Menzies presented his new theory March 15 in a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in London. It was received courteously but cautiously by historians, who have long thought the Zheng He venture ended near the southern tip of Africa.
Circumnavigating the globe
Sent by the Chinese emperor, Zheng He led more than 100 ships, armed with weapons and loaded with treasure, to the Middle East and Asia.
That much is widely agreed upon.
Menzies thinks the admiral continued on to South America and also explored the Caribbean and the Sea of Cortez, tucked inside Baja California. The journey ran from early 1421 to late 1423.
A navigation expert and retired Royal Navy submarine commander, Menzies says maps used by Columbus in 1492, Ferdinand Megellan in 1519, and other Europeans of the era were based on earlier Chinese charts. Menzies used these documents to recreate the Zheng He voyage, a path along which he then found other clues.
He also presented evidence to the Geographical Society of shipwrecks near Australia and in the Caribbean, as well as porcelain and stone Chinese artifacts found in various locations, all of which he said supports his view. A full account of his findings, however, is being withheld. Menzies, 64, and his publicist hope to get a contract for a book, which would divulge the entire body of evidence.
Guiding star
Over centuries, the perceived locations of stars move because of changes in Earth's tilt on its axis. The phenomenon is called precession, and it works like this:
Earth is fatter at the equator than from pole to pole. The gravity of the Sun and Moon work on this so-called equatorial bulge and turn the planet into something like a spinning top. Earth's axis of rotation, if extended into space, would trace out a circle among the stars. It takes about 26,000 years for this imaginary extension of the pole to complete the circle, and along the way the pole points at different stars.
The North Star, Polaris, is currently within 1 degree of the north celestial pole. But about 5,000 years ago it pointed at the star Thuban. In about 12,000 years, Vega will replace Polaris as the North Star.
The same phenomenon controls which stars appear directly above the South Pole. Menzies figures the Chinese explorer used the bright Southern Hemisphere star Canopus, as well as the Southern Cross, a prominent constellation, as navigational aids.
According to an article in The New York Times , Menzies used Starry Night to recreate the positions of the stars during Zheng He's voyage. Then while comparing the software's results to the maps, he drew a line from one of the stars in the Southern Cross, vertically to Deception Island, off the coast of South America.
"The maps suddenly line up with current coastlines to an uncanny degree," he said.
Menzies thinks the Portuguese had in 1428 a secret map that showed Australia, South America, and the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. The Portuguese would not sail around the cape until late in the century, however.
"What nobody has explained is why the European explorers had maps," Menzies told London's Daily Telegraph . "Who drew the maps? There are millions of square miles of ocean. It required huge fleets to chart them. If you say it wasn't the Chinese, with the biggest fleets and ships in the world, then who was it?"
Proof waits
Other historians have documented Zheng He's travels through Malaysia, India, the Middle East and Africa. Along the way, the admiral captured the Sri Lankan king and waged military attacks along the African Coast. His multi-masted ships have been called marvels of technology for the time.
But there's been no evidence to suggest the Chinese voyages extended beyond the southern tip of Africa.
Menzies spent 14 years putting his theory together. He holds that Italian explorer Nicolo da Conti, thought by others to have sailed with Zheng He, may have provided the charts to the Portuguese.
Gillian Hutchinson, curator of the history of cartography at the National Maritime Museum in London, is not sure there is a link to be made.
"It is possible that Chinese geographical knowledge had reached Europe before the Age of Discovery," Hutchinson said in the Daily Telegraph . "But Mr. Menzies is absolutely certain of it, and that makes it difficult to separate evidence from wishful thinking."
Zheng He returned to China and died in 1433, a decade after his emperor had lost the throne to Confucian mandarins, who refocused China on itself. In 1436, still more than five decades before Columbus set sail, an imperial ban was issued on the construction of oceangoing vessels, ending the country's era of discovery.
Other historians said they could not review the theory until all of the evidence is presented.
Celestial navigation
It would not have been beyond Zheng Hu and Chinese technology to make the trip.
The knowledge required to navigate using stars goes back at least to the Ancient Greeks, says Phillip Sadler, a celestial navigation expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Until the 18th Century, however, the art was limited to knowledge of latitude. Figuring longitude requires precise clocks that would display local time -- not possible even for Columbus and Magellan.
But that did not prevent trips around the world.
"I don't think you need much celestial navigation to go around the globe," Sadler said in a telephone interview. "You just start off, you go east or west, and if you hit something, you go left or right. Hopefully you get around things."
Sadler points out that if Zheng He had turned left each time he ran into a continent, he would have fared fairly well.
"Columbus himself was a pretty terrible navigator," Sadler points out. "He was essentially just sailing due west."
It is also conceivable, Sadler said, that Gavin Menzies could mine the heavens for clues to Zheng He's journey.
"It's possible to estimate the year a map was drawn based on information about how stars were positioned in the sky from a particular place," Sadler said. "The devil is in the details. How accurately can you do it? That's what I'd like to see."
Like the historians, Sadler said it won't be possible to evaluate the merits of Menzies' theory until all the maps and other data are on the table.
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