Chinese Explorers 'Discovered America'? 822
FLY9999 writes: "According to British historian and map expert Gavin Menzies, Chinese explorers discovered America way before Columbus did. He will disclose his information to the prestigious Royal Geographical Society (RGS) at a conference next week."
What about the Vikings? (Score:4, Interesting)
Discovered? (Score:1, Interesting)
It might very well be that the Chinese discovered California for China before Columbus discovered Florida for Spain, but if there were already people living here, well, it would appear the area was already discovered.
Re:you just don't get it... (Score:1, Interesting)
Lots of people beat Columbus (Score:3, Interesting)
Search internet for lots of sources: One with a short description here [millersville.edu]
Re:Eric the Red (Score:2, Interesting)
IIRC, Eric discovered Greenland and Iceland. His son Leif made the jump to somewhere between Newfoundland and Virginia.
Of course, there is some evidence that Columbus wasn't even the first Catholic western European to settle North America. Some have speculated that the Knights Templar fled France in 1307 and landed in Massachusetts/Rhode Island.
It's the what-ifs like this that make history so great.
BTW: the vikings did too (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not a big deal (Score:4, Interesting)
When explorer Christopher Columbus landed in America in 1492, he was 72 years behind a Chinese expeditionary force, which had already made its way to the area.
And although Captain James Cook was credited with discovering Australia for the British Empire in 1770, the Chinese had mapped the island continent 337 years earlier.
Sailing in 1,000-foot-long ships with nine massive junk-style sails, the Chinese also circumnavigated the world a century before explorer Ferdinand Magellan's epic journey, and reached South America.
The reason why Columbus, Cook and Magellan get the credit is because they were Europeans. And, in those days, Europe was the center of the world. Western civilization sprung from Europe so to speak. Think about it: most (both north and south) American citizens have ancestors in Europe, so do the citizens in Australia.
For Europeans, America and Australia didn't exist until Columbus and Cook hit their shores (the Vikings did it before Columbus ofcourse but that was forgotten). After that, lots and lots of Europeans emigrated to America and Australia (most of them for economic reasons ofcourse). Contact between them and the homefront was never lost and therefore Columbus, Cook and Magellan deserve some credit. Maybe not for first discovering the continents but for putting them on the map.
How... (Score:4, Interesting)
Strange Media Coverage (Score:4, Interesting)
geee (Score:4, Interesting)
And I thought the Native Americans, aka Indians would have discovered it since they lived there, silly me!
The chinese couldn't have discovered it first, per our definition Discovering means "found and claimed by a white person with european descent".
Yes, and ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing that makes Columbus different is that by the time he got there the mechanisms and motivation to publicise the discovery and start the process of conquest and colonisation were in place.
Re:Strange Media Coverage (Score:2, Interesting)
You really think the Chinese emperors were such good, moral people? No, their interests were just as strongly economic, but America simply contained nothing China needed or wanted. While Spaniards and Portuguese were scouring the Americas in search of silver and gold (not by coincidence, Columbus' journey was inspired by Marco Polo's tale of imperial China), the Chinese were bullying smaller states around the Indian Ocean rim into paying tribute. America, lacking in precious minerals and fragrant herbs, simply was of no interest to the Chinese. It was of interest, though, to a growing European population that demanded space and raw materials.
We remember Columbus better than any Chinese explorer for the same reason that we remember Alexander Graham Bell for inventing the telephone, though Elisha Gray had build one earlier (but missed Bell's patent by a few hours).
Uhhh....... (Score:2, Interesting)
...all those formerly pristine frontiers just quietly awaiting their future deforestation, mass flora/fauna species extinction, genocide, colonialism, and natural disaster events.
Whew -- on second thought, I guess "America" is lucky all those folks were "racing" to discover it. Those natives sure weren't doing much with it. If not for that race, it would still be an unspoiled, underpopulated, wild, undeveloped, unpolluted, useless area. Only lately has it begun to realize it's full potential!
Re:What about the Vikings? (Score:4, Interesting)
Thousand foot long ships? (Score:5, Interesting)
On nine sails?
The freakin' Titanic was only 900 feet long and needed 31,000 steam-driven shaft horsepower just to get halfway across.
Thousand foot wooden ships with a single sail every hundred feet or so were either a remarkable engineering accomplishment or a mariner's nightmare.
Native Americans Have Feelings Too (Score:1, Interesting)
It is bad enough that my people barely have a voice in a nation that was once ours alone, and now we have to stand by while you insult us by saying we don't count. Why don't we count? Because our love of mother earth over-shadows our lust for power and strife among the nations? You didn't even bother to capitalize "Native American", as I'm sure you would have capitalized any other nationality.
You may laugh at my people now and see them as weak. But vengeance will be ours when the great spirit calls us and the winds blow our ashes with the dust. We will be worshiped with the earth and people will say - there is a land, and there is her people, they are one.
Re:It's not a big deal (Score:2, Interesting)
people form Oceania got there first (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The ancient Egyptians discovered Australia (Score:3, Interesting)
A common picture in tombs have a picture of the deceased holding a knife to the neck of an Indian or Ethiopian. There are reports that they knew of at least four other races 3000 years ago. There are almost no detailed drawings of ships or maps. There are also reports that the Egypteans didn't go far in their ships but hired crews from other areas. Maybe they had some superstition about going too far from home.
Some of the survey maps from 3000 to 5000 years ago have areas that are very accurate. As in better than the ones done in the 1800's by the French and require round earth calculations. There is an map of the entire coast of Africa in the British Museum so someone was going long distances in boats and getting back. I'm not sure the ones that got to Australia ever got back since a long boat at that time had a high risk of being a one way trip to fish food.
Re:So? (Score:3, Interesting)
So the Vikings might have ranged along the coast, and their fishermen might have landed there to dry cod for some centuries. There are also indications that English fishermen were taking cod from the Grand Banks well before Columbus sailed, and of course they would have noticed the nearby land. But in 1492, Europeans were finally becoming ready to cross an ocean and _stay_. It was no longer possible to loot the middle east under guise of a crusade. Looting each other led to early death far more often than to wealth. But now they had much improved sailing ships so they could go out and loot new lands...
Of course, those Englishmen who landed at Jamestown in the expectation of digging gold up on the beach, or stealing it from the Indians, were sorely disappointed. They had to turn farmers just to survive -- and then farming turned out to be quite lucrative, especially once explorers along the African coast found a solution to the labor problem...
Lots of folks visited Americas (Score:3, Interesting)
Given the probability of one way trips to the americas, this is not totally outrageous [wfu.edu], but is so far off the map as far as normal high school educations go as to appear bizarre.
While I may quibble on the details and the analysis, the basic concept is reasonable.
Re:They Lost a War (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So? (Score:3, Interesting)
Additionally, Cook, Magellan, de Gama and Columbus all had accurate maps of the world. Mr. Menzies says: "What nobody has explained is why the European explorers had maps. 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?"
Also, apparently the Chinese ships dwarfed european ships of the 15th and 16th centuries, and only about 5% of the Chinese explorers survived to return to China; But by the time Zheng He returned to China, the government was in chaos and the fleets were mothballed.
A small number of records and charts survived to be passed to Western explorers.
There is a more complete article about this in the London Daily Telegraph [telegraph.co.uk].
This has been taught in universities for years. (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the more hotly contested historical points is why China turned inward when it was, hands down, *the* strongest nation in the world in the latter half of the fifteenth century. It was on the verge of an industrial revolution predating the British one by hundreds of years, but that never happened: A new emperor came to power who associated the treasure ship expeditions with both the old emperor and the eunuch power regime, and the Chinese policy of expansionism came to a quick end.
It was previously known that the Chinese made it around the tip of Africa, and even as far as South America. Only a small number of people accept early Chinese circumnaviagtion of the globe as truth. I'm one of them, and so was my professor.
Chinese Archives (Score:2, Interesting)
Imperial China kept detailed records on a day to day basis of communications and other records. A gold mine of unique historic information can be found in there.
One gold nugged dug up by a French historian (sorry, don't have a link handy) descibes in detail a world journey and visit by a late 18th century British trade delegation that could thus be retraced as the British had kept diaries they published after their travels. The emperor had kept a day to day watch of their activities as they travelled through China and made detailed comments in the sidelines of the reports he was receiving on the foreigners.
The British were out to sell horse drawn carriages, canons, clocks and other "high tech". They had visions of selling huge amounts of their products to China's immense population....
Re:They Lost a War (Score:3, Interesting)
and that would be true if in fact we had actually gone to war or declared war at any point (military exercises are what we would consider the activities today). Dismissing the fact that 'americans' however far in our past lied, cheated, stole, murdered, misrepresented, and raped the 'native' population of the americas allows us the comfort of continuing in the same vein of action without remorse or consideration. If we do not look to our past, we cannot learn from it and grow to be a better people.
Everyone DESERVES respect. Our own constitution is based on 'unalienable' rights afforded to man (all man, mankind). In the government and individual actions in the slaughter of societies, tribes and individuals (something we should very closely equate to the Jewish Holocaust) 'we' denied those people of their 'unalienable' rights.
The sad part is that lets say we "move on", we "move past" what happened and the wrong doings of generations past... what are we doing today to make sure that 1) we preserve what little of that culture is left 2) we ensure that the native american as a bloodline doesn't dissappear entirely. And the answer is 'very little'. I don't believe in 'affirmative action' I believe in 'equality'. 'We' put more effort into building 3rd world countries up than we do in building up the nations that exist within this country. We need to look to the past to see what we can avoid repeating and what we may need to correct so that WE (all of us) have a more prosporous and rich future.
Re:Non-belligerent Indians? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not trying to be politically correct. I'm trying to be accurate in response to an overly euphemistic description of history. If I am not accurate, please correct me. And you have a point that in order to be fully accurate we might put these conflicts into a larger context. That the land was stolen does not necessarily mean that it should be returned-- as you point out, they may well have stolen it from others. That an injustice was committed does not necessarily obligate descendents of the original malefactors to produce some sort of recompense. And when it comes down to it, this is land we're talking about. It's pretty hard, imho, to "own" something that predates you by millions of years and which upon your death, you will become part of.
Unlikely, my rosy red behind! (Score:3, Interesting)
Ever wonder why the names of so many New England towns end in the word "field"? Most of what is now New England (and anywhere else on the continent with good dirt and a decent growth season) was cleared fields long before European settlers showed up. Further, most recent estimates (recent, because previous estimates have been uniformly politically self-serving, but based on the same historical observations) show that aboriginal populations in North America rival europe's population at the time of westward expansion.
The density of population from one place to another was much more consistent than in Europe, so there were no streets being used as open sewers , no Bubonic plague, no resistance to the diseases that appear among densely populated cities.
What you learned in High School about native populations is simply wrong. When the plagues started depopulating native villages (mortality rates were about 95%), the settlers thought that all of this wealth sitting and waiting for them to come along was the will of God and in their prayers thanked God for their good fortune.
To get back to the current topic. Just about everyone has been to the Americas before Columbus. The obsession with his successful trips to enslave a few natives and steal a lot of gold shouldn't be interesting to anyone actually interested in history.
Don't get me wrong. The natives made plenty of mistakes. The Mayans were likely wiped out by an ecological disaster of their own making. Other native tribes made their own mistakes. They were human, but several of my ancestors uniformly and repeatedly screwed them over by breaking treaties and contracts time and time again. Pretending it didn't happen or even outright denying it doesn't change the facts.
Here's another one for you. The sale of Manhattan for a few beads? Two problems: First, the deal was made with a tribe that had no claim to Manhattan at the time (though they said they did) . Second, the treaty as signed was for one season's hunting rights (the natives were very savvy with land contracts and land rights). At the end of the contract, we had to vacate, but we pulled out our guns, enslaved the natives, and shipped them back to Europe (the slave trade went both ways across the Atlantic).
Regards, Ross
Let's be accurate! (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.mnh.si.edu/vikings/
will have no doubt that the Vikings came to America and settled on the northern tip of Newfoundland nearly 500 years in advance of any Chinese or Italian seafarers. Of course no one can claim to have "discovered" America as it was already inhabited by what the Vikings referred to as skrallings, who killed some of the Vikings and is the likely reason that they retreated to Greenland after a year or so of living in L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. For more see:
http://parkscanada.pch.gc.ca/parks/newfound
Re: eyes roll (Score:2, Interesting)
Strangely enough, people said the same thing about Assyria. (until Ninevah was discovered in 1920)
Re:Chinese yes, (Score:3, Interesting)
What you do have to keep in mind, though, is that Monte Verde is in Chile. If the Americas were populated solely via the Bering land bridge, then these people most likely would have taken many generations to not only travel all across two continents, but also to adapt lifeways suited to the new environments which they were encountering. The same goes for Meadowcraft, at least to a lesser extent. Even assuming an incredibly swift migration, you have to go back several centuries from even the latest dates to get to the date of the actual crossing into North America
Unfortunately, if the earliest migrations southward took place along the pacific coast, any habitation sites have likely been submerged with the rise in sealevels following the alst ice age. Robert Ballard and his bunch have recently had a lot of success identifying submerged sites in the Black Sea, so it is conceivable that some of the earliest sites might be found, but as of yet, we still know next to nothing about them.
Re:Some facts on what happened to native Americans (Score:3, Interesting)
There were no concentration camps, no ovens, no Gestapo. The number of people actually killed - as in, murdered - by Europeans can be measured in the tens of thousands. This isn't insignificant but it's by no means unique in history. As I said before the Assyrians did much, much worse and with more brutality than even the Spaniards were capable of. Hell, the Incans and the Aztecs *both* committed atrocities far beyond anything than Cortez and company envisioned, and these boys were complete lunatics.
This pathetic attempt at revisionist history isn't appreciated.
And please note: accepting historical fact by no means exempts people from moral action *today*. Passing laws to protect Native Americans and provide them with equal opportunity are a sign of ethical behavior; indulging in blame-fests is a way of avoiding concrete action which might affect one's pocketbook. Blaming ourselves for what thousands of peoples have done during the entirety of human history is a great way to 'accept responsility' without having to take corrective action to make the lives of Native Americans *alive now, today* more equitable - especially when self-blame is free and money is not.
I do not hold myself responsible for what my ancestors did to Native Americans, intentionally or unintentionally. Life isn't fair, and such is the lot of the conquered. I do, however, blame myself if I don't act to improve the lives of Native Americans in our nation today. So lets stop whining and start doing something constructive, eh?
Max
Interesting ... (Score:3, Interesting)