Book Report

1421: The Year China Discovered America

By: Gavin Menzies

            This book has, simply put, changed my idea of history.  It has changed my perception on one of the main and most major supposed ‘facts’ that has been taught to me, along with every other student at least in the United States.  The school board leaders and anyone who has anything to do with the history classes of our nation needs to read this book so that it may be realized that Christopher Columbus, our country’s ‘discoverer,’ in fact was not the first person from a different country to sail and happen upon what is now The United States of America.  Another ‘fact’ that this book has disproved is that Ferdinand Magellan was the first to circumnavigate the globe in 1521.  While this book hasn’t, to most people, disproven the fact that Columbus discovered the Americas and that Magellan was the first to circumnavigate the world because of the scarce amount of evidence, I believe this as true.  This book has taught me that the Chinese in fact, discovered America and circumnavigated the globe far before those European explorers had done.  The Chinese were the first to do these phenomenal feats along with others in 1421—almost a century before Magellan and seventy years before Columbus took the glory for their tasks.  

            While this book seems to be very confusing, it is chock-full of facts—very important facts at that.  The Chinese not only discovered America and circumnavigated the globe, but they also were the first to discover Antarctica, Australia, and were the first to circumnavigate Greenland.  Because only a portion of the information is backed by hard evidence, this book is based a lot on artifacts found in different places around the world from the Chinese Ming Dynasty (the dynasty they were in during the exploration) which sort of stretches the theory and makes some disbelieve it.  Menzies covers a large realm of topics in this book all pertaining to the 1400’s such as the Emperor and his eunuchs, the Forbidden City, and of course, the 5 captains sent on the exploration and each of their individual travels, discoveries, and maps.  One of the most interesting and mind-blowing facts I learned while reading this was how the Chinese created all of their own maps and charts when they went on their ‘map-less’ journey into the unknown AND they even discovered a way to determine longitude 300 years before the invention of the chronometer.   The main Admiral of the vast fleet also collected animals along the way to return them to the Emperors Zoo.  They even thought of the giraffe that they captured and returned as the Chinese mythical qilin.  The emperor hired one of his favorite artists and poem writer to write a poem about it:

“In the corner of the western seas, in the stagnant waters of a great morass,
Truly was produced a qilin (ch'i-lin), whose shape was as high as fifteen feet.
With the body of a deer and the tail of an ox, and a fleshy, boneless horn,
With luminous spots like a red cloud or purple mist.
Its hoofs do not tread on living beings and in its wanderings it carefully selects its ground.
It walks in stately fashion and in its every motion it observes a rhythm,
Its harmonious voice sounds like a bell or a musical tube.
Gentle is this animal, that has in antiquity been seen but once,
The manifestation of its divine spirit rises up to heaven's abode.”

While there are a lot of disputes between different citizens of the world who have read this book and have been exposed to this idea of change, I believe it.

             This book is a very interesting book that changed my view on all of history.  The Chinese people have accomplished a lot in their history, but obviously did not have taken the glory of all of it.  They cannot do so mainly because of the works of a later emperor who erased all of China’s greatest triumphs.  Ever since, it has just been a giant scavenger hunt to try finding all of the surviving evidence that this really happened and Gavin Menzies, a renowned author and Navy submarine veteran, has, in my opinion, accomplished that.  If it is eventually, if ever, 100% proved that the Chinese did in fact accomplish all of these achievements, I’m afraid it will not do much with our history books other that add another chapter.