1421 & 1434 Gavin Menzies Chinese Junks Books!

[Lucky Eddie]

1421 & 1434 Gavin Menzies Chinese Junks Books!

Is it just me?

I've enjoyed books like Peter Trickets Beyond Capricorn, where-in he suggests that Portugals Christopher Mendonca explored Australia in the 1500's before the Dutch French English etc

Then again I've also enjoyed Gavin Menzies book 1421 & 1434 suggesting that The Chinese in their junks explored most of the globe 100 years before the Portuguese.

It makes a lot of sense that the information about charting etc spread around the world over 3 or 4 hundred years until Columbus and Cook and others took up the cudgels and explored to create the european version of history we were taught at school.

I want Trickett and Menzies to be right.

BUT!

I find that - some of the "info" the rely on to jump from one to another supposition - provided to them by well meaning folk all over the world, when it comes to areas I know well - turn out to be nothing more than "shipwreck folklore" in my own local area.

One gets to wondering if ALL the supposed facts presented are nothing more than wish full unsubstantiated folklore?

700 foot high tsunamis, with hundreds of Chinese junks thrown onto cliff tops and mountains in the South Island of NZ - that have been found thru magnetic anomaly surveys?.

I'd like to believe...

I really would.

So I thought I'd take an in depth look at one of his references to a possible Chinese junk in anarea I am intimately familiar with.

And when I do I find absolutely NOTHING factual to support the story.

He refers to a possible Chinese Junk wrecked at the mouth of the Blackwood River at Augusta near cape Leeuwin in southwest Western Australia. Trouble is Menzies book places this river in a different state (South Australia). Its obviously a date entry error and simple enough to make, but it calls into question how accurate (well researched) the rest of the story is?.

The claim is the Junk rests 1 Kilometer / Mile to the east of the River mouth.

Here's the problem tho.

This river mouth is highly mobile. It has moved 2 miles east in the last 10 years (right thru the area the Chinese Junk is claimed to have resided!).

All this sand, supposedly containing a Chinese Junk - has been steadily eroded away, and not one sign of any junk!

So this has me questioning openly many of the other claims made in this book.

Likewise Peter Trickett's Christo Mendonca claims in Beyond Capricorn.

In the book - he mentions 2 "cannonade" found in WW1 by Australian Navy in Napier Broome Bay in the West Australia Kimberly's. They ended up being displayed in a museum in the nations capital Canberra.

Trickett claims they are Portuguese manufacture and design.

Yet well known and renowned Maritime archaeologist from the WA Maritime Museum has published a peer reviewed scientific paper thoroughly discrediting Trickett's claim as to their Portuguese origin?.

So - just what are we the public to make of these seemingly scholarly book works.?
To my mind at the moment they are what I classify as FACTION, a cross between fact and fiction.
They appear to be less scholarly and more an attempt to link known facts with a lot of fiction to make a ripping good yarn.

Am I alone in my thinking?

Cheers!

 

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[mariner]

Re: 1421 & 1434 Gavin Menzies Chinese Junks Books!

Lucky Eddy,

I have met Gavin for lunch a couple of times when I have been in England, and think he has done a tremendous job in increasing the general public's awareness of early cartography, Chinese navigation and history in general, but some of the specifics that he quotes are not as clear-cut as he suggests. I have myself told him about rumours/folk lore/possible evidence about Chinese presence on the NW coast of America, and like you have looked at some his "evidence" and find it lacking in substance.

However, his is as good a general explanation as any of, for example, how Magellan knew that the Strait now called after him existed BEFORE he set off on that voyage, how early maps like the Waldseemuller map of 1507 was able to show the western coast of South America so accurately when no European is documented as going to that area before 1520, and how the Waldseemuller globe of the same year was able to depict so accurately the southern area of South America (Cape Horn) separated from Antarctica by a large expanse of water, when Drake in 1579 was officially the first to discover that this was the case.

I really like Gavin, and can't understand why so many people in the academic world line up to throw stones at him, without being able to offer a reasonable alternative to his theory about how the Chinese accumulated and spread their great knowledge of the geography of the world.

Like you, I want him to be right.

Mariner

 

[Alexandre]

Re: 1421 & 1434 Gavin Menzies Chinese Junks Books!

It's all just mambo jambo. Take, for example, his 'evidence' of the Azores Islands having a lot of people there with Chinese genes. He says that's because the Chinese reached the Azores in pre-Age of Discoveries.

What he does not know - or won't tell - is that the Azores had a lot of Chinese emigrants arriving there in the early 19th, brought to São Miguel Island in order to produce tea there (it still is being produced today, the only place in Portugal that does so).

 

[itmaiden]

Re: 1421 & 1434 Gavin Menzies Chinese Junks Books!

Well like you I have always questioned certain things. Columbus did not in my opinion set off through "unknown" waters to find a way to the "Indies" considering that there would be no way to know the distance in order to have enough provisions on hand for the voyage. This was during the period of the Inquisition, and I believe the trip was to find safer havens. Columbus came from a navigation town so he most likely had a better than average knowledge of what was out there. Even in the old tales of Atlantis, the islands and lands beyond Atlantis on the western side were mentioned. Then look at the architecture similarities between Egypt and the ruins in South America, Latin America, and Mexico. Both the African continent and the South American continent had the same reed boats. Interesting that Pyramid like structures all pretty well fall along the 30 degree line from China through Africa and to Mexico.

...and getting back to Columbus..how did he know the currents ? In Solomon's time, navigation trips were as long as 3 years in length ? Some of this time may have been spent at trade fairs, but a variety of goods were brought back which reflected products from Africa, India and possibly China and maybe some of the Islands in between. That was during the 1st temple period of Israel which was very long ago.

A rock carving along the old dried Red River that runs through Oklahoma and near Arkansas shows a boat with what appears to be a circus on board, very similar to what existed in Egypt.

Many appear to have been lost at sea or took a chance on fate to escape wars and oppression of various sorts and have landed on other continents, and in doing so some of these were adopted within other native peoples and brought in new cultural elements and knowledge. However, there obviously has been a wider knowledge of the world at least among those who frequent the seas.

Our standard "history" education shortchanges us in terms of understanding the world, peoples, and the truth of many things. That is why I think I research so hard...to find the real truth or as close to it as I can about human history. Archaeological photos serve as a good adjunct to study, though I often do not agree with all archaeological interpretation of things.

itmaiden

Is it just me?
Cheers!