind of a 1400s Marco Polo. While Menzies tries to stuff him into 1421, it really doesn’t make much sense. If Conti really did sail with the Chinese all across the planet, then why doesn’t he say anything at all about that in the actual surviving account of his life which he directly told Poggio Bracciolini, who wrote it down—we can read that account today. Surely a miraculous adventure to new continents would be worth mentioning in your biography?  

https://archive.org/details/travelsofnicoloc00wint/page/n7/mode/2up

There are no Chinese eunuchs to burn these books, so Gavin Menzies just ignores this hole in his logic. He even mentions the writings about Conti’s life. Did he forget?

Oh, also, Conti arrived back in Venice in 1444, twenty years after the Pizzigano map that supposedly depicts Puerto Rico. The years don’t add up.

Anyways, Gavin Menzies’s first piece of actual evidence that the Chinese sailed past South Africa into the Atlantic is this really gorgeous map, made by Fra Mauro, a Venetian cartographer working for Portugal, in 1459.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/FraMauroDetailedMap.jpg

https://onartandaesthetics.com/2016/07/06/fra-mauros-world-map/

This map depicts the bottom of Africa—Cap de Diab—before Europeans reached what we call the Cape of Good Hope today. Well, there’s a pretty obvious explanation: maybe Fra Mauro just guessed that Africa had a bottom, or maybe someone else reached there first—one of the thousand different mercantile cities along the coast of the Indian Ocean.

Gavin Menzies says it was China. The map does, after all, depict boats that might be Chinese treasure ships.

But wait, how did these boats end up on a Venetian map? Well we know for a fact that at least Niccolo da Conti saw big boats in the Indian ocean that might’ve belonged to China. He then returned to Venice before the map was made.

So, it’s not so crazy for Chinese boats and the bottom of Africa to be on a map from 1459.  

Very interestingly, the map specifically says that a ship from Asia sailed to the bottom of Africa around 1420, which does match with Menzies’s thesis. Menzies says this shows a “ship or junk had indeed rounded the Cape of Good Hope and then sailed into the South Atlantic” (93). Then, of course, up the coast of Africa and to America beyond, which is what the book’s about.  

But wait. The map has additional text that Gavin Menzies even puts in his book: The ships sailed towards “the west and south-west for 40 days, found nothing but sea and sky. In their estimation they ran for 2,000 miles and fortune deserted them. They made their return to the said Cap de Diab in 70 days.” (91).

So even if we assume this is true and not a legend passed from person to person, the legend doesn’t even say the ships that sailed beyond South Africa found land. They just sailed for months, found nothing, and turned back around. You can’t rely on a legend that doesn’t even say what you want it to say.

Gavin Menzies’s next piece of evidence is another document where someone says Fra Mauro talked to someone else who “sailed from India past Sofala to Garbin, a place located in the middle of the west coast of Africa.” Game of telephone aside, even if this is true, it’s talking about someone sailing up the coast of Africa, not to America, and not even necessarily the Chinese! (92) Arab and Indian people also knew how to make boats in the 1400s and they sailed all through the Indian Ocean.

Is it possible that one of Zheng He’s treasure ships sailed to the Congo? Yeah, it is. But it would be very strange for that not to be present in any written account of Zheng He’s voyages.

Next Gavin Menzies cites another precocious map, the Korean-made Kangnido, which was updated in 1420 and apparently depicts Africa “so accurately… that there cannot be a shred of doubt that it was charted by someone who had sailed round the Cape” (97).

This is where you start to wonder if Gavin Menzies is delusional. Is this vague blob supposed to be shockingly accurate? Africa is a shapeless elongated mass of hanging dough with no detail and a giant ocean in the middle. If Chinese explorers really visited this place, like Gavin Menzies says, and brought direct information back to the Korean mapmakers, then why does Africa have no real detail at all? In his book he has to literally photoshop the blob for it to look more like Africa (98). He says it’s because the Chinese had no way to measure longitude and didn’t know how far West they went—okay, but surely they’d realize they were heading West for at least a little bit by just looking at the sun?? But no, Africa is completely vertical on the map! 

Also I love how he insists the coastlines are so accurate when the mapmakers obviously just drew squiggles—and apparently forgot the entire continent of India exists? If these Chinese sailors didn’t realize they were sailing West and forgot a whole continent, then how could we trust them to actually sail around the planet?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/GeneralMapOfDistancesAndHistoricCapitals.jpg 

If we gave Gavin Menzies a Rorschach test he’d say it proved China reached America before Columnus.

Okay, so next Gavin Menzies says the Chinese ships sailed to the Cape Verde Islands. Any proof of this? Well, he insists that he found mysterious calligraphy on an old rock. He admits this calligraphy isn’t medieval Chinese, but it might be an Indian language. That’s right, this is his proof:

https://www.bela-vista.net/Pedra-Nossa-Senhora-e.aspx

Very faded calligraphy on a random rock that might be Indian. You better get used to this level of evidence, because that’s what the rest of the book is like.

Did China Reach America?

After reaching Cape Verde, Menzies claims the Chinese fleets scattered into the wind. One goes toward North America and two go toward South America.

The evidence, believe it or not, just keeps getting thinner and thinner as this book gets further and further from Asia. I wonder why?

In Chapter 4,

To prove Chinese sailors reached South America, Gavin Menzies turns to a Turkish map made in 1513. This Piri Reis map has a pretty good depiction of South America, but it was made after Europeans sailed to South America. But, Menzies says, Piri Reis based his map on a European one made in 1428 that we’ve since lost. What’s more likely? That 1428 map had detailed information about South America thanks to Chinese exploration, or that this Turkish guy also used a more up-to-date map nearly a century later?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Piri_reis_world_map_01.jpg

Now, Gavin Menzies goes a step further and says this map doesn’t just depict South America, but Patagonia and the Strait of Magellan before Magellan even got there. But I don’t buy it. First, I don’t see any waterway through this southern continent here.

In chapter 6, Menzies argues that this obvious land bridge is just temporary ice. I don’t buy it.

Once Piri Reis gets south enough, he just sketches out a coastline without much detail. Looks more likely to me that he just thought South America connected to the legendary continent of Australis, which cartographers dreamt up because they thought all the continents in the north needed to be balanced by some giant continent to the south. Turns out there is a continent in the south—Antarctica, but it’s much smaller than anyone thought until they actually found it. Australia, which obviously doesn’t touch South America, inherited the name of this imaginary continent.

Because every single clue must prove China sailed here, Gavin Menzies even goes so far as to say this dog-headed man, which the map shows lives way up in the Caribbean, was actually a mylodon from Patagonia. 

That’s right, the mylodon: a species of giant sloth. One problem: they went extinct 10,000 years ago. 

Why can’t it just be a monster man? Why does he feel the need to explain this? Well, because a dog-headed creature is mentioned in a 1430 Chinese book about strange animals found in distant lands. I don’t know why Gavin Menzies does this to himself. The ancient Greeks had plenty of myths and legends about people with faces on their chest or backward legs or dog heads: the kynokephali. 

https://www.theoi.com/Phylos/Kunokephaloi.html 

Not every single myth has to be real. Unless, I suppose, you’re scrounging for any piece of evidence for your weird book.

What’s his next piece of proof? Ok, he says that American chickens look suspiciously similar to Asian chickens. 

Before you laugh, this is a pretty good argument. Maybe the Chinese brought chickens to the Americas. Well, it would be a good argument if scientists hadn’t found American chicken bones in the Americas before the Chinese allegedly got there. Now, American chickens might actually be related to Polynesian chickens, which could’ve drifted across the sea or might’ve even been brought by Polynesia sailors… before 1400.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1965514/

https://www.nature.com/articles/447620b

So no, Chinese sailors didn’t bring chickens to America.

After exploring South America, kidnapping giant sloths, and telling Native Americans how to read chicken guts for prophecies, the Chinese fleets plunge south for the Strait of Magellan, which they forgot to put on their map.

I am rapidly losing my willpower to respond to all these random claims, so let’s fast forward.

Did China find Australia?

Chapter 6 is titled: Voyage to Antarctica and Australia.

Remember that Piri Reis map? Well, Gavin Menzies again has a hallucination and insists it’s an accurate depiction of Antarctica! This snake monster? Well, that’s an elephant seal!

After spending some time in the freezing cold, the fleet takes off and zips across the southern seas for Australia. Is there any cartographical evidence of Australia from the 1400s? No, but there is for the 1500s! Does Gavin Menzies count this as proof? Yes.  

https://imagesonline.bl.uk/asset/1709/

There is actually a whole historical debate about whether or not the Portuguese got to Australia in the 1500s, long before Captain Cook.

https://fac.flinders.edu.au/items/b035aec0-03b8-4659-b504-29ed8162c950

There’s even a Wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_Portuguese_discovery_of_Australia

Guess what? The idea that Portuguese sailors, who sailed extensively throughout the Indian Ocean in the early 1500s, stumbled upon Australia, is much more plausible than Chinese sailors discovering Australia by sailing counterclockwise to the Outback in the early 1400s. 

Chapter 7 also covers a Chinese voyage to Australia but from across the entire Pacific.

Gavin Menzies goes through various flimsy pieces of evidence, including stone ruins, stories of an old shipwreck, and legends of “yellow men” joining among the Aboriginal people. None of this is direct proof, it’s just more of the same junk.

If Gavin Menzies even made the argument that Chinese sailors were swept beyond Indonesia and stumbled upon Australia, I could probably accept that as possible. But sailing all the way to Patagonia, then to Antarctica, then to Australia? I don’t buy it. 

Oh, also, shoutout to Nicholas on Buymeacoffee who generously donated and requested a video on Australia. I tried to get my fans to vote on an Australia video, but their Australophobia blinded them to the light. So, for now, this is the highest concentration of Australia in any What Why How video.

Ok, where was I? Right, Chapter 8: the Barrier Reef and the Spice Islands.

Except I don’t care anymore, let’s skip to the next Chapter: The First Colony in the Americas.

Colonizing North America

Now we’re talking.

So, after that one Chinese fleet sailed all the way to India, to South Africa, to Cape Verde, to the Caribbean, then down to Patagonia, then across the entire Pacific to Australia, Gavin Menzies next has it forget it’s supposed to be returning home to China—instead, it sails back across the Pacific to none other than California.

His proof? Well, first he turns to the Waldseemuller map, perhaps the weakest map yet: there is absolutely nothing to actually suggest anybody visited the West Coast of America in this map. It’s just a squished blob with mountains. Gavin Menzies has the pure insanity to claim “San Francisco and Los Angeles are clearly depicted at the correct latitudes” on this map. Utter insanity, he’s completely hallucinating.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3200.ct000725/?r=0.009,0.047,0.201,0.15,0 

Next he mentions another random shipwreck that has more evidence than most of being made of Chinese wood from the 1400s. In case you didn’t know, shipwrecks don’t even need pilots—boats can get whisked across the seas and dumped on foreign shores without some sort of gargantuan fleet of Chinese sailors behind them.

But Gavin Menzies doesn’t just claim Chinese boats passed by California, but they actually established a long-lasting settlement there, right on the mouth of the Sacramento River. His proof? A book that identifies a Chinese town–in 1877–and claims Chinese people married with local Native Americans over the centuries because the Native Americans reminded the author of Chinese people. So, no evidence at all. 

His next piece of extraordinary evidence? A 1904 book that claims a Californian village was built by Chinese people because it had walls. This is all it takes for Gavin Menzies to proclaim “It certainly seems” the Chinese “left a settlement in California” in the early 1400s.

There’s no evidence besides this. No written texts, no actual Chinese artifacts, no skeletons, nothing.

Gavin Menzies was quite possibly the most gullible person on the entire planet. Any rock, any drawing, any village, any map, any chicken is absolute proof of his thesis! He has considered no alternatives at all. He has completely and utterly brainwashed himself.

Chapter 10

If you were Gavin Menzies, what would your next piece of evidence be? Well, how about you look at the Native American societies in North America and try to find any coincidental overlap in the least to Chinese culture? 

Here’s one: both the Chinese and western Mexicans made lacquerware. Bingo, that’s proof the Chinese visited and taught them, because god forbid anybody do anything without China teaching them how to do it first. As Gavin Menzies has the gall to write, “theoretically, if very implausibly, this elaborate and time-consuming process could have evolved simultaneously in China and Mexico, countries thousands of miles apart” (219). He’s so delusional that he honestly thinks it is more plausible that China sailed across the entire Pacific Ocean to teach Native Americans than them figuring it out themselves!

Chapter 11

In the next chapter, Gavin Menzies covers the Caribbean. He turns back to the 1424 Zuane Pizzigano map, which we already rejected at the beginning of the video. But Menzies twists translations of words on the map until they kind of match features on Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe—more motivated reasoning. Here’s some more bias: Antillia looks like a box, so maybe that’s Puerto Rico! But while the imaginary island of Satanazes is also painted as a rectangle, the real island of Guadeloupe definitely isn’t. How does Menzies fix this? Well, the sailors must’ve just made an honest mistake. No matter what the map depicts, it’s proof that China sailed to the Caribbean.

Next, Gavin Menzies snatches a 1502 Portuguese map [the Cantino map] and claims it’s so good that only a fleet of dozens of ships could’ve gathered enough info to make it. But after Columbus reached the Americas in 1492, plenty of ships followed. Using this map as proof of anything else besides Europeans’ own mapmaking abilities is again ludicrous.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Cantino_planisphere_%281502%29.jpg

Chapter 12

In Chapter 12, Gavin Menzies turns to more Caribbean shipwrecks that have no proven connection to China. He also says these stones off the coast of North Bimini, the so-called Bimini Road, were actually made up of ballast stones dumped by the Chinese to build a slipway for a wrecked treasure ship.

Except Gavin Menzies doesn’t have any proof the Chinese had carefully carved ballast stones, or that the Bimini Road was made by any humans at all. 

Menzies says the stones aren’t from the area because they have micrite, but the only source that claims that is apparently a paper from 1979; other geologists say the stones are made of beachrock. And apparently the Chinese built this slipway the wrong way—the rocks move mostly parallel to the shore, as he depicts on his map (271). Woops, I guess the Chinese forgot which direction the beach was.

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=735547265a61f535fde2fd1c9fb75c173015cb82#page=179

Chapter 13 is named “Settlement in North America.” 

While before he said the Chinese planted a colony in California, this chapter says they colonized New England first!

His first piece of evidence is Giovanni de Verrazzano saying some Native Americans had yellow-colored skin and long black hair (284). The only logical explanation that Menzies can think of is that they were actually Chinese.

His next piece of evidence is this stone building in Newport, Rhode Island

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Newport_Tower_Newport,RI_(51488606239).jpg

Which he insists was built by Chinese colonists because the dimensions don’t match English measurements. What’s a more likely explanation? Some guy in the 1600s used weird dimensions for his stone tower, or Chinese colonists built it?

For the rest of the chapter he continues to ramble about very thin pieces of evidence, like this rock that apparently depicts the Buddha.

https://hsindependent.blogspot.com/2011/07/mysterious-stone-builders-and-search.html

This is what Gavin Menzies calls a “substantial body of evidence” (290). He’s scraping the bottom of the barrel.  

Did Zheng He meet Santa Claus? 

Chapter 14 is called “Expedition to the North Pole.”

That’s right. Because it wouldn’t make any sense for his Chinese fleets to head back the way they came, they just had to sail up to Greenland and travel over Siberia to return back home to China.

His proof? Well, the Vinland map of course. The Vinland map does depict Greenland and parts of North America, but one problem: it’s a complete forgery. It’s a fake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vinland_Map_HiRes.jpg

https://news.yale.edu/2021/09/01/analysis-unlocks-secret-vinland-map-its-fake?

How do scientists know? It used inks first produced in the 1920s. Gavin Menzies knows they know this, so he cites the one guy who shed some doubt on their conclusions, Thomas Cahill, whose work has since been proven wrong.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4754.2008.00428.x

Gavin Menzies then says “those claiming the Vinland map is a forgery have not remotely satisfied the burden of proof” (305). The burden of proof. This entire book hasn’t met any burden of proof at all! This guy’s insane. Utterly insane.  

https://web.archive.org/web/20170511102807/http://www.1421exposed.com/html/1421_and_all_that_junk.html

Anyways, the last few chapters of 1421 argue that tricksy Portugal, learning of China’s expeditions to the New World, set sail and colonized the Caribbean before Columbus got there. What evidence? More of the same delusional garbage. Why even put this in your book? It’s like he hated Christopher Columbus so much he couldn’t even give him the silver medal, but had to kick him down the steps to bronze. 

Let’s just end the video. 

Conclusion

You know, when I read the book for the first time it wasn’t so bad. I wasn’t trying to debunk it, I just read it as a piece of fun schlock. But now that I’m actually going through and trying to show people how exactly the book lies and manipulates, it’s pretty frustrating. It’s 400 pages of brainwashing.

So, what do we get out of this? What did we learn?

Well, if there’s anything we should probably take away from 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, it’s to be skeptical. Not just of mainstream history, which, sure, check citations and do your own research, but also be skeptical of these overconfident wackoes who plunge into history, and other fields, and proclaim they’ve discovered some new miracle interpretation that the crusty old institutions are too decadent to see.

These guys—Gavin Menzies, Graham Hancock, so on—have brainwashed themselves and others. They’re not operating in the same plane of reality as we are. Every piece of evidence can be twisted and manipulated until it fits into their theory. Square pegs into circle holes.  

Just because someone disagrees with The Man or the NPC’s or whatever doesn’t mean they’re right.

Hopefully people who read 1421 check out the actual history of Zheng He’s voyages.