from an old post by Doug

From: Doug Weller <dweller@ramtops.co.uk>
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Subject: Re: 1421: the Year the Chinese discovered America
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 17:19:36 +0100

On Fri, 25 Jul 2003 17:13:05 +1200, in sci.archaeology, Eric Stevens
wrote:

>
>A good clobbering is given by
>[groups.yahoo.com]

From an Australian historian:
The Chinese Colonisation of New Zealand


By Michael King


“So,” said my neighbour, “you’ve written a general history of New
Zealand.” I admitted I had. “I’m really looking forward to reading it,”
he went on, “especially the bit about the Chinese link.”

This is precisely the kind of comment every historian dreads. You
labour away for years on a book. You think it is, if not “finished”,
exactly, at least ready for publication - when somebody raises an
aspect of the topic you’ve never heard about. In this instance, I hoped
my neighbour was referring to Winston Peters’ election claim that Maori
were descended from the Chinese. That at least was explicable and
refutable.

“No, no, no,” he said. “I’m talking about the colony that the Chinese
established in New Zealand in the fifteenth century AD. Look”, he
scrabbled around the papers on his desktop. “Here’s an article about it.
”

The feature in question was from a quality overseas Sunday paper. It
was about the book 1421 by former submarine commander Gavin Menzies, who
sets out to prove that a fleet of Chinese junks sailed and mapped the
entire world between 1421 and 1423. Among other achievements, Menzies
alleges, these vessels reached the Magellan Straits sixty years before
Magellan was born and discovered America seventy years ahead of
Colombus. In the course of this extraordinary expedition, says Menzies,
the Chinese navigators “discovered” Australia and New Zealand and
established colonies in Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

One likes to preserve an open mind. I was, inevitably, surprised to
hear the claim that the Chinese had discovered and colonised New Zealand
when not one shred of documentary, artifactual or traditional evidence
for such a claim had ever been found here. Perhaps Menzies had come
across sensational evidence in Chinese archives or museums? Contrary to
public perception, historians are only too willing to change their
minds and their stories when there is sound reason to do so. Every
historian dreams of unveiling sensational new paradigms backed by solid
evidence before a conference of astonished and admiring peers.

Consequently, I awaited the arrival of Menzies’ book, 1421, The Year
China Discovered the World, with considerable interest. It was
published internationally by a reputable company, Bantam Press. Pre-
publication blurb urged would-be readers to “forget everything you ever
knew or thought you knew. Because 1421 has made every history book in
print obsolete … Worldwide TV rights already sold for a huge figure.”

The book arrived right on Christmas. I fell upon it with a sense of
high expectation. Accompanying publicity told me that, in the course of
research, Gavin Menzies had visited “120 countries and over 900 museums
and libraries”. Among these institutions, according to the author’s
acknowledgements, are the Waikato Museum of Arts and History in
Auckland [sic]; and Tepapa [sic] Museum in a place called Tongarewa.
Hmmm … Not the most promising of beginnings for a New Zealand reader.

What about Menzies’ claim that the Chinese reached and colonised New
Zealand more than five hundred years ago? This, it turns out, is based
on the alleged discovery of two enormous Chinese junks cast up on the
country’s west coast. “The wreck of an old wooden ship was found two
centuries ago at Dusky Sound in Fjordland [sic] … It was said to be
very old and of Chinese build and to have been there before Cook,
according to the local people. ”

Alas, only a fraction of this is true. In 1797 a wrecked ship was found
in Facile Harbour, Dusky Sound, by an American vessel, the Mercury. But
far from being “very old” or “of Chinese build”, it turned out to be
the East Indiaman Endeavour, which had been deliberately wrecked and
abandoned there in 1795 because of its unsafe condition. The crew and
passengers escaped from Dusky Sound in a brig which had accompanied the
Endeavour and in a 65-ton vessel named Providence, which had been three-
quarters built by sealers stranded in the sound two years earlier.

Menzies’ misidentification of Endeavour as a Chinese junk is as
fantastic and as unsubstantiated as his suggestion that there were
“local people” living in the sound long enough to say that the vessel
had appeared there before Cook. There were no local people in Dusky
Sound when the Endeavour arrived in 1795, nor when the Mercury was
there in 1797. Even the single family of Maori that Cook found there in
1770 had disappeared by the time of his next visit in 1773.

Menzies cites a further piece of evidence that a Chinese fleet had been
in Dusky Sound. He reports that in 1831, two sailors off a Sydney ship
“saw a strange animal perching at the edge of the bush and nibbling the
foliage. It stood on its hind legs, the lower part of its body curving
to a thick pointed tail … they estimated that it stood nearly nine
metres high.”

Rejecting the more obvious explanation that the sailors might have been
affected by substance abuse or were lying Menzies identifies the
mysterious creature as a mylodon or South American giant sloth. The
Chinese, he goes on to say, “could have taken [them] aboard in
Patagonia. Perhaps a pair could have escaped from the wreck, survived and
bred in similar conditions to their home territory in Patagonia.”

The conditions in Dusky Sound, where the wet bush hangs right to the
water level, are in fact nothing like the environment in Patagonia in
which the mylodon lived during the Pleistocene era. And, even leaving
aside for the moment the fact that there was no Chinese wreck there,
how likely is it that creatures of this size could have survived in
Fiordland for 500 years without being seen by Maori or Pakeha visitors
or leaving so much as a trace of a carcass, a bone, a scrap of fur?

Disappointingly, Menzies claim that a second Chinese junk was beached
on the North Island coast is every bit as shonky. He alleges that the
wreck of (again) a “very old ship” was found near the mouth of the
Torei Palma River [sic] at Whaingaroa (Raglan Harbour). “[It] is known
as the Ruapuke Ship after the beach of that name.”

Ruapuke Beach is in fact on the open coast some 50 km south of Raglan
Harbour. But its mystery wreck is well known to historians, one might
even call it an old friend. In my professional lifetime this phantom
ship has been cited as evidence for Phoenician, Roman, Egyptian,
Viking, Tamil, Portuguese and Spanish discoveries of New Zealand. It
should be no surprise that Menzies has recruited it as proof of a
Chinese discovery. The reason that this marvellously elastic piece of
evidence fulfils all these expectations is that nobody can produce the
wreck itself, which allegedly keeps appearing and disappearing in the
sand dunes; nor, even, photographs or drawings of it.

In 1969, determined to subject earlier claims to some kind of test, I
sent a piece of the Ruapuke wreck recovered by a local farming family
to the Forest Research Institute in Rotorua. The fragment was two
ancient pieces of wood, which I was assured was teak, held together by
two brass nails. The verdict was disappointingly sober. The wood was
totara, and the institute established that, as an artifact, the
fragment was little more than 100 years old. The Ruapuke wreck, in other
words, was the remains of a vessel built in New Zealand in the
nineteenth century. So much for the theories of ancient voyagers
reaching New Zealand before Tasman and Cook; so much for Gavin Menzies’
claim of a giant junk in the west coast sand dunes.

The remainder of Menzies’ New Zealand research is on a par with his
nonsense about the wrecked junks. He enlists that old favourite the
Tamil bell, which he claims was discovered by a “Bishop Colenso” near
Ruapuke Beach (it was found in Northland by Church Missionary Society
printer William Colenso); the example of a non-existent stone at
Ruapuke Beach covered in Tamil or Chinese inscriptions; the Korotangi
bird valued by Maori as a Tainui taonga but identified by Menzies as
evidence of a Chinese presence; and the legend about Patupaiarehe or
fairy people, which Menzies alleges is a local Ruapuke story when in
fact it is common to tribes throughout the North Island.

I’m not equipped to evaluate the quality of Gavin Menzies’ global
research in support of his great Chinese voyage of discovery from 1421-
1423. I can say, however, that his New Zealand section exhibits more
false information and a more dishonest manipulation of evidence than
any that I have encountered in a book issued by a reputable publisher.
The book is, in short, a disgrace. But by the time this becomes
apparent in professional reviews the deals will have been done, the
television documentary made and the enormous print runs sold and author
and publisher will be laughing all the way to the bank. For those of us
who try to make a living ffrom the writing of accurate and responsible
history, the prospect is depressing.
-
Doug Weller -- exorcise the demon to reply
Doug & Helen's Dogs [www.dougandhelen.com]
Doug's Archaeology Site: [www.ramtops.demon.co.uk]