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Gavin Menzies has written previous books, including the bestselling "1421 - How the Chinese discovered America." He's considered controversial because of his theories - which he has enhanced with world travel and meeting with experts in many fields - importantly finding pre 1492 maps. He currently bucks against academia and established theories of science. For instance he is opposed to the Bering Straight - land bridge theory of how Native American people crossed into the Americas and is in favor of sea travel. (Sea travel by the way figures in many tribal stories of how they got here. I recall in one of my anthropology classes the Native American students got angry with the professor and marched out!)
Reading his "Who Discovered America" closely, there are a few assertions that I disagree with, but since DNA science is an essential part of proofing his theories that people were either shipwrecked or traveled the natural currents of the oceans to travel around the continents, I'm intrigued and open minded.
Page 245 ..."The currents in the North Pacific flow in a great lip, carrying boats north from China, past Japan, then swinging east past the Aleutian and Kuril Islands to Alaska, then south along the American coast to Central America. So sea travelers from Asia to North and Central America have a free ride and food along the way and can sail so they are only out of sight of land for three days. This great clockwise, nearly rectangular, flow of water takes place all year round... It appears certain that man reached the Americas by sea at least forty thousand years ago..."
Does being controversial mean he's all wrong?
No, it doesn't.
Over many works, he does have his fans. For instance the New York Times magazine called his ideas revolutionary. The New York Daily News called him a historical detective. Like Jared Diamond, who is a professor in another field but writes his theories about man's evolution of culture and society such as "Guns, Germs, and Steel," or Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman, another professor in a field outside genealogy, but who is combining genealogy and DNA studies of the Melungeons, which suggests that they were Sephardic Jews, there is room for alternative theories. There is room for those who are writing outside their specialty fields or who are simply smart and not educated formally. At one time the World was thought to be flat and anyone who thought otherwise was considered a heretic. (And I suspect that some day science will catch up with reincarnation theories too.)
JARED DIAMOND OFFICIAL SITE
Pages 185-186 - Overview: Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson in a chapter on North Carolina and the Virginias, is about some of the same territory that Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman's researching. He writes about a researcher named Jerry Warsing who is following a disease called Machado-Joseph as evidence of Chinese mariners in North America decades before Christopher Columbus. The Melungoens of West Virginia have a high incidence of this disease which is prevalent in Yunnan Province, China as well as in the Aborigines of Australia and in Yemen. The theory has been that the Portuguese spread this disease but Waring now believes it was the same huge Chinese fleets that Menzies wrote about in previous books who took the disease around the world.
He focused on the Native American tribe called the Mingo whose DNA has a high admixture of East Asian genes. The Mingos themselves said they were not Indian people but descendants of shipwrecked sailors.
Page 186 - Excerpt:
..."Further investigations led Warsing to the eventual conclusion that a fleet of some two hundred ships under the command of Zheng He had been wrecked in about 1432 on the coast between modern Southport, North Carolina, and the Norfolk, Virgina. Confronted with the marshy inhospitable coast, they marched inland up the Cape Fear and Roanoke rivers and settled in the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains between Salem and Asheville, North Carolina. Some of them also settled in route in West Virginia, where they left a proliferation of stone buildings - Warhing believed that they also left a selection of Chinese plants, pallowwaddy and rice, along the way. He believes their survivors are among the tribes of the Ming Ho (Mingo), Wyo Ming, Lyco Ming, Shawnee (name corrupted from Oceanye Ho), and Melungeons."
WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA
The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas
by Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson
is published by William Morrow - An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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