Menzies, Gavin 1937–

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Menzies, Gavin 1937–

PERSONAL: Born August 14, 1937, in England; married; wife's name Marcella (owner of a real estate business); children: two daughters. Education: Attended Royal Naval College (Dartmouth, England).

ADDRESSES: Home—London, England. Agent—c/o Author Mail, HarperCollins, 10 E. 53rd St., 7th Floor, New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Royal Navy, 1953–70, served in submarines, 1959–70, commander of HMS Rorqual, 1968–70; freelance writer and traveling researcher, 1970–.

MEMBER: Association of Zheng He Studies.

WRITINGS:

1421: The Year China Discovered America, Bantam (London, England), 2002, William Morrow (New York, NY), 2003, revised international edition published as 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, 2003, William Morrow, 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including History Today.

ADAPTATIONS: 1421: The Year China Discovered America, was adapted as a television documentary by Paladin Invision/Pearson Broadband, 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: In 1989 retired British naval officer Gavin Menzies took a wedding anniversary trip with his wife to China. There Menzies became fascinated with the works of the greatest Ming Dynasty Emperor Zhu Di, who built the Forbidden City, moved the Chinese capital to Beijing, and repaired the Great Wall, in addition to amassing a fleet of treasure ships commanded by eunuch admirals that he sent out to sail around the world and trade with "barbarians" in distant lands. Menzies's interest spurred him to begin research for a book about Zhu, Zhu's Mongolian rival, and world events in the year 1421.

However, partway through the manuscript Menzies learned of a Venetian map dating from 1424 that charted islands in the Caribbean not believed to have been discovered, except by indigenous peoples, until Columbus sailed sixty-eight years later. Knowing that only the Ming Dynasty had the fleet to make such voyages at the time, Menzies began new research into the sea voyages of medieval China. What he found caused him to change the course of his research to show that the Chinese—not the Europeans—were the first nonnative peoples to discover the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, even Antarctica and the Arctic. After a total of fourteen years of research, during which time Menzies visited 120 countries, 900 museums, and nearly every port that was actively trading in the fifteenth century, his book 1421: The Year China Discovered America was completed. An international best-seller, it set off a firestorm of both interest and controversy worldwide with its potential to rewrite world history.

Since his book was first published in 2002, Menzies has given talks around the world, including in Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. He has been named a visiting professor at Yunan University in China. Correspondence began pouring in from readers after the book's release, some seventy-five percent of it containing evidence of Chinese settlement and exploration in the Americas and elsewhere. A Web site created for the book provides regular updates on new evidence and research. A four-part television documentary based on the book aired in 2004. An updated paperback edition, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, was published worldwide in 2003.

Menzies's theory has a basis in thoroughly documented history. Emperor Zhu Di dispatched his Grand Eunuch, Zheng He—who later became known as Sin Bao, or Sinbad the Sailor—as admiral of a Chinese armada that was to explore the ends of the earth. Although the consensus among scholars is that the fleet only sailed as far as Madagascar, Menzies contends that, during a two-and-a-half-year period, Chinese ships sailed around Africa's Cape of Good Hope, reached the Caribbean and the Americas, sailed north to the Arctic, reached Australia and New Zealand, and sailed south to Antarctica, mapping the new territories along the way. The map that first sparked Menzies's interest, the author believes, was copied from one procured from the Chinese by a Venetian trader in India. Menzies says that by the time Columbus and others sailed, they had maps of the New World to travel by.

By the time Zheng He and his surviving fleet arrived home, however, tragedy had struck the emperor—his palace had burned, his favorite concubine had been killed, and he had abdicated the throne. The contry's new isolationist rulers destroyed the returning explorers' maps and charts and stopped China's expansionist programs, stranding, says Menzies, thousands of Chinese colonists in the new lands. Among the evidence of this early Chinese exploration, according to Menzies, are Chinese-introduced species of chickens and certain plants, porcelain and jade, sunken junks, and accounts of Chinese-speaking peoples found by the first Europeans to explore the Americas. Physical evidence includes a tower in Rhode Island that resembles a Chinese lighthouse, and the so-called Bimini Road, off Florida's coast, which Menzies claims the Chinese built to repair their junks after a hurricane.

Menzies traced the Chinese fleet's probable routes around the globe, predicting where ocean currents would have taken them, and he found a number of shore marker stones carved in Asian languages. He also used his navigational experience gained in the Royal Navy to predict how the Chinese navigated by the North Star and by the star Canopus.

Reviewers had mixed reactions to Menzies's book. A number of mainstream scholars disputed his evidence as circumstantial, navigationally impossible, and poorly documented. Others argue that small groups of Asians, rather than the large Ming fleet, were more likely to have traveled to the Americas over time. Still, most reviewers agree that Menzies's theory is fascinating and worth further investigation. Steven U. Levine, in Library Journal, called the book "an exciting and eminently readable work that both the armchair traveler and the amateur historian are certain to enjoy." William B. Cassidy, in Traffic World, praised Menzies for bringing greater readership to the known maritime accomplishments of the Ming Dynasty. He concluded that 1421 "offers an often entertaining challenge to our beliefs about the past and reason to reflect on the way we construct history."

In contrast to such positive reviews, a Publishers Weekly contributor said that Menzies's evidence "ranges from reasonable to ridiculous." Jonathan Mirsky, in the Spectator, described the author's technique thusly: "stir together some facts and supposition and present the mixture as a big fact." Julia Lovell, in the Times Literary Supplement, commented that "one does sometimes wonder … whether Menzies first looked at the facts and then made up his mind, or vice versa." John Noble Wilford, in the New York Times Book Review, observed, "One must read with care how Menzies describes and interprets the archaeological material…. Nor is Menzies' use of maps reassuring." Although agreeing that it is possible the Chinese did make landfalls in parts of the world well before Europeans and that records of these voyages may have been destroyed, Wilford concluded: "Menzies has yet to make a compelling case…. It is unlikely that all the emperor's ships and all the emperor's admirals, for all their vaunted capabilities, could have put together concerted expeditions of the scope ascribed to them." Tom Holman, in the Bookseller, on the other hand, wrote: "1421 is written in an accessible style that bears the wealth of knowledge behind the claims extremely lightly, though it is backed up by a mass of supporting notes and appendices."

Menzies himself has no doubts. As he told Holman: "I've had thousands of letters from all over the world, but not a single one saying that what I've found is rubbish…. Every single explorer who set sail after 1421 had charts. And it was they who said so in their logs—not me." He told a People contributor: "There's not one chance in a hundred million that I'm wrong."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 15, 2003, Margaret Flanagan, review of 1421: The Year China Discovered America, p. 1271.

Bookseller, March 29, 2002, Tom Holman, "Behind the Headlines," p. 13; August 16, 2002, Tom Holman, "Exploring Uncharted Waters: Gavin Menzies Is Making Waves with His Claim that Early Chinese Explorers Pre-dated the Discoveries of Christopher Columbus and Captain Cook," p. 32.

Geographical, June, 2002, Chris Amodeo, "Ancient Mariner," p. 8; January, 2003, Christian Amodeo, "Gavin Menzies (In Conversation)," p. 98.

History Today, May, 2002, "A Former Submarine Officer Believes Explorers from China Were the First to Circumnavigate the Globe," p. 10.

M2 Best Books, January 8, 2003, "Author Claims Chinese Discovered America before Columbus."

Maclean's, December 30, 2002, "Sailing the Ocean Blue Long before Columbus," p. 87.

New York Times Book Review, February 2, 2003, John Noble Wilford, "Pacific Overtures," p. 9.

People, February 24, 2003, "Bye, Columbus? One of the Seven Voyages of Sinbad Took Him to the New World in 1421, Says Author Gavin Menzies," p. 88.

Publishers Weekly, November 25, 2002, Natalie Danford, "Navigating Controversy: A New Book Claims That the Chinese Explored the Americas Long before Columbus Did," p. 20; January 6, 2003, review of 1421, p. 52; February 10, 2003, Daisy Maryles, "1492? 1421? Whatever …," p. 60.

Science News, February 1, 2003, review of 1421, p. 79.

Spectator, November 2, 2002, Jonathan Mirsky, "How the Ming Fleets Missed Manhattan," p. 68.

Times Literary Supplement, December 13, 2002, Julia Lovell, "The Grand Eunuch's Voyage," p. 32.

Traffic World, February 24, 2003, William B. Cassidy, "Ancient Mariners: If China's 'Sinbad' Visited America before Columbus, Transpacific Trade Is Very Old, Indeed," p. 32.