Breaking the Master Narrative, Part 4

I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but I figure it’s safe. It would have come out eventually and, really, it’s better you hear this from me than some random stranger you meet on the street. Everything you know about history is wrong. There. I said it. And I, for one, am glad I got that off my chest. Now we can begin the healing. Wait, what’s that? Why are you leaving? No, please, stick around, I’m not holding it against you. I learned the same wrong history lessons you did, heard the same conveniently incorrect stories. I believed them, too. I’m not saying I’m better than you and that I understand history better than you can. I’m saying that I got the right story earlier than you and I’m here to help you understand. I’m here to help you adjust. Besides, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I screwed something up, too. Big time. And I’ll share it with you if you just give me a chance. Yeah, see, isn’t that better? Can we begin now? I’m sure you remember the old rhyme: “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” It’s one of those bits of information that every school child knows. But beyond the simple words there exists the baggage of misconceptions about the meaning of 1492 and the world that Christopher Columbus inhabited. The very first misconception is one you’re probably already aware of. No one was worried that Columbus would reach the edge of the flat world and fall off. They knew the world was round. They knew that eventually he’d make it around to India. It’s what was in between that was mysterious and unknown. And to understand that we must go back two thousand years before Christopher Columbus. Medieval scholars are mostly considered to be people who used the Bible and only the Bible to understand their world. The fall of the Roman Empire had destroyed or suppressed much of the knowledge of the ancients, after all. But one of the ancients continued to have an impact on European thinking: Aristotle. It is from Aristotle that the medieval world created most of its cosmography. Aristotle supposed that the universe consisted of a set of concentric spheres. The four middle spheres were comprised of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. These four elements, in turn, comprised the Earth and were what made Earth the center of the universe. They did this because they were heavier than anything else and, as a result, sank to the middle. The element of earth, being the heaviest, sank to the very center, surrounded, in turn, by water, air, and fire. Beyond the four elements sat the seven heavenly spheres, one for each of the visible planets and the sun. Beyond the heavens sat the firmament, the place upon which the stars were placed. Beyond that was a great void. The Aristotelean cosmology held great appeal for medieval thinkers. It fit with their conception of the Earth as created by god in the book of Genesis. So they took the model and modified it slightly. Instead of the great void proposed by Aristotle they made the area outside of the firmament the realm of god and the Heavenly hosts. Earth itself was built on a Greek system as well. The land mass of the world was surrounded by a vast ocean that was at best dangerous to navigate and at worst deadly to anyone who tried. They took literally the legend of Herakles, who passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and placed pillars to mark the end of safe navigation. This particular construction of the universe and reliance on myth and legend had an interesting side effect. It meant that everything had to have a physical location somewhere in the universe. And in order to understand that we need to go back even farther. To the week of creation itself.

The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good; the bdellium and the onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria And the fourth river is the Euphrates. Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.(Gen. 2:8-15)

We all know how that story goes. But it’s the very end of the story that captured the imagination of certain people.

So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.(Gen. 3:24)

Remember those T and O maps of the world and how they were less concerned with geography than cosmology? Remember how the world started in the east where the sun rises and the sweep of history inexorably moved west to the sun set? Think about the implications to the medieval mind. If you could travel far enough east you could find the Garden of Eden. This wasn’t just idle speculation in the medieval European mind, either. In 1357 a book came out called the Travels of Sir John Mandeville that followed on the heels of the popularity of the travels of Marco Polo. Sir John’s travelogue was inferior to Polo’s for the simple reason that he never existed and whoever actually wrote it never went to the places he claimed to visit. Which is how Sir John managed to find, among other things, the court of Prester John and the end of fast and unnavigable rivers that flowed from Eden itself. Earthly Paradise, it seemed, did exist. It just couldn’t be reached by traveling east. This wasn’t actually as big a problem as it seemed, however. The solution had already been discovered by an Irish monk named St. Brendan during the 6th Century. He made the logical leap to travel westward from Ireland and, in so doing, reach paradise. The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot was a wildly popular read in medieval Europe. It chronicled his seven year journey, during which he found many islands, encountered a giant whale, and eventually made his way to the Blessed Isle, then returned to tell the tale. It is, in many ways, similar to two other tales. The first tale goes all the way back to Pliny the Elder. There were, he said, a series of islands out in the Atlantic Ocean that were called the Fortunate Islands. It was here that the heroes of old who had pleased the gods were sent to live in idyllic conditions surrounded by calm and welcoming seas. When ancient texts began trickling in to Europe from the Arab lands or were rediscovered in the dusty libraries of ancient monasteries the works of Pliny the Elder were brought back to light. A Genoese expedition in 1346 found a series of beautiful islands off the coast of northern Africa and decided they must be Pliny the Elder’s Fortunate Islands. As such they named the islands as a whole after one of Pliny’s islands: Canaria. We know them today as the Canary Islands. The second tale concerns a legend from Portugal. At the time of the Moorish invasion of the Iberian Penninsula in the early 8th Century an Archbishop named Porto decided to flee from the barbarian invasion. He led a collection of his followers out to sea where they found an island and started seven cities before burning their ships so they could never return. In the early 1400s as the Spanish and Portuguese became more adventurous in their journeys the legend of Porto’s island was brought back in to vogue. Some claimed to have seen the island and its nearby companions. On crew even claimed to have made landfall. When Columbus set out for India he intended to stop on the island for provisions. The name of the mythical island might be one you’ve heard before. It was called Antillia. Yes, that Antillia. The mysterious island that Gavin Menzies found depicted on the Pizzigano Map that he decided must be Puerto Rico and gave proof that someone had found and mapped the New World before Christopher Columbus. And it is with the island of Antillia that I must confess I made a mistake. See, when Menzies found Antillia on the Pizzigano Map and spun that in to his theory that the Chinese had made it around the world he made a mistake. He took that one piece of information and twisted it in ways it was never intended to be twisted. Any further research he did only served to further reinforce his assumptions about what Antillia was because he decided that he had figured something out and he was right but no one else had ever learned what he knew. This is, on the face of it, an absurd conclusion to draw. But in pointing out the absurdity of Menzies’ claims I managed to make the exact same mistake he did. I said there was absolutely no way the Chinese could have discovered Puerto Rico and gotten that information to Europe. I then concluded that Antillia was either a flight of fancy on the part of the map maker, a later addition by some nameless third party, or a mythological location. All of these are easily possible and the third is correct. But that doesn’t make up for the fact that I didn’t do the simplest possible thing. I never bothered to figure out the origins of Antillia. While I was thinking about the Waldseemuller Map I had the idea to see if Antillia was mentioned as an island off the coast of Asia in one of the later maps or, possibly, in the journies of Marco Polo. I figured maybe it was an intentional addition to the Pizzigano Map to show that Asia and Europe weren’t really all that far apart. It was only then that I discovered Antillia was a legendary location that stretched back to the 8th Century. Had Menzies’ been aware of this it would have destroyed the entire idea of the Chinese expedition in 1421 at the start.[1] Had I bothered to do my due diligence I would have been able to conclusively disprove his theory right from the start. More than that, however, the whole thing serves to prove an important point. If you’re going to take someone to task for not doing the proper research, make sure you do the work yourself. Otherwise you’ll be putting some of that egg on your own face. Either way, we’re now standing on the edge of the known world. Think of us as those Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian explorers standing on the western expanse of Europe looking out over the ocean, prepared to discover something new and amazing. We’re about to find out that the world doesn’t look at all like we’ve been lead to believe. ------------------------------- [1]This, of course, assumes good faith and a genial ignorance on Menzies’ part. Considering that Antillia isn’t exactly a legendary place on par with El Dorado or Shangri-La,[2] I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt. [2]Actually, in a way it is. The seven cities of Antillia were later morphed in to the Seven Cities of Cibola, for which Francisco Coronado searched believing they were filled with vast golden riches. It also lends its name to the islands known as the Antilles in the Caribbean Sea. But the point remains that Antillia’s association with the Seven Cities of Gold and the Antilles is esoteric at best. ------------------------------- Random Footnote: There is one piece of information that remains tantalizingly out of reach to me. This is the nature of the other big island that caught Menzies' attention: Satanzes. Menzies, correctly, might I add, identifies "Satanzes" as "Devil's Island." It appears to the north of Antillia in several of the portolan charts ("portolan" being the word for charts designed specifically to identify sea ports. The Pizzigano Map is a portolan chart). It's possible that Satanzes is only in other charts because it appears on the Pizzigano Map, which is also the first map to show Antillia. This explanation, while simple, is hardly satisfying. The only reference I've seen to a Devil's Island outside of the ones in the chart, however, is an early name for Bermuda. The explanation for this is probably fairly mundane, as Bermuda was a nightmare to navigate and apparently the sea birds that called it home made an interesting noise that frightened early sailors. I've seen no connection whatsoever between Satanzes and Bermuda. It was, apparently, not as important as Antillia. Either that or the legends of Satanzes simply did not survive while the legends of Antillia did. Still, it makes me wonder. And since I'm not above advancing bits of pure speculation, I think I'll wonder out loud for a bit. Or, at least, wonder with my fingers. Remember that the medieval European world was oriented from east to west with east at the top and representing the beginning and west at the bottom and representing the end. Further, remember that everything in mythology corresponded to something somewhere in the physical world. Therefore, could Satanzes literally be the legendary dwelling place of the Devil or, alternately, the place where Satan fell to Earth after being cast out of Heaven? There might even be a clue. It comes about two centuries after the Pizzigano Map, but it seems like as good a place to start as any. Let's look at a rather long section ofBook I of Milton's Paradise Lost (the part that draws my attention is in bold face):

Thus Satan talking to his neerest Mate
With Head up-lift above the wave, and Eyes
That sparkling blaz'd, his other Parts besides
Prone on the Flood, extended long and large
Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge
As whom the Fables name of monstrous size,
TITANIAN, or EARTH-BORN, that warr'd on JOVE,
BRIARIOS or TYPHON, whom the Den
By ancient TARSUS held, or that Sea-beast
LEVIATHAN, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim th' Ocean stream:
Him haply slumbring on the NORWAY foam 
The Pilot of some small night-founder'd Skiff, 
Deeming some Island, oft, as Sea-men tell, 
With fixed Anchor in his skaly rind 
Moors by his side under the Lee, while Night 
Invests the Sea, and wished Morn delayes:
So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay
Chain'd on the burning Lake, nor ever thence
Had ris'n or heav'd his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enrag'd might see
How all his malice serv'd but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn
On Man by him seduc't, but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour'd.
Forthwith upright he rears from off the Pool
His mighty Stature; on each hand the flames
Drivn backward slope their pointing spires, & rowld
In billows, leave i'th' midst a horrid Vale.
Then with expanded wings he stears his flight
Aloft, incumbent on the dusky Air
That felt unusual weight, till on dry Land
He lights, if it were Land that ever burn'd
With solid, as the Lake with liquid fire;
And such appear'd in hue, as when the force
Of subterranean wind transports a Hill
Torn from PELORUS, or the shatter'd side
Of thundring AETNA, whose combustible
And fewel'd entrals thence conceiving Fire,
Sublim'd with Mineral fury, aid the Winds,
And leave a singed bottom all involv'd
With stench and smoak: Such resting found the sole
Of unblest feet.  Him followed his next Mate,
Both glorying to have scap't the STYGIAN flood
As Gods, and by their own recover'd strength,
Not by the sufferance of supernal Power.

Milton, obviously, wouldn't have seen the world through the medieval lens. Europeans had been permanently settled in the Americas for a century and a half by the time Paradise Lost was written. Still, he built the poem around the common language of myth and legend, so it's possible that he was aware of Satanzes as the literal Devil's island and preserved that idea in his epic. It's not much, but it's something to think about...

Breaking the Master Narrative, Part 3

In order to fully understand what it means to break a narrative we must understand the narrative we’re breaking. As the old saying goes, the past is a foreign land. They do things differently there. So it should really come as no surprise that the world we inhabit today is different from the world inhabited by the people of the medieval period. I’d even go so far as to say it’s shockingly different. We live in a world where we can find our home or place of business on Google Maps. We live in a world where we can easily find out exactly how far it is between, say, London and Beijing, and then find a flight and make that journey in less than a day. We live in a world where a war can break out in a tiny nation a thousand miles away and we can know about it almost instantaneously. We live in a world where the collected knowledge of civilization can be found with a quick internet search. In what might possibly be the most important change, we live in a world where north is up. If you really think about it for a moment it turns out that north as up is a fairly arbitrary distinction. The only reason we orient the world in that way is because we’re aware of the poles and the Earth’s rotation. It also helps immensely that the majority of world maps were created in the northern hemisphere for the simple reason that there are more people north of the equator. Take yourself back, for a moment, to a world before the magnetic compass. Does north as up make as much sense in that world? Now, before you answer that question, think of one other detail: this is also the world before Galileo and Copernicus. So you are also unaware of the fact that the Earth is rotating while traveling around the sun. Earth is, instead, the fixed center of the universe. There is one thing that you are aware of. You know the Earth is round. The idea of a round Earth was common knowledge in Europe from the time of the Greeks onwards. It just didn’t mean quite the same thing. It meant the world was designed in such a way that it told a story. The Medieval European world was built around the Christ story. More to the point, it was built around the cosmology of the Bible, at which Jesus was the very center. In what might be the hardest point to grasp, the maps of the time were not designed to aid in navigation, but to tell the story of the world from Genesis to Revelation. So for this we must move to a world where east is up.[1] The earliest maps of the medieval world were simple constructs known as T and O Maps. They separated the world in to three parts: Asia, Europe, and Africa.[2] Asia was a half circle that took up the upper half of the map and was separated from Europe and Africa by the rivers Don and Nile respectively. Europe and Africa, meanwhile, were quarter circles separated from each other by the Mediterranean Sea. Asia was the top of the map because that’s where the sun rises. This wasn’t so much a geological fact as it was a cosmological issue. For as the sun advanced across the world from east to west and day to night, history advanced from east to west and from creation to apocalypse. At the top of the medieval world, far to the east in Asia, was located Eden and the point where the world began. At its center was Jerusalem, the world navel and the fulcrum of all history. The western edges of Europe and Africa were the bottom and the place where history itself was destined to end. Or, at least, that’s how the medieval scholars saw it. Man was created, in their minds, at dawn in the east. The story of mankind was then an inexorable march westward to the place where the sun set. The interesting conclusion the European Christians drew from this particular map of the world was that they were standing on the verge of the apocalypse. As far as they were concerned there was nothing much in Asia worth thinking about and the enemies of Christ were gathering to push the Christians out of the Holy Land. Therefore the Christ story was about to reach sunset in the west and the world was about to go dark. Given the context, medieval apocalyptic hysteria makes a lot more sense than the alarmist messages of Jack Van Impe and the people over at Rapture Ready do today. This becomes especially true when you add in an unexpected variable. See, one of the central points of the recent ideas of the end of the world, as advanced especially by Hal Lindsay, is that the role of the mythical Gog and Magog who Satan would gather to fight against god at the end of the world was to be played by Russia. Let’s wander over to After the Flood for a moment[3]. In the Genesis Table of Nations Magog is named as one of the descendants of Japheth. Ezekiel 38:2 refers to “Gog of Magog” while Revelation 20:8 switches it to Gog and Magog. In both cases they are regarded as enemies. Due to the work of Josephus, meanwhile, Magog was placed in the land of the Scythians, a people who lived north of the Black Sea in, roughly, the modern day Ukraine. The story, though, isn’t quite complete. Before the idea of Magog in the medieval period makes sense we must first meet someone who never existed. Yes, I did just write that. Christian legend of the medieval period told of a great priest/king known as Prester John. He was, it was said, a descendant of the Magi who came from the east to worship at the birth of Jesus. The Magi had returned home and taken the story of Jesus with them and, as a result, there existed in the far depths of the Indies a powerful Christian nation led by Prester John who had dedicated his life and resources to protecting Christians in the east. It was believed that if Prester John could be found he could be enlisted to fight against the Turks and bring a final conclusion to the Crusades. At roughly the height of the legend of Prester John a powerful army did arrive out of the east. This new force did not bring hope with it, but terror. Europeans came to refer to this terror from the east as the Tartars, which possibly came from a misunderstanding of the word “Tatar,” which was a tribal name, but had a much deeper, more symbolic meaning, as Tartars come from Tartarus, the location below Hades in the Greek underworld. They were, quite literally in the medieval European mind, the sons of Hell. We know the Tartars better as the Mongols. When they invaded Europe they came around the northern edge of the Black Sea through the Ukraine and headed towards Hungary. To the medieval European mind the Mongols may as well have been Magog, riding from the east to signal the end of the world. Try to think about this world for a moment. To the medieval European mind the entire universe was structured with the intent of telling a single tale: the creation, fall, redemption, and ultimate destruction of the world. Distances were so vast and information so scarce that it was possible to believe there was a vast and powerful kingdom off to the east with an army a million strong that could come to the aid of the Christian world at any time. It was also possible that when an army did come out of the east it was a previously unknown, completely terrifying force that represented the end of the world rather than salvation.[4] And I haven’t even gotten to the monstrous races, the Torrid Zone and the antipodes, and the legends of what lay to the west of the end of the world.[5] Did I say that something lay to the west of the end of the world? Why yes, yes I did. But I’ll have to get to that in a little while. In the mean time, you might want to refresh your memory of this particular 1421 post. Because I’m kicking myself over the simple, amateur mistake I made when I wrote that post and how it lead to me drawing a completely erroneous conclusion. So stay tuned… ---------------------------- [1]I am extremely happy I picked up The Fourth Part of the World. Lester, the author, realized – quite correctly, might I add – that in order to understand the Waldseemuller Map we must first understand what a map is and how the idea of the purpose of the map were changing at the time it appeared. It is those moments of discovery and understanding that make the study of history exciting. [2]Hence the appellation “the fourth part of the world” for the Americas… [3]Interesting, isn’t it, that these things are joining together? This is in no way intentional on my part. It just turns out that the master narrative of 1421 and the master narrative of After the Flood share common (and deeply esoteric) origins, so in understanding one it helps to understand the other. [4]This actually created an entirely alternate set of realizations for me. I used to play BattleTech and was deeply aware of the story built around the game. To be as short as possible, the BattleTech universe focused on the Inner Sphere, a roughly circular area of space. At one point the Inner Sphere was dominated by the Star League, centered on Earth, which was also, conveniently enough the center of the Inner Sphere. After an insurrection the Star League disintegrated and Aleksandr Kerensky, the commander of the armed forces, took them beyond the Inner Sphere. Shortly thereafter the Inner Sphere descended in to chaos and the only place that was still able to command technology to the level of the old Star League was ComStar, a quasi-religious organization based on Terra. Eventually the descendants of the Star League army came back as the Clans, a fanatical warrior culture with higher technology, better armies, and a desire to conquer Terra and re-establish the Star League. At first it was believed that the Clans were a separate, alien force and that Kerensky would return to save them. Those hopes were, of course, dashed. I'd always gotten most of the allusions of the set up. The Star League was analagous to Rome, ComStar to the Catholic Church, the Successor States to the squabbling feudal kingdoms of Europe. It only occurred to me while reading up on the Mongol hysteria that the Clans filled the role of the Mongols in the BattleTech universe while Aleksandr Kerensky played the role of Constantine taking the Roman Empire east to Constantinople while his hoped-for descendants played the role of Prester John and his mythical kingdom. Meanwhile, the map of the Inner Sphere prior to the arrival of the Clans is, itself, a T and O map. The Clans came from the top, between the Lyran Commonwealth and the Draconis Combine. You could think of them as coming in from the east in a medieval T and O Map. Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I have no idea if this was intentional. It's just interesting to contemplate... [5]Which isn’t quite the same as the edge of the world. Just something to keep in mind…

1421: Many Happy Returns

And we're back with 1421. Kind of. Turns out that getting this thing set up involves something called "reading." I've apparently spent my weekend doing these things called "playing COD4" and "watching Band of Brothers." It's similar, but not quite the same. However, I will say this: from a historical accuracy perspective, playing COD4 is surprisingly similar to reading 1421. It's also just slightly less accurate than my current game of Medieval II: Total War. We all remember that time when Venice took over Byzantium and the Holy Land, beat back the Mongols and Tamerlane, then invaded Russia and colonized the New World, right? Right? But that's neither here nor there. Before I actually go any further, I'm going to stall for one more week. See, one of the things that I think would be helpful to discuss before going anywhere is what it actually means to "change history." Hopefully I will do so in a way that doesn't cover previously treaded ground. But, hey, such is life... We already have the historical record of the discovery of the New World. It was helpfully put in to rhyming form. In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It's catchy, no? Columbus set foot on an island in the Caribbean. He then made four other voyages and was followed by a hell of a lot of other people. The reason the United States of Columbus isn't the world's sole superpower is because the discovery of the big prize actually fell to Amerigo Vespucci. Of course from the voyages of discovery we have the conquistadors and the Spanish supremacy in the New World for a time. The high tide of Spanish supremacy came in the late 1500s with the Spanish Armada. Following the British win in the Channel we got the ill-fated Roanoke colony, followed by Jamestown, then Plymouth Plantation and all the rest. Thing is, though, this is wrong. Menzies would have us believe that seventy-one years before Columbus made his fateful discovery the Chinese actually showed up and colonized the New World. This assertion, according to him, turns history on its head. We have to re-think everything we know about the formation of the New World. Except there's one tiny problem with that assertion. See, some four hundred years before the supposed Chinese voyages the Vikings showed up on the shores of the New World. And we know this happened because we've found the Viking settlement up in, um Nova Scotia or Newfoundland or somewhere. Before the discovery of the settlement, though, historians argued about the veracity of the claim. Some said it was impossible. Some said the Vikings were good enough seamen and their longboats could hop from Iceland to Greenland and across to the Canadian coast. In fact, it seemed logical that the only way to support the Greenland colony was to get supplies from Canada, which was much closer than the far shores of Scandinavia. When the issue was finally settled with hard evidence it changed history, right? Not really. I mean, in the sense that it changed a few things about the history books, yes. In the sense that it validated the arguments of certain historians and alerted everyone as to the skills of Viking navigators, sure. But it didn't actually change anything. Christopher Columbus might not have been the first European to reach the New World, but he did something Leif Erickson couldn't do. He kicked off an age of exploration, discovery, and colonization that did, in a very real and unquestionable sense, change the course of history. This is the hurdle that the Viking discovery supporters theoretically had to leap and couldn't. It's the hurdle Gavin Menzies still has to show he can get over. The question is, quite simply, does a 1421 discovery of America by the Chinese actually change anything about the history of the world? Think of it in other terms. Say the Germans knew how to build atomic bombs in 1943 and had actually built one. If they had it but didn't use it, does that change the reality that Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the atomic age? There are basically two different ways that history can be changed. The first is when we change the books slightly to say that things didn't happen quite the way we thought. This happens all the time and it's exactly the sort of thing that historians research and squabble about. These things do, in fact, make or break careers. The second is when we step back and say, "Whoa. We thought *this* happened, but it was really *that.*" These events are rare. I tend to go with Schliemann's discovery of Troy in these moments because it's hard to think of events that drastically change our conception of history like that. The discovery of a Viking colony in Canada was basically one of those events, too, when it gets right down to it. However, Menzies is going for something that's a level above these two ways of changing history. He's trying to argue that the 1421 voyage itself changed history. This is a much harder argument to make and support. But it's hard to explain, so I'll do my best. We changed the history books when we discovered that Leif Erickson actually did make it to America. Leif Erickson, however, didn't really change history. The Viking settlement of America was simply too limited in scope and focus to have any long-term effect on the world as we know it. It's a footnote in the story of exploration. Christopher Columbus changed history when he made it to America. There was a cascade of events that followed in Columbus's shadow that did not happen with the Vikings. He was followed by other explorers and settlers and the settlements kicked off a period of European prosperity and empire building that both illuminated and re-shaped the globe in ways that were unfathomable in the year 1491. If Columbus hadn't done it, would someone else have? Probably. It's a bit difficult to conceive of the idea that the New World would have remained undiscovered forever. But the question is, who would have done it? It's more than likely that it would have been a different European explorer. Chances are good, too, that it would have happened within a decade or two of Columbus's voyage. Meanwhile, Erickson's discovery of America was basically ignored for eight or nine hundred years. If Menzies' theory is actually correct, it's been a fantastically well-kept secret for nearly six hundred years. This hardly counts as changing history, at least in my book. His argument that the Europeans headed to the New World equipped with Chinese maps is deeply flawed, too. I'm aware of the fact that there's more to it than the whole Antilia and Satanazes thing. But there are two random historical tidbits that indicate nobody in Europe knew as much as they supposedly did. I've already covered Columbus's theory that he was close to India. It's why we referred to Native Americans as Indians for so very long (and still do, for that matter). However, there's one other point that puts the lie to the Chinese map ide. In the early days of the European colonization of the Americas it looked like Spain and Portugal would be the two major players. They really didn't want to fight about it, so the two powers sat down and divided the world. They cut the map at somewhere around 50 degrees west longitude. Spain took everything to the west and Portugal took everything to the east. Portugal thought it had won, because that meant Spain was relegated to whatever it could find in the New World, and Portugal got to found Brazil and participate in the carving up of Africa. It was a gamble for Spain to take the New World. They simply didn't know what they had. It worked out pretty well for them, too. At least up until the Armada and the slow rise of British supremacy at the expense of Spain. And when it gets right down to it, if the Chinese had a chance to get the jump on the Europeans in the New World, I'll bet they were really regretting it by the time they were being carved in to pieces and trading their sovereignty for opium a few hundred years later. EDIT: For some crazy reason I placed the Spanish Armada in the "early 1500s" last night. 1588 isn't "early" by any stretch of the imagination. I think I'd decided it took place in 1521, but I can't fathom why.

1421: The Conspiracy Deepens

When we left off on our last exciting episode of Gavin Menzies' journey towards insanity he was making illogical leaps about islands he found on a chart. He attempted to corroborate his theory (which is good, we like research in the world of historical inquiry) but found, shockingly enough, that the Portuguese hadn't yet heard about the crazy Venetian islands. He did discover that they ended up on a 1428 chart that made its way over to Portugual in 1431, at which point Henry the Navigator, the leader of Portugal, ordered his captains to keep an eye out. A couple entries ago I mentioned that I once read a book called The Russian Push Toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697-1875. I'm now extremely glad I happened to pick that particular tome up from the Western Illinois library for a project. It was a fascinating book at the time and one of those books that served to illuminate just how much people didn't know in the past and how recent that past lack of knowledge was. The book started in 1697 (really!) at roughly the moment Russia pushed across to the mouth of the Amur River. The Tsar made it a goal, for reasons I don't really recall, to enter in to relations with Japan. There was only one problem with this idea: the Russians had no idea where Japan was. Seriously. Japan. Yeah, it was closed off, but there were lots of people nearby who knew how to find it. The Koreans and Chinese knew exactly where Japan was. The Dutch had a trading presence at Kagoshima island, an artificial island built specifically for them outside Kure, that had been there for a couple hundred years. And Japan isn't that far from Russia, so it seems a little crazy that the original Russians to reach the mouth of the Amur wouldn't have a clue where it is. No one was giving the Russians maps and they didn't exactly have satellite images of the Pacific Ocean. So we can use this as a thought experiment. Pretend, for a moment, that Japan doesn't exist. I'm not talking about from a political standpoint, but that instead of the Japanese islands there's just an empty expanse of water. Now let's say that there was a Chinese dude somewhere who met up with a bunch of Russian explorers and wanted to screw with them. So he says, "Hey, did you guys know there's an island out there?" Then he tells them stories about an island filled with rich people who desperately wanted to buy Russian pelts and wherein all the women were extremely attractive and curious and would undoubtedly be far more impressed with the sexual prowess of the Russians than the native men. So the Russians go scooting out in to the ocean and sail around for a while, dreaming of wealth and bitches. When they don't find it they go back to their new Chinese buddy and ask him to draw them a picture. So he does. About three hundred years later a dude named Gavin Menzies finds the crudely-drawn map of Japan in a library somewhere and writes a book about the mysterious island off the coast of Asia and the centuries-old conspiracy to block knowledge of it from the rest of the world. Or something. I haven't quite gotten that far yet. But here I must digress. Menzies goes off on his research, in which he apparently found maps of various parts of the world that were created before the Europeans could have possible found everything. He doesn't offer evidence, but this is just the Introduction. Theoretically speaking, he should be offering evidence in the book. Although somehow I doubt he will, since his readers aren't, y'know, bona fide researchers. Ah, crap, I have to tangent again. Okay, I know that not everyone who picks up a history book is a real, college-trained historian. I know that some people don't want to be bothered with the extremely intricate details of historical inquiry. I also fully understand that some people find history downright boring. But, um, those people probably won't be picking up a history book for any reason. I'm pretty sure that by announcing outright that he's selling to "the general reader" is pretty much an insult to his readers and, y'know, the sort of thing that's going to keep academics from actually giving two-tenths of a shit. But, again, I digress. Menzies engages in a maddening discussion with naysayers here. He points out all of the problems with his new theories, points out that historians have already dismissed the random islands that dot the charts he's looking at. In this he becomes not so much a historian, but an apologist. Now, all historians are, in a way, apologists. It's kind of a necessary process, especially for those historians that are attempting to upend the status quo. This, though, is were Menzies diverges from usual historical process. Historians generally lay out their case and put it in front of other historians by presenting papers at conferences or in journals. They generally don't operate in the manner of the religious apologist. This isn't to say they can't and it's not to say that Menzies is doing anything particularly wrong here. I just have an aversion to the apologist. The tactics he's engaging in here are simply disingenuous. "Some might say I'm crazy," he's saying, "And I can't say I disagree. Hell, I didn't think I was right at first." I don't want Gavin Menzies' personal testimony of his conversion to the true theory of the 1421 discovery of America. I actually find it quite a bit interesting that he would claim this is for the general reader, then he would claim that the academics have already rejected his theory, but he knows. It sounds a lot like the evangelical minister decrying those pointy-headed liberals with all their book learning that's just getting in the way of acknowledging the truth. Again, there's nothing wrong with this approach. It may well be completely unintentional. If Menzies hadn't spent enough time reading history books (or reading them with a proper understanding of the nuance) he probably just didn't have the background necessary to understand how to present his case. Menzies, though, is quick to point out where he knows way more than all those historians. He's a retired Royal Navy officer who knows how to read charts. There's undoubtedly a bit of truth to it. Cartographers of the days when people couldn't get any farther above the sea than the top of the highest mast saw things differently than we do now. A Navy man would understand that perspective far better than I would (although I have a hard time seeing how a submariner would see everything that way...). But in this idea he offers the downfall of his own arguments. If his claim is that the Chinese were intently exploring Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe and had solved the mystery of mapping longitude (which is extremely difficult, by the by. Latitude is fairly simple if you know what you're looking at, since the rotation of the Earth is a constant and all you have to do is find a celestial marker. Longitude doesn't quite work that way*), why were they so out of place in the Pizzigano chart? It doesn't quite match up. The Introduction finishes thusly:

Columbus, de Gama, Magellan, and Cook were later to make these same 'discoveries' but they all knew they were following in the footsteps of others, for they were carrying copies of the Chinese maps with them when they set off on their journeys into the 'unknown'. To misuse a famous quotation: if they could see further than others, it was because they were standing on the shoulders of giants.

I find it fascinating that he would claim Columbus headed towards the setting sun with knowledge that he was heading for a world already explored by the Chinese. There's a reason we refer to the islands of the Caribbean as the "West Indies." There's also a reason why the native inhabitants of the New World are known as "Indians." Columbus thought he was off the coast of India. Remember, he was trying to find a quicker way to India when he left Portugal. It took a while for him to realize he wasn't anywhere close to Asia. In fact, Menzies is now, whether he knows it or not, positing a conspiracy that stretches from the Ming court to Henry the Navigator and out to all the great European explorers themselves. All we need now is a mention of the Knights Templar and the Masons and we have every loony conspiracy from the last couple hundred years. This, again, is not a good start. And he didn't accidentally run aground on the shores of Satanazes or Antilia, either. I don't think he was expecting to, either. Hell, who knows. Maybe Pizzigano was an inspiration to Columbus. Maybe Satanazes was supposed to be Taiwan and Antilia was Luzon, the big island on the north end of the Philippenes. Considering that Marco Polo could have brought that info to Europe some two centuries before, it's not the craziest idea in the world. And I could probably come up with plenty of stuff to back up my theory. But you don't see me writing a book about it... Anyway, I'm finally done with the Intro. Next we move on to the book itself. Hooray! ------------------------------ *I got latitude and longitude backwards there. Oops. I didn't put in a simple edit, though, because the story of figuring out how to measure longitude is pretty interesting. Latitude is a fairly simple thing to figure out if you have the right equipment and the ability to do some math. You basically find a celestial body that's at a known location relative to the Earth and measure its angle. From that angle you can figure out how far from the north or south pole you are (basically). This is why Polaris and the Southern Cross are so important to navigators. They play the role of fixed celestial body. Measuring longitude accurately, however, required a pair of devices that we take for granted today: the accurate clock and the spring. Figuring out longitude in a world without GPS was basically dependent on figuring out how fast the ship was traveling, in which direction it was traveling, and how long it had been traveling. Speed and direction could be figured out.** Time was the doozy. See, we've known how to tell time pretty much since civilization began. Telling time is deeply ingrained in the whole of the human story. But most timekeeping throughout history relied on things like sundials or jars filled with water that were designed to drain at a fixed rate. The former is useless on a non-fixed platform and the latter isn't overly accurate. The first mechanical clocks relied on pendulums to keep everything in time and the natural motion of a ship on the surface of the water basically screwed that whole thing up. It wasn't until somebody, and I forget who, combined the spring with the pendulum that the ships had a solution. The first shipboard clocks basically had four pendulums. They were mounted in dumbbell fashion on parallel rods and springs were mounted between the rods. Once set in motion, the two rods pushed and pulled according to the tension on the springs and kept the clockwork going without interference from the motion of the ship on the ocean. The history of timekeeping is an absolutely fascinating subject, by the way. From the simple, prehistoric henges designed to tell the ancients when the solstice would occur to the modern digital clock there's an awful lot going on. Society couldn't function without the telling of time, but we take so much of what has gone in to it for granted. **This, too, is a neat bit of history. When someone aboard ship wanted to know how fast they were going they dropped a bit of rope in to the water and left it there for a fixed length of time. The rope had knots at certain intervals, so the number of knots that were pulled out indicated how fast the ship was going. This is why measures of nautical speed to this day are given in knots.

1421: Gilligan's Island

[Author's Note: Ha! I technically made it. There's still 21 minutes left to go for Sunday...] Here's a new one. I already have a problem with the Introduction of 1421, which is novel. For the first time in history I have a problem with the Acknowledgments. I imagine that this is an extremely rare occurrence. But the first paragraph of the Acknowledgments bothers me.

A brief outline of the more important maps, documents and other pieces of evidence I have used to form the conclusions presented in this book has been included in the Appendices, and the primary and secondary sources I have used are cited in the Bibliography. However, this is a book for the general reader, not the academic; three quarters of the evidence has had to be omitted for lack of space.

Um, bullshit? Seriously, has this man ever picked up a history book? I understand that there are people in the world who want to read history without thinking too much about it or bothering to leaf through the Bibliography. In that case it's the responsibility of the historian to present that history in an interesting way and figure out how to make it both accessible and scholarly. I wouldn't necessarily put John Darwin's After Tamerlane in the category of really interesting history, but I could name any number of books that are both interesting and scholarly. Ian Toll's Six Frigates leaps immediately to mind. James Hornfischer's Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors works wonderfully, too. It's a slightly different category, but Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse were both extremely popular and scholarly works by Jared Diamond. Claiming some sort of historian's gnosis is not a good thing. That's kind of why I introduced this whole thing by evaluating the notes section of the book. If I want to know about a work of history I don't start with the quality of the author's argument, I start with the quality of the author's data. In the very first paragraph of his book Gavin Menzies has made himself in to the Ray Comfort of history. This is not a good start.

For that reason much of the detail of my proofs and calculations and a large amount of other supporting material have been placed on the internet at www.1421.tv. In addition, I am happy to answer any specific queries and to make my research notes available to any bona fide researcher. Contact should be made in writing, via my publisher in the first instance.

You know what? I am sorely tempted to actually contact the man's publisher and try to get a copy of his notes. I would absolutely love to know what a "bona fide researcher" is. Something tells me that I wouldn't count, what with the fact that I think he's full of shit and all. This, again, is a sign of bad history. It's also no accident that I refer to him as the Ray Comfort of history. See, the big problem with the idiots at the Discovery Institute and other Intelligent Design advocates is that they don't (and can't) send their supposed science through peer reviewed journals. Historians have those, too. You'll probably not see my name in one of those at any point in the near future, but they're out there and if I were trying to actually make a name for myself in the world of history you can bet I'd be trying to get articles in to a bona fide journal. Gavin Menzies ain't trying to do that. He's also setting up a layer of protection between his "real" data and real historians. This is an indication that he's not writing real history and he knows it. Historians who are confident in their arguments don't make a wall between real history and "popular" history. They try to make their version of what happened accessible and scholarly at the same time. But I fear I'm repeating myself... Let's move on to the Introduction. Sadly, it doesn't get any better from here. He begins with a story of seeing the 1424 Pizzigano map for the first time. Pizzigano was a Venetian cartographer who made a remarkably accurate map of the western edge of Europe and Africa. Britain, Ireland, France, the Iberian peninsula, and Morocco are on the map pretty much exactly as we'd think of them today.

However, my eye was then drawn to the most curious feature of the map. The cartographer had also drawn a group of four islands far out in the western Atlantic. The names he gave them -- Satanazes, Antilia, Saya, and Ymana -- did not correspond to any modern place-names and there are no large islands in the area where he had positioned them. That could have been a simple error in calculating longitude, for Europeans did not master that difficult art until well into the eighteenth century, but my first, troubling thought was that the islands were imaginary and had existed only in the mind of the man who drew the chart.

Now, I'm no cartographer. Nor do I claim to be an expert in cartography. However, my gut instinct were I to be looking at the Pizzigano map for the first time would be to assume that the islands only existed in the mind of the man who drew the chart, too. And I'd probably go with that assumption, too. This is one of those things where ignorance really does count as bliss. I suppose I can forgive a non-historian in this case, because it's easy to believe that a 15th Century Venetian cartographer would have more information than he actually would have had. We constantly overrate the capabilities and knowledge of those who came before us simply because we know it and cannot properly understand a world that doesn't have the knowledge we do. I read an absolutely amazing book over the summer called The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder, a professor at Northwestern University. Over the course of reading the book I was constantly struck by just how arbitrary measurement is and just how recent the metric system is as an innovation. We're so accustomed to the idea that the kilometer or the mile is a standard measure of distance that it's hard to wrap our minds around the idea that three hundred years ago each town had its own slightly different concept of how to measure how far apart things were. Menzies' "troubling thought" is far from troubling to those who actually know about the world before our time. It's far from impossible to imagine a situation in which a cartographer who had never actually seen the Atlantic would put a random island in the middle of the ocean based on hearsay and legend. It happens. Hell, Jefferson sent the Lewis and Clark expedition out because he'd just purchased Louisiana from Napoleon and wanted to figure out how much land the United States had actually acquired. Europeans had been in the New World for three centuries by then and nobody actually knew how big North America was. Menzies goes on to translate Antilia as "island on the opposite side of the Atlantic" and Satanazes as "Satan's or Devil's Island" after admitting that he had no knowledge of medieval Portuguese (which, for the record, I'm still not entirely sure matters, anyway. It's a Venetian map, after all). He also makes a big deal out of the fact that they're colored in, which is not a trait they share with the map of Euorope. After much thought (apparently), he concluded that "Antilia and Satanzes were actually the Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe. 1421 also includes four sections of full color, glossy illustrations. One of those sections includes the Pizzigano map. When I looked at it for the first time, I couldn't help but laugh out loud. The map is a port map and it does contain a remarkably accurate picture of the west coast of Europe and northern Africa. It's also surprisingly artistic, since there aren't any lines on that part of the map. The reader has to fill in the lines, since the coast is filled out by words that presumably indicate the placement of ports and landmarks. It's literally necessary to connect the dots to get a picture of the coast line. Yet off in the middle of the Atlantic there are pictures of islands. They're drawn and filled with solid colors. They look completely out of place. Chances are that they are completely out of place. It's not all that hard to imagine that some subsequent cartographer put those islands in later after they'd been discovered. It's also not impossible to imagine that the original cartographer did believe there were islands out there. He could have imagined that these were the physical localities of Heaven and Hell. Or he could have heard a legend altogether similar to Atlantis and tried to put the island up and restore it to its former glory. Oh, did I mention that when I saw the map the first time I started laughing? It's true. See, Menzies looked at the Pizzigano map and saw an island that looked perfectly like Puerto Rico. I saw an island the size of Portugal located somewhere between the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Africa and drawn with a north-south long axis. Oh, and it looks more like Nebraska than Puerto Rico. Should you want to see it, here's a website that's hosting it. I would actually hazard a guess that the islands of Antilia and Satanazes weren't on the original Pizzigano map. The more I look at them the harder it is to conclude anything other than that they simply don't belong. There have been a good 600 years for someone to decide to use it as scratch paper or to add on islands. Anyway, this is illustrative of a major problem with having not-so-gifted amateurs running historical inquiry. Something weird or out of place in a document may be perfectly explainable without a six hundred year-old, globe spanning conspiracy theory. But if the person who sees that weird thing isn't aware of the just how new our world maps are or how recent the idea of preserving historical documents the way they were is, they'll start to extrapolate crazy things from stuff that just isn't all that crazy. Moreover, it's extremely difficult to imagine Pizzigano gaining access to the Chinese maps by 1424. It seems that Gavin Menzies believes the Chinese managed to make it everywhere on the planet except Europe. It's hard to imagine the maps making it to Venice in time for the drawing of the chart in question. Think about it. The big Chinese fleet returns to China after a successful voyage all around the planet only to discover that Beijing's desire is to cover up any and all knowledge and destroy all the records. If the Emperor successfully suppressed all knowledge with near 100% coverage it's a bit difficult to imagine that the information crossed over to Europe in the space of two years just to make it on to a Venetian cartographer's chart. Either way, this is something to think about. Gavin Menzies' "troubling thought" is actually the first thought to test. Historians also get to apply Occam's Razor. If your choices are ignorance, revision from a later point in time, or a global conspiracy, I've got some advice. Stop and think about all of the other possible explanations before you take the time to write a book. And, hey, next time around I might make it throught more than the first two pages of the Introduction...

1421: A Note on Notes, Part 2

Truth be told, I hate end notes. Yeah, it's way easier to figure out how much work an author put in to the notation process, but most people aren't using the notes like I used them in my previous entry. Notes are usually used to help confirm that the author did his or her work and to offer transparency. End notes break up the narrative, since reading them requires flipping to the back of the book. Still, they seem to be popular these days. If there are footnotes, I almost always read them. I barely ever read end notes. What's my point? Nothing, really. I just felt like bitching. Either way, I'm on the subject of notes. They're important. I've already said that Menzies leaves much to be desired in the notes section of 1421. I must admit that what few notes he offers are decent enough in quality. The bigger problem, though, is his reason for letting us know so little about his studies. The information, you see, was destroyed. Destruction of information happens all the time. One of the worst events in the history of the human race, for instance, was the destruction of the great library of Alexandria, wherein pretty much all of the knowledge of the classical European world could be found. Conquest also often leads to destruction on a smaller scale, as a new ruler tries to erase all record of the previous regime. Religion, too, plays a role. For instance, we have precious little information about pre-Columbian Central and South American cultures due to a systematic attempt by Spanish priests to destroy the pagan images of the peoples who lived there. Menzies, however, formulates a somewhat less believable destruction of records. He instead believes that changing attitudes towards outside contact in China caused an edict to destroy all records of the Chinese voyages to the New World. They did not, however, find it necessary to destroy records of Zheng He's voyages in to the Indian Ocean, all the way to the east coast of Africa and in to the Red Sea, which would have gone against the desires of a suddenly inward focused government. And so we get to the issue of sources and the quality of notes.

Commanding fleets carrying over twenty thousand men, Cheng-ho [Zheng He] cruised as far as Jeddah on the Red Sea and the East African coast, and made China's presence felt in Sri Lanka, whose recalcitrant ruler was carried off to Peking.

This is from John Darwin's After Tamerlane. Over the course of the roughly two pages he gives to the voyages and subsequent closure of China to the larger world he offers four different sources in his end notes, including one that specifically offers a newer perspective, since two of his sources were written in the early seventies. He offers a couple additional suggestions in his Further Reading section. Sadly, I fear that I'll find it necessary to track at least a couple of those sources down before all is said and done. It's also worth noting that Darwin wrote After Tamerlane in 2008, six years after the original British release of 1421, and yet does not even acknowledge the Menzies book. There are sources as recent as 2006 in his end notes (and, possibly, newer. I just took a quick flip through and saw a lot of 2002s, '03s, '04s, '05s and a couple of '06s). Of course, acceptance or rejection by the larger community does not in and of itself tell us whether or not something happened. Historical fact does not require belief, after all. However, historians are a curious and argumentative bunch and have a tendency to incorporate new ideas or interpretations in to their research quickly and argue the merits of new ideas strenuously. The complete lack of the 1421 theory in a book that deals largely with the consequences of Chinese isolationism on world history and the boon that the resources of the New World eventually provided the European imperial powers is quite damning. As to the quality of Menzies' notes, I find them lacking. Most sources are old but not old enough to be primary sources. A lot also seem to be in place to support a tangential point. This, I suppose, requires explanation. The lazy or hurried student of history has a tendency to cut corners. This most often happens when the student can't be bothered to actually go back to the library to pick up a better source or gets halfway through the paper and realizes that he or she has picked a bad topic. The most obvious way to deal with this problem without having to actually work is to quote sources that have nothing to do with anything and, therefore, create a bibliography of one-off, random sources. Since profs will usually ask for, say, twenty sources in the bibliography and require the use of fifteen, this can be used as padding. So you'll end up with a bibliography of, say, nineteen books on antebellum slave trade practices and a biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. because there was just a whiz-bang quote that the student used in his introduction. Menzies, of course, doesn't have a professor and a grade book hanging over his head. He does, however, have the burden of presenting his findings as rigorous history. This can easily lead to padding. As I kept looking at the notes something just didn't seem right. There were notes and they were largely okay if I looked at them in isolation. I kept cherry-picking little annoyances, like a tendency to list personal letters, the one note that cites In Search Of... (seriously, I love In Search Of... and wish it was still on. It's not exactly the sort of thing that I'd turn to as source material, though), and the one where Menzies explicitly states that he could not have written an entire chapter without this one specific source, yet draws a completely different conclusion than the one the authors of his source book drew. Eventually I realized I was missing the forest for the trees and took a step back. The notes themselves are a problem. As someone who has seen a lot of good notes sections, written a couple, and padded more than a couple bibliographies, I know what a notes section should look like. 1421's notes section simply looks wrong. If you handed me the seventeen pages of notes without any context or book title, I strongly suspect that I wouldn't be able to tell you what the book is about. His sources are simply all over the map (no pun intended). To be fair, I would be hard pressed to tell you what After Tamerlane is about, but that's also a book that attempts to encapsulate six hundred years of world history in to five hundred pages. Give me the notes from, say, Six Frigates or In the Hands of Providence and I'd be able to say what those books are about. Menzies isn't attempting to write After Tamerlane, he's writing about a fairly narrow topic that allegedly took place over the course of a few years. His entire premise that the Chinese destroyed every single record is, in and of itself, suspicious. We know of the great treasure fleets and we know that they sailed in the Indian Ocean and as far as the Red Sea. We also know of hundreds of years of Chinese interaction with the Middle East and Europe across the Silk Road. It's hard to believe that a new found isolationist policy would ruthlessly destroy every single record of this one voyage and leave intact information about so much of the rest of China's interactions with the world. In fact, we have a good analog to Menzies' postulation with Japan, which did close itself almost completely off from the world for centuries. I once read a book called The Russian Push Toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697-1875 by a guy named George Alexander Lensen that covered Russia's attempts to break open Japan, a much smaller, more isolated, and controlled island nation. The shoguns were incapable of suppressing knowledge of the outside world and were, in fact, more than willing to accept any information any Russians who actually managed to make it ashore could offer. China isolated itself largely because of economic realities, not the sheer xenophobic force of will exhibited in Japan. They really had no vested interest in destroying information about the outside world. Furthermore, China has been a land of bureaucrats pretty much forever. One of the best and worst things about bureaucracies is that they have a habit of leaving extremely long, detailed paper trails that are filled out in triplicate. I'm not saying it's impossible that China systematically destroyed every last bit of data. I'm not saying there's absolutely no way Gavin Menzies is correct. I am, however, saying that it's extremely unlikely. I'm also questioning his research and sources, and if you can get a supposed historian at the source (incredibly bad pun intended), you completely undermine the credibility of his conclusions. Meanwhile, I've left off a huge chunk of the notes in 1421, namely the 116 pages worth of appendices. There's a simple reason for this. I have no idea what the hell either appendix is supposed to be saying. This is not altogether uncommon, mind you, because it's not always immediately obvious why you'd need to read a half-dozen pages about relative densities and hardnesses of North American woods until you get to the chapter devoted to 18th Century shipbuilding techniques. But there should be some point where you say, "A ha, now I know why that's there." I don't see it happening here. Most of Appendix A, which is 104 pages long, is comprised of sentence fragments that don't seem to be connected to anything in the rest of the book through some sort of, say, notation system. They're also largely statements built around the notion that *this* sentence fragment says the idea is true, so the idea is true. And they're usually preceded or followed by a statement about how there's more information to be had on the official website. Now this bothers me. It bothers me a great deal. It's not a hard and fast rule, but an appendix is usually supposed to be given over to supplemental information that simply has no place in the body text. If an author is simply using an appendix as an additional place to assert that he or she is right, the author is doing it wrong. That's what the rest of the book is for. Moreover, the constant references to the website bug me. See, there's a reason that historians put information in to books and offer their sources with specific dates. It's so that anyone with sufficient desire can go and find that source and decide for themselves whether or not the author is being honest with the data. We also put appendices in to the books themselves as a record of what, exactly, the author was looking at for whatever the appendix is supposed to support. Sending the reader to the author's website completely undermines that entire process. The content of a website can change at any time for any reason. So an appendix that offers a garbled statement of circular logic then says, "Go check out the website!" is not a trustworthy source.* That should just about do it for the notes. I'm planning on making this a Saturday or Sunday thing and maybe calling it "High Seas Saturdays" or "Stupidity Sundays." Let's see how long that lasts, given my tendency to not post at all on weekends. I give it two weeks. ___________________ *A friend of mine who thinks about such things also pointed out that the website is a perfect place to get a lot of readers to sign up for the electronic newsletter, then make a quick buck selling the mailing list. I don't know that this is a motivation and wouldn't presume to make such an accusation, but as long as the possibility of ill-gotten gain is on the table it offers a further reason not to trust ol' Appendix A up there... EDIT: Forgot to block out the Darwin quote. Oops.

1421: A Note on Notes, Part 1

Before we get in to the rhythm of things, I'm going to set a base line. There's "good" history and there's "bad" history. If I draw a distinction between good and bad it's not a value judgment of the thing that happened. Rather, it's a value judgment about the work done to put it in to a book. One of the things you have to know as a historian is how to read a history book. It's important to know something about the author. For instance, in looking at the "About the Author" information in 1421, we learn that Gavin Menzies lived in China for a short time as an infant, was in the Royal Navy, during which time he sailed the very same seas sailed by Magellan, has visited many museums, and between the hardcover and paperback versions of 1421 he wrote a book about how the Chinese showed up in Italy in 1434 and kicked off the Renaissance. What we don't find out about Gavin Menzies is what historical credentials he brings to his work. My guess is that the answer is "none whatsoever." Oh, and we learn that he's kind of creepy looking. Or, possibly, that he's just one of those people the camera doesn't like very much (for the record, I've seen him on TV. He doesn't look particularly creepy on video). Now, not being a historian by trade isn't exactly a deal breaker. For instance, Ian Toll's Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy is his first book. It's also, as best I can tell, his first foray in to history in any capacity. Before deciding to write a book he was a financial analyst for Wall Street and the Fed, a political aide, and a speechwriter. None of these things says, "Hey, he'd make an excellent historian." Funny thing about history: you don't actually have to have a degree to be good at it. The purpose of the process of becoming a historian is to make sure the student knows what he or she is doing. A gifted amateur who can figure out the process, though, can do just as well as a tenured professor with a doctorate. It also helps if that gifted amateur isn't trying to break any new ground and simply trying to put a narrative framework around an extremely well-documented bit of history. That's exactly what Toll did with Six Frigates. He wrote a fantastic book. Oh, and he's not creepy looking, which helps. Gavin Menzies isn't a particularly gifted amateur. And he's certainly not traveling a well-worn path with his books. This is the first red flag. But, again, it's not necessarily a deal breaker. It's just a sign that the reader needs to tread carefully. As with any good mystery novel, you have to start a history book at the end. There are long and extremely boring sections at the end of every history book that are filled with end notes and bibliographic information. I can, and have, rejected history books without ever looking at anything other than the title, author, and notes. This isn't an issue of historical snobbery, but accuracy. History is a path of discussions. Way back at the beginning there was the thing that happened. From there history fans out. From the initial players and witnesses we go to the primary sources: newspaper reports and interviews with witnesses and such. Everything after that is more degraded by degrees, like photocopies of photocopies. Since human perception is limited and there's no perfect story about the event, the farther removed we are from an event the more skeptical we must be. This is why sources are important. I developed a saying around the end of my undergrad studies. "If we don't have a source it probably didn't happen. If we only have one source, it probably didn't happen that way." This, I believe, encapsulates the skepticism a historian must bring to the field of study. For instance, we've got the George Washington cherry tree story. There is no original source on that and it's not particularly believable, so it probably didn't happen. Our older texts are often the sole surviving accounts of things. This is why the historian in me eventually rejected fundamentalist Christianity. We only have one source for the vast majority of stuff in the Bible. You can argue until you're blue in the face that god hisownself wrote the book and, therefore, it's all 100% true. But that doesn't mean you're right. Some of the Bible is good history. Most of it either isn't or can't be proven either way. Therefore you have to take it with a grain of salt. And if it seems utterly impossible, like, say, a flood that completely covers the whole of the Earth, it's best to assume it didn't happen. It shouldn't come as a surprise, but the notes in 1421 leave much to be desired. The notes section is seventeen and a half pages long. That probably seems like a lot. In fact, it's half a page longer than the notes section in Robin Waterfield's Xenophon's Retreat, a book upon which I've heaped much praise. There's a minor problem, though. Xenophon's Retreat is 211 pages long*. 1421 is 489. This is a problem. The bibliography/notes** section of a historical work is key. The longer the work, the more notes there should be. It's a direct correlation. Ian Toll's Six Frigates clocks in at 482 pages and has a bibliography/notes section that spans 56 pages. This tells us that he might not be a historian in the traditional sense, but he'd done his homework and he's prepared to back it up. John Darwin's After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, another book I love and one that will factor heavily in this series, clocks in at 506 pages with a notes/further reading*** section of 60 pages. As I've said, the more sources the better. For instance, Alex Kershaw's The Few, a book about American airmen who served for the RAF during the Battle of Britain, reads like a novel. It's part of a new type of history that's built more around the narrative and putting the reader in the moment. It's also a 239 page book with a 43 page notes section. Books that attempt to break ground on a brand new argument or a new presentation of old evidence have an even greater necessity for extensive proof. Darwin's After Tamerlane is a good example of just such a book. My personal favorite, however, is William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. The book is 385 pages long and has a notes/bibliography section that's, I shit you not, 110 pages long. All of this is what the author feels is necessary to back up his thesis that Chicago is the city it is because geography dictated that the perfect place for a modern, dominating metropolis on an industrialized American continent is right at the southern tip of Lake Michigan. When you think about it for a while, then look at his arguments and evidence it seems rather obvious. But that's kind of the point. In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain & the American Civil War, Alice Rains Trulock's excellent biography of my personal favorite historical figure, is 381 pages long and has a notes/selected bibliography that spans 154 pages. Her notes, however, are extensive, insightful, and usually take the form of long paragraphs. Again, the more information the historian presents, the better. In the case of Trulock's book, they give a great deal of insight and flavor. Also, like Toll, she was not a trained and professional historian. But she knew what she was doing. Finally, just because I can, Geoffrey Perret's Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President is 478 pages long with a 50 page notes section. So here we have a list seven history books I have read over the years and enjoyed and appreciated. Nature's Metropolis was an assignment for a college course. The Grant book was one I picked up at random because I had to read and write a report on a biography. The Few was a Christmas gift. I got the book about Chamberlain because I was looking for one. The other three were books that I picked up because I was wandering around a bookstore and they caught my eye. All of the books I've mentioned are books I would recommend as excellent history. Other than the Cronon one, which is extremely dry and dense, and Darwin's, which is extremely dense but not as dry, all of the books are built around narrative and move rather quickly. This is, I'm told something they have in common with 1421. It's why, though, you can't judge a book by its cover. All of the blurbs on 1421 are built around how it's a great read and it turns history on its head. The blurbs on Six Frigates and Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President let the reader know how easy a read they are, too. The blurbs on After Tamerlane are about how Darwin turns conventional wisdom on its head. Don't trust blurbs. A lively history book is a good thing. A history book that challenges preconceptions is a good thing. History isn't, and shouldn't have to be dry. History is also always changing (odd statement, that). It's tough to tell the value of a history book on the blurbs or by the author's biography. Flip to the back of the book. Find the notes, find the bibliography. And if it feels rather light, consider that a red flag. 1421 starts off with a big one. -------------------------- *When I give page counts I'm talking about the body. Read any note counts as additional pages at the back, so Xenophon's Retreat is 211 pages + 17 pages of notes + whatever else for an index, preface, and whatnot. **I'm using bibliography and notes as a combined concept here. It technically shouldn't be. If a book is using end notes and I'm comparing it to a book that uses footnotes, for instance, I'd be doing a major disservice to the latter book. The bibliography tells you what sources an author looked at. That doesn't mean that the author actually used the source in question. The notes tell you what an idea is based off of or meant to contradict. To the untrained eye the Notes will look a lot like a Bibliography, but there's a page number attached to a Note and the note itself is attached to a specific citation so that the reader can find the information. Notes are deeply important. ***The further reading section is basically a bibliography as a narrative. Rather than a simply, alphabetical list of books, it breaks the bibliography down by some system, generally chapter or topic and lets the reader know why they might want to pick the book up. It's usually longer than a comparable bibliography and usually not as exhaustive, but it's still a valid resource and can be far more useful if you're simply looking for more books to read, as it takes the guesswork out of te reader's hands by basically saying, "The author found this book helpful for this topic. You might, too.

1421: An Introduction

I have terrible news for all of my readers who come for the refreshing lack of discussion of the topic of history. On my way home from work today I stopped and picked up a copy of Gavin Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered America. I've been aware of the book and its fairly obvious thesis for a while and haven't really bothered to care. For those who don't know, the author posits that the Chinese discovered America seventy-one years before Columbus. There's really nothing wrong with this proposition. The Chinese of the Ming Dynasty were fine sailors with skills that exceeded any comparable European sailors save the Vikings. We know that Polynesians in outrigger canoes managed to cross and colonize vast swaths of the Pacific, so certainly Chinese sailors could have reached America if they'd put forth the effort. All in all, it's an interesting theory, but one that's not overly attention grabbing unless you're in to that sort of thing. Over the weekend I was watching an old episode of Ancient Discoveries on The History Channel. Ancient Discoveries is a great show. It's like Mythbusters for the history nerd. They find some crazy account of a historical device, then have some historians, military experts, and other helpful people try to figure out if it was possible. So they go out and try to re-create Greek Fire (which they did, it was awesome. Greek Fire was one of those, "We'll never know how they did it, ah, well," things, too) or use vinegar and fire to try to destroy rocks to prove whether or not Hannibal's engineers were able to cut a path down a sheer rock face over the course of a few days (also totally awesome). Most of the time they find out that ancient people were totally ingenious and that the things historians claimed happened were possible. Then I saw an episode on Chinese super ships. For the most part it was fascinating. The Chinese had a unique set of problems related to control of inland waterways and may well have solved their unique problems with truly bizarre ships that were basically floating citadels. It was all very credulous. Until they brought in Gavin Menzies, his 1421 theory, and Chinese junks the size of cruise liners. I then began to learn that the 1421 theory went far, far beyond showing up and planting a flag. Supporters of the theory spoke breathlessly about how if they could prove it, the discovery that did it would turn history on its head. I'm also not entirely certain, but I think that someone tried to make the claim that the colonization of America by ancient people via the Bering Strait land bridge was preposterous and it made a hell of a lot more sense to say the Chinese colonized America. By boat, apparently. A few decades before Columbus showed up. To their credit, the Ancient Discoveries people brought in a real expert. They interviewed Dr. Stephen Davies, the Director of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum. Davies pointed out interesting things, like the fact that modern Pacific Ocean currents and weather patterns would actually have to have been moving in exactly the opposite direction in the 1400s for the 1421 theory to hold. Like any good historian, however, he allowed that the view we have of history is ever-changing. Those who wish to change the picture, however, need actual evidence, not flights of fantasy and mostly fictional accounts. And when I say "flights of fantasy," I mean it. The tail end of the episode was dedicated to the search for a 15th Century Chinese shipwreck in Oregon. The lead guy in the field team showed up at a likely spot (for the life of me I can't figure out why that spot was regarded as likely) and started walking around with divining rods while a lackey followed him and planted red flags every couple of feet. They then pulled out some equipment and drilled for a core sample forty feet down. They were looking for wood. You know, from a Chinese junk. Forty feet below an Oregon sand dune. That they'd been exploring with divining rods and, apparently, dead reckoning. This is not how history is done. It's not how archaeology is done, either. Gavin Menzies and his people apparently regard themselves as latter-day Heinrich Schliemanns. For those who don't know, ol' Heinrich was an amateur historian and archaeologist from the 1800s who had this crazy idea that the Troy of the Illiad was real. So he followed clues in Homer's work and, lo and behold, found Troy. Emboldened by this discovery, he went over to Greece and found Mycenae, too. Nobody believed him until he did it. He left a crazy man and came back a legend. The guy on the dune in Oregon left a crazy man and went back home one, too. They found some bits of wood forty feet down in that dune. There wasn't enough to be tested in a lab. So what did they do? Two other guys got out the divining rods, walked around, and confirmed that, yup, the first guy got it right. So they must have just had the misfortune to drill in to a really thin part of the decking of the Chinese ship that was most assuredly buried down there. Did I mention that this isn't how history or archaeology is done? Either way, when you're basically inventing your location out of thin air and wishful thinking because the evidence you have on hand is less conclusive than Homer's Illiad, you're doing something terribly, terribly wrong. Oh, Dr. Davies mentioned, too, that there are probably lots of wrecked Chinese junks littering the west coast of the United States. There was a pretty big wave of Chinese immigration to the United States in the 19th Century, you see. So even if they had found a junk in that dune, they would have had the burden of proof on them to make sure it didn't have a much more mundane and recent explanation. Either way, this combination of bad history, bad archaeology, relentless self-aggrandizement, and the distinct odor of bat-shit crazy True Believers piqued my curiosity. I figured I'd pick up 1421, leaf through it, and compare it to, shall we say, respectable history. I think I'll make a series of it, something like Left Behind Fridays and not like my series on Wild at Heart. I'm thinking I'll actually pick a day and do a weekly post, but probably not on Fridays... History is, by its very nature, chronological. I'm going to actually go through 1421. I haven't read the book myself yet, so it will mostly be first impressions. And, I hope, snark. Hang on and enjoy the ride. And try to get over your shock that there's actual historical content here at Accidental Historian...