Who Discovered America? - Gavin Menzies

   2013; 247 pages (or 326 pages, if you include all the “Extras”).  Full Title : Who Discovered America? (The Untold Story of the Peopling of the Americas) .  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Speculative Non-Fiction; Pseudohistory; China; Discovery .  Overall Rating : 6½*/10.

    The title seems like such an easy question: Who Discovered America?  Heck, they taught us the answer way back when I was in grade school.  “In fourteen-hundred ninety-two; Columbus sailed the ocean blue”.

    Even then there was murmuring about some Viking upstart named Leif Erickson, who some claimed had the audacity to bump into the New World 500 years before Columbus did.  The experts said that didn’t count because he never established a settlement there.  And when the remains of a settlement was found, they said it didn’t count because it obviously didn't turn out to be a permanent settlement.

    Of course, if you want to get technical about it, neither Chris nor Leif was the discoverer of American, since there was already a huge population of Native Americans here when they arrived.  The experts say they came here from Asia, via a land bridge across the Bering Strait that has long since disappeared due to the sea levels rising when the Ice Age glaciers melted.  That makes sense, I suppose, and if you don’t like that theory, how else are you going to explain their presence all the way from the top of Alaska down to the southern tip of South America?

    Well, Gavin Menzies offers an alternative explanation.  He agrees they came from Asia, for the most part from China.  But instead of trekking thousands of miles through melting glaciers, freezing their knickers off, he says they sailed here in boats.

    Oooo.  The experts don't like that one at all.

What’s To Like...

    Gavin Menzies divides his theory about the Chinese sailing to America into two main hypotheses.  The first one concerns a bunch of randomly-timed ancient voyages, mostly one-way trips, over the course of several millennia.  The second one is more recent and specific: a guy named Admiral Zheng He commanded two vast armadas with the purpose of establishing trade and mapping the world.  One sailed in 1421, and explored the whole west coast of the Americas.  The other commenced in 1434, sailed down around the southern tip of South America, and explored the East coast of the Americas, then the Azores Islands, and finally visited several European kingdoms.

    It should be noted that these propositions are presented in greater detail in Menzies’ two earlier books, appropriately titled 1421 and 1434.  Our book, Who Discovered America?, is really just a later (2013) supplement to those two works, in which Menzies gives newer evidence he's uncovered that supports his claims since publishing the first pair of books in 2002 and 2008.

    The text of the book is short, only 247 pages long.  Amazon’s  blurb claims its length is 326 page, but that includes a bunch of “extra” sections – Acknowledgements, Notes, a Bibliography, Permissions, an Index, Photos, and a half-dozen other sections.  I checked out the photographs, but skipped the rest of those supplements.  Kindle-wise, the text ends at 56%.  Interspersed in the text are some neat drawings, and at the beginning there are charts of our world's major ocean currents, along with a convenient timeline of various ancient civilizations.

    Gavin Menzies does not write in a dry, academic style.  At times Who Discovered America? reads more like a Bill Bryson travelogue, for instance, when he and his wife travel to twelve cities on the historic "Silk Road" trade route, far from the touristy areas of central Asia.  Other times, it reads like an archaeology treatise, such as when he recounts Schliemann's discovery of Troy.  Also, I noticed Menzies tends to repeat his various “proofs” several times throughout the book.

    Note: The book lists the book as being written by two authors, Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson, but most of it seems to have been written by Menzies, and his name is certainly the “hook” on the book's cover.  But for sake of brevity, I refer only to him as the author in this review.  

    Besides the “Chinese” angle already mentioned, Menzies sets forth a couple other controversial propositions, namely:

    a). The ancient Minoans could’ve reached the Americas by crossing the Atlantic.

    b.) Korean and Japanese sailors accompanied the Chinese on a lot of these voyages.

    c.) The traditional Bering land route theory is untenable for all sorts of cold-weather reasons.

    Overall, Who Discovered America?  was an interesting read, but I found most of Menzies’ “proofs” to be unconvincing, particularly the ones concerning Admiral Zheng He.  The odds that a pair of voyages in the early 1400’s, involving hundreds of Chinese ships sailing all over  both oceans and visiting all sorts of places, yet remaining completely unnoticed and leave no traces of their contacts is simply unbelievable.

    Also, Menzies loses a lot of credibility in my eyes when he touts the writings a century ago by one James Churchward.  I read four of Churchward’s books back in my youth; they put forth the proposition that, besides the lost continent of Atlantis, there was another lost continent in the Pacific, which he called “Mu”.  Churchward’s “evidence” was sketchy at best, ridiculous at worst, and he’s pretty much been relegated to the historical trash pile called "pseudohistory".  This is not someone you want to be citing in your books as corroboration.

 Kewlest New Word ...

Tumuli (n., plural) : ancient burial mounds; barrows (the singular is “tumulus”).

Others : Cartouche (n.).

Excerpts...

    Once entering the Black Current off the Asian continent, ships in the period of the Shang dynasty onward could ride along east toward the Americas, but probably could not return, as the westerly current from the Americas is too weak.  So Chinese voyages to the Americas would be in desperation, to avoid some terrible event at home without the likelihood or consideration of returning – a one-way ticket.  (loc. 744)

    The Great Dismal Swamp appears to hold just such a mighty piece of evidence.  The swamp was drained on commission by some friends of George Washington in 1769.  In the course of their work, they came across a huge old Chinese junk.  It was the stuff of rumor and legend; the fact was that no one could explain how an ancient Chinese sailing ship ended up in the muck on the Atlantic coast between North Carolina and Virginia.  (loc. 2677)

Kindle Details…

    The Kindle version of Who Discovered America? sells for $11.99 at Amazon.  1421 doesn’t seem to be available as an e-book, but sells for $8.00 in paperback.  1434 will cost you $14.49 for the e-book version.  Menzies has a semi-related book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, and it goes for $11.99.  Speculative non-fiction books don’t come cheap.

 Gallipoli was, like the Trojan War, appallingly futile, a disgrace to European civilization.  (loc. 560 )

    The Zheng He assertions may be dubious, but the traditional Bering Land Bridge hypothesis is worthy of closer scrutiny.

    Wikipedia covers this in a posting called “Clovis First”, which refers to an archaeological site in Clovis, New Mexico, where evidence of human activity can be carbon-dated back to about 13,390 years ago. That just happens to coincide with the “beginning of the end” of the last great Ice Age, when the huge ice sheet covering Canada began to melt, starting along the western coast of the Americas.

    Even as a student, I was leery of this theory, since it postulates that once the Asian trekkers made it across to Alaska, they rapidly spread all the way to the southernmost tip of South America in only 14,000 years, which is a mere anthropological blink of the eye.

    As long as the Clovis site was the earliest evidence of humans in the Western Hemisphere, the Bering Land Bridge explanation was at least tenable, despite a lack of any direct archaeological evidence.  But since then a number of earlier sites have been discovered, most notably Monte Verde in Chile (carbon-dated 32,000-60,000 years ago) and Petra Furada in Brazil (carbon-dated 14,800-18,500 years ago).

    The excavations of these sites are not yet complete, and some of those carbon-dating numbers are still being challenged.  But if those estimates hold up, the whole “Bering Land Bridge” theory falls apart, since the great Canadian ice sheet would not yet have begun to melt.  And if that’s the case, a populating of the New World from the sea becomes a lot more plausible than traveling thousands of miles across a sheet of ice.

    6½ Stars.  In reading the reviews at Amazon and GoodReads, as well as the various Wikipedia articles on Menzies, Clovis First, and early settlements in the Americas, I have noted a marked bitterness in the tone of the dialogues and articles.  People don’t just disagree with Menzies, they call him things like “a charlatan or a cretin”.  The defenders of Menzies are equally caustic.

    Folks, History and Archaeology are not dead studies.  New findings will continue to be made, and established theories that were based on older, less-complete data, will inherently have to be tweaked.  That’s the way the scientific process works.  Menzies may not have all the right answers, but it is statistically ludicrous to assume that we just happened to find the  vrey earliest settlement in all of the New World in our first excavation at Clovis.