Jammer Wrote:
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> The Chinese Admiral's, Zheng He, voyages are
> fairly well documented. He apparently went south,
> then west. He actually got involved in settling an
> island dispute over right to rule issues on
> Ceylon.
>
> WHY would his voyages touching Indonesia, India,
> and west Africa be so well documented, and a
> voyage east be kept secret?

Because the records were truncated, altered and destroyed and that is in the historical record. See Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol.23 page 525


>
> Why would he bring back a giraffe and a zebra and
> not a buffalo?

I'm sure that he didn't bring back many other species from Africa.
>
> By the way, the crews of those Chinese Junks were
> huge (averaging 88 men per ship)! They could
> sustain themselves for a week or two between
> landfalls, but there was no way they could sail
> for months without provisioning. Long voyages at
> sea inevitabl;y resulted in scurvy, of which none
> was reported in 7 voyages!

Hi Jammer,
Those crews were reported to number up to nine hundred men. We know by many accounts that the Chinese embarked on many ocean voyages lasting months and years, and that provisioning was accomplished by an organic technology that included rainwater reclamation, desalination and even on board gardens of fruit and vegetables as well as animal husbandry.
Unlike European sailors, who subsisted on rotted meat and hardtack, The Chinese were well aquainted with vitamin deficiences from lack of fruit.


>
> The devil is in the details, as far as I can tell
> there's not a shred of meat on these whimsical
> bones.

What we do know of Chinese voyaging puts them far into the Pacific.
>
> Here’s a map known to come from his explorations;
>
>
> I try and keep an open mind, but am starting to
> suffer some mental scarring from "and it's a
> conspiracy we don't know"-ism
>
> Jammer
>
But we do know of the conspiracy that destroyed the logs of Zheng He. We know the names of the war department officials who carried out the destruction...it isn't vague at all.
And the accounts of Ma Huan were censored and re-published a hundred years after the last voyage...we have the admission of the Mandarin editors that they excised information that they found 'unsuitable for eyes and ears." Despite Menzies hatchet job, wholesale dismissals of Zheng He making it to North America are irrational.