Gavin Menzies (1937–2020)

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2897640.html

This book is total tosh. The contention is that Chinese knowledge was spread to Italy via a treasure fleet which sailed through the Red Sea-Nile canal in 1434. I smelt a rat when reading the chapter on celestial navigation, which is surprisingly poor for an author who claims to be ex-Navy, and started wondering when we would get some actual evidence for his claims. 50 pages in, I started googling and discovered that a lot of people had been there show more before me; there simply is no evidence whatsoever that Zheng He got as far as Italy in 1434. (He did get as far as the Red Sea, which is surely impressive enough.) Poorly researched, poorly argued and poorly written, and I'm generously going to include it in my non-fiction rather than fiction tally. I am hesitating whether even to give it to the charity shop, out of concern that someone might buy it and believe it. show less

People like Gavin Menzies keep the world on its toes. That’s the nicest thing I can think to say about this book. If true believers of crazy ideas didn’t come around every once in a while, we might all grow complacent.

Because that’s what Menzies is: a true believer. He has developed this idea about the world – for which there is zero support and zero evidence – and he believes it. This is his life’s work, and nothing will disabuse him of this idea. He gets himself grad students show more and a Harper Collins book deal. He isn't a self-published, one-man show. He makes it happen. You might even start to think he isn’t a kook because of how pure his belief is and how professionally it's presented.

But he’s still a kook.

The entire intro is basically a sob story of how The Academy is silencing his Truth. I am sympathetic to the idea of being ignored by the academy, but the more you say you have the inside scoop that the academy won't let out, the more I think you are a crackpot. There's no such thing as Big Academy. In the publish or perish world, having something original in history or archaeology is like finding the holy grail. You can’t publish a paper that says, “The things we already thought were true continue to be true.” If there were any significant evidence for his position, dozens of people would be on it to publish – because those publications are the only things that matter in the tenure game. There are fields where alternative ideas get shafted; for instance, biochemistry journals that are owned by Big Pharma are hard to break into with new ideas. But history? Archaeology? They’re dead fields. You need something new. Nobody is trying to keep you out of new finds in those fields. There's no Big Academy styled after Big Pharma.

So the more the introduction tries to convince me of this, the less convinced I am. Then there's the Atlantis piece. This is the introduction of your book, friend. I am very interested in learning about how the Chinese may have come to modern-day America on boats. I’m in. You can easily sell me on this idea. But Atlantis? Nope. You’ve lost me now, and this is still the introduction. Maybe don’t lead with Atlantis.

Then there's the thing about how people were sailing the Atlantic from Crete in 100,000 BC, which again, side-eye. We are talking one hundred thousand years ago. That is an almost unfathomably long time. I looked it up, and 100,000 BC is the stone age. Humans only began leaving Africa 125,000 years ago. Now, I am willing to believe the contention that we, being modern and self-important, underestimate the abilities of ancient humans across the board. But to think that within 25,000 years, people went from barely leaving Africa to sailing the Atlantic? I’m going to need some evidence for that. None is provided.

But these were not the things that lost me. What lost me, and what set me against the whole book, was the discussion of how the Chinese must have taken boats because humans crossing the Bering Strait land bridge is impossible because… Today it is super hard to do.

Things can change in 20,000 years. Archaeological evidence indicates that at the time of the migration, the beringia land bridge was grassland steppe. Not ice. Not tundra. Grassland. Where grass grows.

Again, I was very open to the boating idea until this was the key piece of evidence against it. Especially since elsewhere in the book, the author contends that things people today think are too hard actually weren’t too hard for ancient humans!

To me, most of the ideas presented in this book are not actually in conflict. People could have both crossed the land bridge and taken boats. Why not? In fact, if the land bridge is real, it might make it even likelier that people took boats, since the distances they would have had to travel in the boats would have been shorter.

(Note also that millions of years prior, when the climate was similar in creating a grassland Beringia, dinosaurs migrated to America across the land bridge. Did the dinosaurs also take boats?)

Many other chapters present evidence that sounds compelling, for instance, the carbon dating of archaeological finds in Sandia Cave. But every time he made a claim about something he found that Big Academia was trying to hide, I was skeptical. A man who sets up a book this way – can he be trusted? So I googled just about everything he said, and in fact, most of it is not accurate. The New Yorker reported on this in 1995. That's twenty years ago! The Sandia Man find was either (a) a hoax or (b) accidental mis-interpretation of carbon dating. Either way, the find is not as old as Menzies claims it is.

(Here’s the link to the New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/06/12/the-mystery-of-sandia-cave. Interestingly, it points out that the person involved – they claim he purposely perpetrated a hoax, although I don’t see compelling evidence for this either way – wanted to stake a name for himself in archaeology. Right, because as I pointed out above, you can’t get tenure by saying, “Things we already discovered continue to be correct.”)

In fact, none of the sites he references are actually carbon-dated to the time he says they are.

You wouldn’t know this from the book. He does the same thing he accuses others of doing, which is ignoring evidence contradictory to the viewpoints he already holds. Menzies is a true believer. It's not like he's cruelly trying to trick you. He really, truly, passionately believes his crackpot idea. He wants to believe. But believing isn’t enough. show less

The teaching of history is, as von Clausewitz said of war, the extension of politics by other means. Different nations teach their own history from their own viewpoint. Even if that history extends beyond their own borders, the story usually reflects the role of each country in the development of the world. So works of trans-national history are comparatively unusual, and even more rarely do they look beyond narrow national viewpoints.

So a book that claims that Chinese treasure fleets show more explored the world's oceans, circumnavigated the globe 100 years before Magellan and made landfall in the Americas some 75 years before Columbus is bound to ruffle some feathers. Menzies' 1421 does just that. His thesis is that the extravagance of the early Ming emperors, which culminated in the building of the Forbidden City, the completion of the Great Wall, and the commissioning of a massive trading fleet, numbering hundreds of ships, caused a subsequent emperor to retrench the nation's activity, to purge the archives of all records and to retreat into isolationism, leaving Portuguese explorers tantalising clues and charts showing distant lands which they then went out and "discovered".

Given that China had trade links all over South-East Asia, the coast of India and down the east coast of Africa, this seems plausible. The big problem is the lack of firm evidence. And also given that (in Menzies' account) all the main Chinese records were destroyed, this leaves him to pick up scraps from a range of other sources, piecing a story together from fragments. But this is always going to lead to confirmation bias; any evidence will be assessed for how it fits into the grand narrative, rather than looking at the evidence in isolation. Menzies lists a large number of academic institutions that helped him in his researches; what they thought of the outcome is another matter.

The style of the writing does not help. Menzies initially started writing a world travelogue, of which the central idea behind 1421 was just one part. This came to the attention of an enterprising publisher who saw the possibilities in a book based on the account of the treasure fleets. Menzies re-wrote that segment of the book with the aid of a ghost writer; but he admitted that he himself was no writer. He uses some of the usual tropes of the pseudo-science writer - "this proves that the Chinese must have...", "the only possible conclusion is that..." and so on. Even if his evidence were sound, the book presents subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) suggestions that it is not, simply because of the style. Interestingly, he twice cites Erich von Däniken, though not as any sort of reliable source, but rather as the only other person to think such-and-such a piece of evidence is significant, "and that can't be true!".

Of course, if his thesis is true, then all we will have are fragments which need to be pieced together. But this runs the risk of the whole being more than the sum of its parts. China has an extensive history; it was the world's first superpower. But if this claim was viable, would it not be the Chinese who would be making it?

Menzies died in 2020. He published further books making more fantastical claims about the role of China in medieval European history; and set up a website asking members of the public to add to the body of his evidence. This has been replaced by a very slick site for a "1421 Foundation" which has picked up this particular ball and is running with it. This is a shame, because it all now smacks of commercialisation and sensation; certainly, any serious historian or archaeologist coming to the field of medieval Chinese naval history might well be put off by all the trappings. And that would be a shame; in a world where narrow national interests are being exploited for political gain, any trans-national or global perspective is helpful in trying to give a sense of balance. But without better evidence, this book and its successors are not helping. show less

Slop. Menzies has done it again! And not in a good way. This book is a bit more organized and reads a bit better than his previous output because he has added a co-writer. But the text still is choppy and meanders needlessly. And probably a third of the book is mindless, boring travelogue with the royal we of the "1421 team" (usually just Menzies and his wife) going on expensive travels funded by the books he has sold to the gullible . A whole chapter, for instance, describing every show more modern-day stop along the old Silk Route. Why? When the point of the book is to show again (without evidence, again) that China discovered the Americas by sea. Why? Filler. Otherwise the book would have been just one hundred pages of misinterpretations, innuendo, and silliness.

Now let me begin with a caveat: I do think it is possible some Chinese ships (and Portuguese and the Polynesians and maybe some others, for that matter) may have discovered the Americas before 1492, but they had no long-lasting impact. However, I seriously doubt that there was sustained contact, trade, and colonization as Menzies and his ilk would have us believe.

Menzies still doesn't really understand DNA. He speaks of "Chinese DNA" and "Japanese DNA" and even, at one point, "Taiwanese DNA" but fails to realize that Amerindians have Asian-type DNA because scholars say they are descended from Asians! No big mystery there. But the "Asian DNA," Menzies implies, is evidence of recent contact when, in fact, it is evidence of nothing but distant connections. Any biologist or anthropologist could tell you that.

Menzies still holds to the pyramid fallacy: that if one group built pointy buildings and another group built pointy buildings, then there must be some concrete connection between the two groups. This, of course, is poppycock. First, pointy buildings are easy to build. Second, the logic that one must have gotten the idea from another is faulty. I could just as likely write a book claiming that Amerindians colonized China in the distant past and taught them how to build pyramids. Prove me wrong.

Menzies still does not understand the early European explorers or their maps. When John Smith or Coronado or whomever wrote down "we heare there are China ships in the far ocean" it doesn't mean there were actually Chinese ships plying American waters, it means Europeans were eager to have a China connection and fabricated it. It's why Christopher Columbus can hear that the "Caniba" are close by (the Caribs) and he can distort that to "the Khan is close by." Now, using the logic of Menzies, this means that the Great Khan must have had a colony on Cuba in 1492. That is, of course, silly. But it is the type of logic Menzies uses. Take, for instance, his use of the 1776 Antonio Zatta map on page 225. It shows a "Colonia dei Chinesi" on the west coast of North America, which, to Menzies is proof positive there was a Chinese colony there. (He doesn't seem to notice the toponym Fou-sang right next to it). But this doesn't mean there was a Chinese colony there, it just means Zatta was wrong. If you know anything about European cartography of the Americas from 1492-1800, you know it is full of guesses and silliness. There is a 1545 map by Caspar Vopell, one of my favorites, that shows the place-names of Asia alongside those of Mexico and America as an extension of Asia. The Gulf of Mexico is even called the "Mare Cathayum" (Chinese Sea)! This doesn't mean that the Gulf of Mexico was full of Chinese ships and colonies, it just means that Vopell had no friggin clue what was going on. But Menzies and his fellow travelers would posit that this is evidence of Chinese voyages to the Americas.

This is the kind of "evidence" that Menzies and team adduces. It is all poppycock. For instance, on page 146, Menzies claims that the Peruvian city of Chan Chan was built by Chinamen from the city of Canton because Canton is "Chan Chán to the Chinese." You would think that someone whose stock and trade is China would know that the Chinese for the city of Canton is Guǎngzhōu, though it once went by the appellation Shěng Chéng, which means "the provincial capital." How Guǎngzhōu or Shěng Chéng is made into "Chan Chán," and how that is the equivalent of the pre-Columbian city of Chan Chan, is locked away in Menzies's mind.

Lastly, as long as Menzies relies on a supposed 1763 copy of a supposed 1418 map as evidence (Google "1418 map"), you need not take him seriously. First, most experts consider it a fake and it has zero in the way of provenance. Second, it apparently has modern characters on it. Third, it is wildly inaccurate, though Menzies would have you believe that the Chinese were the most accurate mapmakers of all time. A map that displays California as an island is based on faulty European maps; and a map that can't show China correctly doesn't bode well for Chinese mapmakers. But let us, for the sake of argument, declare that this map is genuinely from 1763 (though Menzies persists in calling it the "1418 map," he admits it is only a copy from 1763). Even if it was from 1763 and based partially on 1418 exemplars, it is not proof of Chinese voyages to the Americas in 1418. It is only proof that the Chinese know of America after 1763 and that someone added it to an earlier map. If I stumbled across a copy of the 1851 novel Moby-Dick printed in 1998 that has an introduction mentioning the 1956 film Moby Dick, it doesn't mean Herman Melville invented film and filmed his novel back in 1851, it means someone added something to his 1851 text in 1998. But, using Menzies logic, Herman Melville invented the movies in 1851. See?

One and a half stars for pretty pictures. But Menzies is doing the field a disservice with his grandiose and idiotic claims. And why do such authors always claim some dark conspiracy of "professional historians" are out to get them. I know for damn certain that if ANY scholar had any real proof of a Chinese voyage to the Americas, he would publish it and rake in the fame and money. And, it is funny that on pages 249-250 Menzies can thank PhDed scholars (like John Sorenson and Carl Johannessen) and then denigrate "'professional' historians" who won't listen to his theories.

In the end, this book is just poppycock. All you need to know about Gavin Menzies you can find by watching National Geographic's documentary 1421: The Year China Discovered America (which you can find online). It presents his theory and then demolishes it completely. Watch especially at the end when the interviewer confronts Menzies on his misinterpretations, quoting the actual documents Menzies uses as proof and showing they in fact contradict Menzies. His face is priceless. That's all you need to know about Gavin Menzies and his theories. show less