It is some time since the book was published, but as I am increasingly finding due to pressures of time, I only recently managed to finish the book “1421, the Year China Discovered the World”, written by former Royal Naval submariner Gavin Menzies. He writes in the tradition of revisionist historians who, fired by a sense that a group of people have been done a great injustice – the Chinese treasure fleet sailors – puts his own skills to righting a perceived wrong. It is an enthralling read, drawing on Menzies’ own navigational knowledge and seamanship, his thirst for adventure and historical knowledge, and above all, by an almost Sherlock Holmes-like ability to track down awkward facts to build a case.
The case is a pretty powerful one, although there are some holes in it, at least on a first reading. What makes the book enjoyable all the way through is that it does not strike the reader that Menzies is full of that tedious modern desire to debunk the achievements of great men in order to exalt his own cleverness. This trait, this desire to show that certain brave folk have feet of clay, bores me to tears. Menzies reveres Cook, Magellan and other European explorers, but he feels the Chinese, who put together massive fleets of enormous sailing junks, have been the victims of undeserved obscurity.
Without spoiling the book for those who have not read it, what Menzies does is to show how certain maps of the mid and late 15th centuries, used by the Portugese and folk such as Columbus, could not possibly have contained the information in them without someone having done the prior work of charting certain areas. He finds all kinds of evidence: fauna, flora, jewellery, stoneware, and patterns of trade. He shows how the Chinese, centuries before Englishman John Harrison invented his vital chronometer, cracked the problem of accurately measuring longitude. Menzies’ navigational expertise is vital to showing how maps of the Middle Ages, when corrected for certain errors, make sense for the modern navigator (as an amateur yachtsman myself, I find this sort of stuff fascinating).
I have a few problems though with this thesis, although they may not be fatal to it. First of all, the mandarin-run China destroyed pretty much all the known written evidence that the voyages that Menzies writes about took place. Several of the admirals who led the expeditions were killed or disappeared. Thousands of their sailors died or found shelter in the lands on which they were shipwrecked. Although a European monk – converting to Islam to avoid problems, perhaps wisely – apparently sailed on the ships and transmitted evidence of the expeditions, it is often rather hard to see how the details that Menzies uses to base his claim can be assembled coherently. I find it frankly incredible that not one major Chinese sailing officer ever laid down independently verifiable accounts of his actions and voyages and that those accounts were all destroyed. The probabilities of such an outcome strike one as low. Menzies relies to a large extent on informed and clever conjecture. But conjecture is what we have and I am not sure how all this would pass muster in a court of law.
Even so, Menzies has not been afraid to present his theories, put together over a period of many years and he has a website, which is regularly updated. If you look at the Amazon site carrying the book you will see that many reviewers are sceptical, if not downright hostile, to Menzies. Some of that hostility looks to me suspiciously like base envy. The fact is that Menzies has written a superb story and it has the ring of truth about it. It is the sort of book that to be honest, I would love to have written myself.
What are the wider lessons to be drawn from this book? Well, the first and most striking lesson for me is that the magnificent Chinese fleets and the entrepreneurial drive of the men who created them was deliberately snuffed out by the ruling Chinese establishment. As a result, the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and British were eventually to fill the vacuum and seize the spoils of colonial expansion and trade. This story is an object lesson in the stupidity of economic autarky and inward-looking cultures. It is not a book that should be comfortable reading for today’s neo-mercantilists like the preposterous Lou Dobbs of CNN, for example. Other lessons include the reminder of what a remarkable group of men and women continue to serve in the Royal Navy like Gavin Menzies, and what courage continues to be required of people who do their business on the high seas even in this age of high-tech and satellite navigation.
And remember, the ancient mariners did not have handheld navigation devices, air-sea rescue helicopters and video linkups. They had only the stars, the sun, and plenty of raw courage.
If you read it, be so good as to describe the Chinese solution for longitude. Did it involve lunar observations? This is often referenced in the Patrick O’Brian novels. Not sure the Chinese invented that.
It is based on lunar eclipses, yes. His explanation for how they must have achieved it is pretty clever, actually. It required a large fleet of vessels able to make sightings and cross-reference their findings to come up with an accurate picture. I find it convincing.
I don’t see why people would think it so impossible for the Chinese to have made it to the west coast of the Americas. The biggest piece of open ocean they’d have had to traverse would have been less than 50 miles at the Bering straits.
The only real limiters for a big sailing ship would have been food and water, and there’ are few places along the Asian and American coasts where those would be in short supply.
Being pedantic, shouldn’t we be saying the the Chinese were second to discover the New World, after the Viking explorers? (Excluding the aboriginals who arrived possibly 12,000 years earlier)
Read this a year or two ago, right after it came out.
It is an intersting idea, and very plausable, but Mensies seems to have teh unfortuante need to seize on every scrap of evidence and promote it even when it should not. Like that stone tower in one chapter.
I have not seen the web site, so will look at that as well.
The lack of written documents is not surprising to me, since Mandarins kept tight reign on teh entire bureaucracy and could easily have destroyed all documents not fitting in with the political culture of the moment.
So far as private acounts, from what I recall, most people not in trade or the aristocracy were largely illiterate, and the culture of China, being very obedient, if not servile towards authority, would lead those that were literate to obey without question any orders to dispose of offending records.
What is needed is arceological evidence, which is lacking so far.
The genetic evidence found is too muddy to be useful, since there has been such a huge Chinese emigration to all parts of the Pacific rim, and elsewhere.
So I rate it a plausible, but far from proved, speculation.
And don’t forget the Sinclairs of Rosslyn
This is tangential, but it’s seemed to me that the most straightforward way to determine longitude would be to measure magnetic declination (deviation between magnetic north and true north) and latitude. At a given latitude, there ought to be only two easily distinguishable points with a given magnetic declination.
I’ve never seen this proposed as a solution to the longitude problem, which leads me to believe that there’s some basic flaw I’m missing.
Thank you, JP. I don’t know why they needed a whole fleet – Jack Aubrey managed all by himself. As for its origins I would think to look back to the Greeks, but who knows? By all means, credit to the Chinese.
cirby, a “big sailing ship,” or fleet of them, is not safe close to shore. The wind could run you onto the rocks at any time. Much safer, counterintuitively perhaps, to stay out at sea. IIRC they got to Africa the same way. Yes, they were badass in their day, before the Middle Kingdom turned its gaze inward.
OTOH you do raise a good point about victualling. If out at sea (which I presume they did), how did they ward off scurvy? Did they know the magic of citrus? Herbs maybe? Ancient Chinese secrets? ;>
1) You would have to accurately map “magnetic north” as opposed to true north.
2) You would have to understand that magnetic north moves around, and adjust.
3) You would have to either do this at sea, or do it on land and publish it to mariners, and do it with XXth century technology.
Those are what I come up with off the top of my head, irrespective of whether your theory is valid. Perhaps you might do it today but not when the Chinese were floating their boats.
I also enjoyed this book immensely. The evidence presented particularly on human genetics and Asian chickens seems very strong. He also offers a prediction, which if it proves correct would go a long way to verify his hypothesis. The prediction involved the several, hundred feet, mounds of sand on the sea bed near the Bimini Road. He suggests they are of wrecked vessels from the Chinese fleet and will therefore be made of teak. So if they are teak it is QED. If not his hypothesis is probably wrong.
Incidentally, I find the rancour of many of his critics depressing, why do people react so negatively to what is, at least, a wonderful yarn?
From what I and my ape-brain can gather, the Chinese Longitude method may have been good for post-processing of maps, but it does not strike me as practical for an individual ship trying to get to a specific location that a Harrison chronometer would.
A bit like the Kinematic post-processing of GPS data that gets millimetre accuracy without expensive RTK setups, I suppose. Not much new under the sun, er, moon.
This book is a classic publishing scam on the reading public that used a half arsed hypothesis from a partly informed retired military officer in order to stir up a non-controversy for the purpose of drumming up book sales. And it worked, except that the massive junk theory of chinese naval history, is just that. It is an almost entirely spurious story based on some very thin slivers of half fact and confusion. There was an interesting Australian ABC Four Corners TV programe on it in 2006 that exposed the sogginess of this thin tissue of speculation for the waste matter that it is. See http://1421exposed.com/ or just google “1421 myth” to round off your journey of discovery on this.
No No No !
You see my theory is…
Where did you all go to?
It seems like Torchwood sometimes.
On the magnetic declination idea, take a look at how magnetic declination actually varies with location. Oh, yeah, and it moves.
I recall one rather amusing description of how the Earth’s magnetic field worked:
One consequence of the Earth’s internal structure is a magnetic field. A compass needle points roughly north. The standard ‘lie to children’ is that the Earth is a giant magnet. Let’s unpack the next level of explanation.
[…] According to physicists, a moving fluid can develop a magnetic field providing three conditions hold. First, the fluid must be able to conduct electricity – which iron can do fine. Secondly, there has to be at least a tiny magnetic field present to begin with […]. Thirdly, something has to twist the fluid […] As a result of these motions, the Earth’s field becomes a lot stronger.
[…] So yes, the Earth does behave a bit as though it had a huge bar magnet buried in it, but there’s rather more going on than that. […] Some of the materials of the Earth’s crust can form permanent magnets. […] In the upper regions of the atmosphere is a layer of ionised gas – gas bearing an electric charge. Until satellites were invented, this ‘ionosphere’ was crucial for radio communications, because radio waves bounced back down off the charged gas instead of beaming off into space. The ionosphere is moving, and moving electricity forms a magnetic field. About 15,000 miles out lies the ring current, a low density region of ionised particles forming a huge torus. This slightly reduces the strength of the magnetic field. The next two factors, the magnetopause and magnetotail, are created by the interaction of the Earth’s magnetic field with the solar wind – a continual stream of particles outward bound from our hyperactive sun. The magnetopause is the ‘bow wave’ of the Earth’s magnetic field as it heads into the solar wind; the magnetotail is the ‘wake on the far side of the Earth, where the Earth’s own field streams outward getting ever more broken up by the solar wind. The solar wind also causes drag along the direction of the Earth’s orbit, creating a further kind of motion of magnetic field lines known as field-aligned currents. Finally, there are the convective electrojets. The ‘Northern lights’ or aurora borealis are dramatic, eerie sheets of pale light that waft and shimmer in the northern polar skies: there is a similar display, the aurora australis, near the south pole. The auroras are generated by two sheets of electrical current that flow from magnetopause to magnetotail; these in turn create magnetic fields, the westward and eastward electrojets.
Yes, like a bar magnet – in the sense that the ocean is like a bowl of water.
It’s a neat idea, by the way, and people with PhDs have thought of it and felt quite pleased with themselves for doing so; but you were also right that when examined in more detail there are a few teeny little issues with it…
I will not find myself very convinced without unequivocal physical evidence. We have this for Vikings reaching North America. We don’t for the Chinese. That doesn’t prove that they didn’t come at all, but suggests that if they did, any visits were very short and superficial. And in truth I don’t find arriving, staying for a couple of days, and then leaving to be all that likely.
Oh, it’s almost certainly not true like much of history, but it makes a wonderful story. A great deal of history is not true; although it would be perfectly possible for the Chinese to come and stay for a few months, realise the locals had nothing much worth trading for, and depart without leaving any sign. The evidence doesn’t really allow you to draw conclusions either way. Maybe they did, probably they didn’t. But the points about the entrepreneurial spirit, the enormous ingenuity of the men of former times, and the courage and sacrifice of those early explorers remain an inspiration.
Yes I agree Michael.
I scrubbed a post along the same lines earlier.
It’s 1421, not 1066.
Surely someone would have written down something about little people on bloody big ships .Doing the circumnavigation thing. People would have noticed. But apparently not.
Could this be Jealousy or just that it never happened.
Thanks, Pa Annoyed. The only problems I’d been able to come up with were logistical ones like the ones nichevo came up with, which didn’t seem like dealbreakers to me (at least not dealbreakers for the British when the Longitude Prize was being offered), but your explanation sinks the idea quite nicely.
The link that Robert posted is very interesting. It does seem that Menzie’s work is nothing but, well, crap. But even if it wasn’t, so what if the Chinese got there first? It ended up having so little influence it was forgotten for over 500 years! The important thing about the discoveries period was not who got there first, but that for the first time a permanent connection (cultural and economic) was created between every civilization on Earth. And that was something that clearly wasn’t achieved by the Chinese.
I dunno, but if I ever found a link between human genetics and chickens, I would be very suspicious of the neighbors.
Seriously, it is odd that there are, at best, only dubious records of these, and those that exist are open to debate, to say the least.
On the other hand, the areas supposedly visited, records either were not kept, as in North America, or, if they existed at all, were destroyed by Spanish and Portuguese conquest, as in South and Central America.
Areas near India and Arabia recorded Chinese fleets, of impressive size even by todays standards, but those would be fairly normal journeys.
I do not recall if any records, or even claims of records, have been found on the west coast of Africa of the presence of Chinese ships or traders, which would lend credence to part of his story anyway.
I heard about this a while back on the Richard & Judy show of all places.
The victualling was accomplished because these were very big ships for the time. They kept pigs on board and grew plants for food. They could manage this because they de-salinated sea-water. The impression I got was that this is essentially non-controversial. Chinese mariners certainly made some spectacular trips at the time regardless of whether they ever made it to North America.
On R&J Menzies produced a truly bizarre piece of evidence that the Chinese did get to NA. He had a contemporary Chinese map fragment of what appeared to be what is now New England. I thought that rather weird. The Oregon coast would have made a lot more sense…
What struck me most about the story (again, I’m fairly sure this is uncontroversial) is that the great age of Chinese exploration lasted for a very short period of time. The next Emperor was very conservative and ordered the fleet scrapped. The Chinese certainly had the technology to discover and exploit the New World yet they failed to do so because their centralised bureaucracy made a bad call.
Within a hundred years of the (possible) discovery of America by the Chinese European free-enterprise was exploiting America successfully using much smaller, lower-tech vessels. I regard this as an examplar for Libertarianism and a model which will be emulated on the “high-frontier”.
Who first got to America is irrelevant. There are so many claims. The last I heard involved the English. I’m on shaky ground here but there is (apparently) evidence that Cabot found (to his enormous surprise) Newfoundland natives who had a smattering of English. They had apparently picked it up from English cod-fisherman who in order to satisfy the (then as now) insatiable desire Brits have for that particular fish had reached the American littoral. Obviously, such a long trip required re-provisioning so they traded with the natives who presumably weren’t adverse to a bit of cod either.
Well, Jack Aubrey did take “lunars” and according to O’Brian it was, IIRC, an ancient method. But not necessarily as practical as could be desired. Can anyone attribute the use of lunar calculations of longitude in Europe? Am I correct in thinking the Greeks might have used it?
Let me assure you that the Chinese did NOT desalinize sea water in any amount sufficient to sustain life for the crew of such a behemoth. Tech aside (and when was distilling invented?), fuel requirements would have been ENORMOUS. They might had some manner of freshening stored water. Pigs, sure. Plants, MAYBE – again, volume and such. What plant?
Thanks for all the comments, which raise some interesting points I had not considered, although they do not really alter my view that Menzies did write a compelling historical account albeit with some quite troubling flaws.
The desalination of water is not properly explained and commenters were right to bring this up. This is a major issue for making very long passages possible. These junks are said to have carried thousands of passengers.
In dealing with vitamin deficiencies leading to scurvy or rickets, Menzies describes in detail all the various foodstuffs and storage methods used by the Chinese. I have not time or space to repeat them so I suggest people read the book.
The points about possible landings of Chinese in what is now New England are valid. Some of the old map evidence that Menzies draws on is sketchy.
As I said in the original post, a lot of what Menzies says amounts to conjecture, based on a collection of all manner of evidence as well as some lucky breaks with maps. But when the Mandarins destroyed so much evidence of the voyages, it leaves me wondering why no written evidence was laid down elsewhere.
I’ll keep an eye on the website to see if these points get properly dealt with.
Does all this matter beyond historical point scoring? Well, as I said, there are lessons to be drawn from all this, such as the perils of autarky, etc. Considering the mistakes made by NASA and some others over space flight, this whole business is relevant to efforts now to explore and develop space. So there is some relevance there.
brgds
Robert, I had a look at the link supposedly debunking Menzies’ book. As another commenter said, there is so much venom and personal angst directed against Menzies (apparently, horror of horrors, he wants to make money!) that I have a problem with this sort of critique. By all means argue that his arguments are wrong, but can’t people leave the personal stuff out of it? What’s eating these people? Caucasians, did the exploring).
Re scurvy: oranges originate in China, and are very well conserved if the weather is not too hot.
BTW, speaking of money-making: I found it amusing that the American edition of this book is named: “1421, the Year China Discovered the America”
…writing a perceived wrong.
Nice touch.
RobE, it was a mistake, but reading it, I’ll leave it in!
I can’t really comment specifically on the book, as I’ve only seen the TV version… however assuming they’re basically similar:
I found the whole approach distinctly irritating. I’ve got no problem with the idea of a chinese fleet going for a cruise – I’d be surprised if that didn’t do at least a minimal degree of exploring – although I agree that the evidence is distinctly flimsy at points once Menzies tries to take it from “a little exploring” to “halfway around the globe”.
What irritated me was that the mentality behind the work seemed to be just another example of Western self-flagellation. The doco devoted an inordinate amount of time to demonstrating that Columbus actually had a map that came from the Chinese exploration – because everyone knows no-one from post-1000AD Europe ever made any intellectual/technical/cultural advance first. Even if Columbus did have a map or rumours, I’d find it a damn sight more likely that they came via the Norse anyway (as Eric pointed out & the doco studiously avoided mentioning).
That said, I do find it amusing that Menzies is getting so much flak from academics for taking a common theme of current academia and running with it (“101 Dubious Justifications For The West Being Lucky Rather Than Competent”).
The book makes clear, Pache, that the fleets were not going for a cruise, as if they were all swanning off for a nice sail, some glasses of rice wine and a chance to meet local women and work on the suntan.
I agree with much of what you say, however. One of the annoying aspects of the book at the very end was a PC flourish. Menzies denounces western explorers and by implication, tries to claim that the Chinese mixed benevolently with the locals, no violence, no stealing, etc. It is a bit much. The admirals and the leading sailors were eunuchs, who got into that terrible physical state as a result of violent wars in China. The regime that sent out the fleets was often capable of savage brutality.
Did Columbus have a map? Well according to a book I read a while back, yes he did.
The book is about Bristol fishermen in the 1400s, who had been fishing the Newfoundland coast for many years.
They found out about North America from Viking Icelanders with whom they had been trading.
The reason that they didn’t talk about it, was then as now, Tax. Fishermen would be taxed heavily on catches not caught in designated areas, so they kept shtum as to where the cod was coming from.
Columbus found out about America by having met some of the Bristol fishermen in various Spanish Ports.
Alas I cant remember the author or the name of the book
Maybe my biases are showing, but I interpreted this book as a cautionary tale for the libertarian handbook.
We have the most advanced and powerful state of its era led by an emperor deciding for his own reasons to explore the world. Not a few ships but several fleets and thousands of people over decades. A significant percentage of the Chinese state’s GNP. A state can sometime do one thing well. They succeeded, the whole world was mapped, but then the emperor lost interest. The Mandarins recovered the leavers of power and were horrified at the budget overruns so scrapped all the results.
In other words just the sort of things a centralist state does. The effort and lives of many intrepid sailors and millions of acres of teak forested are wasted, even though they actually triumphed.
Incidentally, my understanding of why the admirals were eunuchs was because this enabled them to hang out with the emperor and his wives, without threatening his bloodline.
David, I was not really writing my thoughts about the book as how it fitted in with the libertarian world view as such but of course my final thoughts did touch on the perils of what happens when a country, based on a strong central state, decides to pull the plugs on innovation and seals the borders. So I agree with you.
As the British explorers showed, for example, it is not enough to have clever tech, you need the liberties and flexibilities of an entrepreneur-friendly culture to make this exploration pay off.
Correct. But I doubt that the poor folk who had their bodies mutilated thought that this was a great bargain at the time!
The fact that you take this seriously certainly lowers my rating of your reliability and good sense, and to some extent that of Samizdata’s as a whole.
Try these:
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jwh/15.2/finlay.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000409.html
http://www.hallofmaat.com/modules.php?name=Articles&file=article&sid=91
If that’s not enough for you, it now appears that Menzies is claiming that the fleet sailed up the Thames to meet Henry V. For Australian pyramids he relies on the work of Rex Gilroy whose work is cited elsewhere by creationists as evidence that aborigines lived with dinosaurs and by UFO websites as evidence that dreamland journeys are through really existing secret tunnels. It goes on and on.
The journal Archaeology was quite correct to put Menzies alongside Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock.
He also caveated the hell out of the book, so I really do not see the big deal.
Re menzies and 1421, see
http://www.1421exposed.com
Herodotos’s account of the Phoenicians’ circumnavigation of Africa, which apparently resulted in no sustained commerce, was obscured long enough to allow widespread disbelief of the roundness of the Earth. Earlier accounts were lost.
It is not surprising that any Chinese exploration of the far Pacific would have been desultory or forgotten. But then they apparently had no great motivation to seek sea routes to the West.
BTW, ancient mariners — at least some of them — may have had mechanical navigational aids.
tdh: “allow widespread disbelief of the roundness of the Earth”
Will this myth never die?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
David Landes has a good overview of the era of Chinese naval exploration in his book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” in the chapter “Eastward Ho!”. As noted previously, the era was brief (less than 50 years!) and the ships were very large (about 400 feet long and 160 wide), as were the fleets. Landes notes that the first fleet in 1405 which went into the Indian Ocean and the east coast of Africa had 317 ships and carried 28,000 men. The ships were of various sizes and served different roles – some were purposely devoted to carrying horses, for example, or were effectively tenders and victualers. Landes cites several sources for his information, but primarily
Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas.
Onboard desalinisation of water in the Middle Ages is tosh. So is any method of navigation based upon lunar eclipses.
If you want another speculative but fascinating read, try The Brendan Voyage (Link) by Tim Severin. The author thinks the Voyage of St. Brendan the Navigator contains details of the North Atlantic and even “The New World.” This would mean that the Irish discovered America in the sixth century. Again, very speculative — he has no direct physical evidence, and the bulk of the book is devoted to proving that the Irish boats of the time could have made it across the Atlantic, by building one and making the trip himself a la Kon Tiki.
Well Prince Maddoc (Wales)
Made it. And made it back.
He dissapeared on the second voyage.
Evidence? There is a welsh speaking American Indian tribe apparently
I should also mention that the idea of a wooden ship 400 feet long seems very unlikely. The Chinese megaship’s beam approximates the length of a seventy-four gun ship!
Aside from engineering concerns and the limitations of available timber (any light on that in the book?), this is corroborated by the suggestion that 371 ships were crewed – or at least populated – by 28,000 men. This is less than a hundred men per ship (75.47) which corresponds to the manning of a British brig or sloop of war.
While fewer men are needed on a commercial craft than a warship (esp., perhaps, without artillery), the notion of seventy-five men crewing a nine-masted ship twice the length of a first-rate in a storm is ludicrous. The crew of a 74 was around six hundred.
Imagine seventy-five men, or the fraction of those men available, hauling aft the mainsheet in a gal (let alone nine of them)! In a similar circumstance the Theseus, 74, required two hundred men, for a vessel only a hundred and seventy-five feet long.
Especially when you consider that many of these men would not have been seamen but passengers of various categories.
…
Question: any data on the Chinese invasions of Japan? The Kamikaze, Divine Wind, destroyed their second fleet, the one of a thousand ships. Does anyone know anything about those ships, the size or establishment (number of the crew)? I’m sure they would have sent their biggest and best to the party.
“Will this myth never die?”
The longer I live, the more I regret having received schooling rather than education, and despite having quite early found that teachers (at those early levels, even in an excellent school district) were morons, and having preferred books, their misdirections linger.
It seems that to denounce Flat-Earthers is to be a Flat Earther. Ironic, that not long before this, I came across a broadcast of Inherit the Wind, and, recalling how some ill-educated schoolchildren had remarked it stupid, wished I’d somehow made them see — or beware to see — themselves in the give-me-that-old-time-religion crowd. (The election of newly-inaugurated Deval Patrick as governor of MA appears to have been largely a madness-of-crowds phenomenon.)
Nevertheless, the near-total loss of the original account and the apparently-total lack of followup by Persia render the loss of any analogous Chinese account quite plausible. If, however, the Chinese did reach North America, it is unlikely that they reached south even so far as Aztec territory, or some echo of this would likely have persisted.
JK, no need to pull an ugly face. As my post makes abundantly clear – I wonder if you actually read it all the way through, many people seem not to have done so – I have my doubts about Menzies’ thesis and some of the gaps in the book. But much of the evidence, if it is as he says it is, is pretty strong but clearly needs additional work to pass the test. I said so.
It really helps if people actually read what we write. Saves a lot of time and trouble later.
You may be right on the first sentence, but you need to justify the second part of it. Don’t be a tease.
On the 1421exposed.com site there is a link to a lengthy paper in PDA format:
which I find extremely compelling. As it is over 7MB and their bandwidth is finite, I received my copy by email. Interested parties may wish to seek it out.
If the given measurements are accurate and literal, this behemoth would be a pig of a scow that would need gale force winds to go anywhere. Theoretically possible, but practically absurd.
I speak only to the issue of 400-foot flagships, as does Dr. Davies. I say nothing of their ability to navigate or to sustain life over long distances, although it is a matter of some debate as to whether their abilities in the use of such things as the magnetic compass were either unique or adequate to the tasks posited.
Of course, although Menzies’ book costs money, the paper is free, so I have read one and not the other. If there are substantial excerpts of Menzies’ work or of defenders on the Web, perhaps someone would provide links, if I have not already missed them.
Also, was it lunar observations or observations of lunar eclipses? The latter would be a bit rare for regular use. The former were used in the time of the Napoleonic Wars and might certainly have been used beforetime in some form. After all, lunar calendars date back to the times of the ancient Hebrews, let alone to 1421.
Incidentally, “lunars” might be a colloquialism used also to refer to navigation by the planets and the stars, though I haven’t read into it deeply enough to be sure. B-52 navigators are trained to navigate by the stars, and the technique is used aboard nuclear submarines as well.
it was lunar eclipses. I have already mentioned this in a comment higher up. Menzies went to some trouble to show how the Chinese may have done it. I think even the ancient Greeks had a go at it as well
I thought you may have misspoke. Lunar eclipses? Do they happen often enough to serve any actual purpose? A position fix once a month or once a year or once in a blue moon is not much help in getting from A to B, even a very good fix.
nichevo, go and read the book or an electronic precis of it. Lunar eclipses obviously occur only once in a while but, when they do occur, they can be plotted from different parts of the world. The trick, as Menzies says, is to plot them from lots of different locations and then compare the results.
He has a pretty good description of how the Chinese went about it, or could have done so. Even if one dismisses much of Menzies’ book, or has doubts about its credibility, as I do in parts, the stuff about how the Chinese may have solved the riddle of longitude rings true to me and makes sense.
To repeat another point of mine, I do accept many of the criticisms made of the book by other commenters and am grateful for people in pointing out the websites that have called his claims into question. However, I do really wonder why some of the writers get so het up about the man and his motivations. It makes me wonder what on earth he has done to wind people up. In some cases, there is obvious snobbery towards the fact that Menzies is a former sailor, not a professional historian. Oh the infamy!
Have you a link to such a précis?
I cannot find an easy precis – although the paperback is pretty cheap so it might be easier to buy it, assuming you wish to to do so. Otherwise, have a look at this
(Link)
Oh, you’re talking about surveying. Yeah, maybe, but the question is navigation, how to sail from point to point, a position fix at sea or in unknown waters. What they talk about might have been okay for making maps.
Using Jupiter’s moons makes sense – Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey acknowledged this technique as ancient. But he could not make it work at sea – the telescope would not stay still. It answered very well on land however, IIRC.
I believe a master list of timed Jupiter moon eclipses etc., from a specific location (eg, Greenwich ), is required before
a local set of timings would give longitude.
Did the Chinese have such a list?