- LONDON (Reuters) - Debunking
Christopher Columbus has become a full-time occupation for retired British
submarine commander Gavin Menzies.
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- Next week the urbane 65-year-old begins a global publicity
campaign to promote his extraordinary claim that Chinese sailors discovered
America 70 years before Columbus and mapped the whole world centuries before
European explorers.
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- Despite criticism from academics that his theory is no
more than "a tower of hypotheses," publisher Transworld paid
500,000 pounds ($780,000) for the rights to "1421 -- The Year China
Discovered the World," a huge sum for an unknown author.
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- A longer U.S. edition appears in January, with translations
following in China, Japan, Spain and Portugal, while Britain's Pearson
Broadband outbid 46 others to snap up television rights.
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- "The extraordinary thing about it is that there
is nothing new in my theory at all," Menzies told Reuters in an interview
ahead of his book's November 4 publication.
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- Menzies has stirred up a whirlwind of discovery and debate
since he first detailed his theory at a London lecture in March.
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- He now employs four researchers to handle "the torrent
of information" from around the globe supporting his claim.
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- His book expands his theory that the Chinese circled
the world in fleets of vast many-masted ships between 1421 and 1423, reaching
as far as America, Australia and Greenland.
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- WESTERN EXPLORERS
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- Little is known of the voyages because the fleet's records
were destroyed shortly after it returned.
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- Menzies says academics, particularly in Europe, have
been blind to the possibility that someone beat Western explorers like
Columbus, Magellan and Cook to the New World.
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- "There has been a concerted effort to suppress the
truth. I'm not saying it's necessarily a conspiracy. But it has served
a lot of people to maintain the old status quo," he said.
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- "There have been good livings made out of Columbus,"
such as debating which Caribbean island he reached in 1492.
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- "All of that becomes much less interesting and less
important if it's known that Columbus didn't discover the Americas and
that he used someone else's knowledge to do so."
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- Menzies says contemporary accounts show that all the
European explorers set sail with maps of where they were going.
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- He says these charts were copied from a now-lost master
map of the world held secretly by the King of Portugal, itself derived
from information brought back by the Chinese fleets.
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- Elements of this map survive in 15th and 16th-century
European maps which apparently show the Caribbean, America and Australia
long before Europe reached the New World.
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- In addition, the book draws on previously unexplained
archaeological finds to support Menzies' premise that not only did Chinese
sailors reach the Americas, they also settled there, influencing local
culture and agriculture.
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- ACCOUNTS IGNORED
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- Menzies admits he is not the first to suggest that Columbus
was beaten to the Americas, but says other accounts have been ignored.
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- He recommends a two-volume 1990 bibliography -- "Pre-Columban
Contact with the Americas Across the Ocean" -- listing hundreds of
existing publications on the subject.
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- "There is only one library in England that has got
this bibliography, that's the Bodleian (at Oxford University)," he
said. "It's just ridiculous."
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- Plans are under way in China to rebuild four of the huge
ships in which Chinese admirals Zheng He, Hong Bao and Zhou Man sailed,
and recreate the voyages Menzies says they took by sailing them to America
and Australia.
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- There are also plans to create museums across China to
celebrate the admirals, who until now had been largely forgotten even in
their own country.
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- Pearson Broadband, for a four-part documentary, will
investigate a ship buried beneath California's Sacramento River to test
if it is a lost junk from the Chinese fleet.
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- Menzies says his theory could be vindicated by the discovery
of a Chinese body in the Americas pre-dating the European explorers, which
will be detailed in his book's U.S. edition.
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- "It's got Chinese Jade on the throat and up its
nostrils and is apparently a Chinese or Mongolian skeleton."
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