Gavin Menzies:The year China discovered the world

By HUGH LARACY

In the early 15th century, during the Ming Dynasty, Chinese ships made numerous long foreign voyages.

Seeking trade and tribute, they reached the mouth of the Indus and the east coast of Africa. That much is well established. Now, in a long, lavish and detail-laden lucubration, Gavin Menzies contends that there is more - much more - to the story than has hitherto been revealed.

He states that in 1421 the emperor Zhu Di dispatched four fleets made up of more than 100 giant vessels and with a complement of 30,000 people (including concubines) to circumnavigate the globe.

When the remnants of the armada returned to China two years later it had, he claims, charted the east and west coasts of the Americas and of Africa, circumnavigated Greenland and coasted most of Australia, visited New Zealand (note that, Winston!), traversed the northern shores of Russia and passed through the Straits of Magellan.

And all of this before the tentative probings initiated by Prince Henry the Navigator of Peru had begotten the voyages of Da Gama, Columbus and Magellan. Indeed, he would have it that those luminaries were guided by information derived from the Chinese expeditions of 1421-1423.

A retired British submarine commander, Menzies has, it would seem, taken it upon himself to lead an attack against historical Eurocentrism.

In itself, that is no bad thing. But solid proof is still required. I think, as any detached investigator of the past knows, cannot logically lead to therefore it was. Personal conviction is not unimpeachable. Yet the first person singular is used with disconcerting frequency in this book, sometimes in a naive and overly dramatic way.

Thus Menzies reports that he went to the British Library to consult the journal of Magellan's chronicler, Pigafetta, but copies of that work can be found in any public library. Unfortunately (or conveniently?) any possibly relevant Chinese documents have been destroyed.

Consequently, the story has had to be built upon a scattered and eclectic body of esoteric and imaginatively enhanced clues. Inscriptions on stones, shipwreck reports and local folklore are all pressed into service. But they are secondary to a creative reading of certain European maps said to incorporate information derived from the Chinese, and transmitted by a Venetian named Niccolo da Conti who met the fleets in India. QED?

Not quite. In his map readings Menzies is joining the company of an enthusiastic group of speculators not known for taming even the wildest surmise, or of first disposing of counter-claims.

Thus the Mahogany Ship of Warrnambool is simply co-opted as being Chinese without reference to any other attempts at explanation. Again, scholarly research indicates that the blue-egged Asiatic chicken has been in South America for 4000 years, but Menzies dates it only from 1421.

Regarding New Zealand there are other howlers. His book has the Chinese bringing the kumara; it mis-spells the name of Elsdon Best (thrice); it makes William Colenso a bishop; it locates the discovery of the Tamil bell in Waikato rather than Northland; it is fanciful regarding the korotangi (stone bird) that came to light near Cambridge in the 1860s; and it relates both these artefacts to a wreck at a site unknown to New Zealand map-makers.

Such inventiveness makes it unwise to take this handsomely produced book seriously.

The publicity that has attended it, though, does highlight the enduring need for the rigorously critical study of history. Anyone interested in the topic should read K.R. Howes' forthcoming The Quest for Origins: who first discovered New Zealand and the Pacific Islands?, or even enrol for a course on Pacific exploration. Auckland University offers a good one.

* Hugh Laracy is an associate professor of Pacific history at the University of Auckland.

Bantam Press $54.95