Book Review: 1421: The Year China Discovered America

I actually finished this book a while ago, but I’ve been a slacker about posting the review. I came to read the book in a roundabout way. My background in world history is fairly steeped in the conventional wisdom one acquires through the osmosis of twelve years in the U.S. public education system, a few general education courses in college, and the odd Jeopardy! clue. So when I saw Gavin Menzies’ 1421 on display at the bookstore, I was fairly dismissive of the claim on the cover. The Chinese discovered America in the 1400’s? If such a thing were true, I’m sure I would have heard of it from more conventional sources.

Thus secure in my knowledge of things, I moved on to other titles, until I was visiting my dad in Provo last year and saw that a copy of the book sitting in his den. One of Dad’s colleagues at the university had served a Church mission in Taiwan, and maintained a running fascination with all things Chinese. Brent had recommended the book to Dad, and so he was reading it. What’s more, he seemed to be drinking the author’s Kool-aid. “Look at these ocean current charts,” he said, flipping to a chart showing Chinese ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope and running across the Atlantic. “He makes a pretty good case.”

Well. If my dad, engineering professor and skeptic of all things speculative, thought there might be something to the book, it was worth a second look. I settled in to read my own copy. From the first page, the author, a retired British submarine captain, assumed an excited, academic tone that was reminiscent of the BBC’s David Attenborough. (You’ve heard Attenborough’s voice if you ever watched one of those BBC nature documentaries that ran on PBS in last half of the twentieth century. You would recognize it instantly.)

Menzies is so excited to share his findings with you that it seems he can’t get the words on the page quickly enough. Though he follows an outline of the journeys of different Chinese admirals, the evidence is his main effort, and this causes him to jump backward and forward through the narrative, across oceans and continents, to paint the most persuasive picture he can of the overall Chinese world presence in the 1420s. His manner may have been annoying if what he was presenting were not so intriguing. He makes some bold hypotheses, but backs them up with a dizzying array of evidence. Among his more interesting claims are Chinese discoveries of North and South America, Antarctica, and several points of Oceania, including permanent settlements that blended with the population extant in those areas.

The evidence for these claims runs the gamut of archeological sites, historical records, biological flora and fauna, DNA, and linguistic analysis. It is a tremendous achievement for an amateur historian unaffiliated with any university or other institution, and he is still actively working on the project and publishing his latest findings at the 1421 website, 1421.tv. (He's also expanded the scope from America to "the World" which you can see from the title graphic I've posted.) I found my skepticism melting away as he made his case. I’m not convinced of the validity of every hypothesis he makes, but there is too much solid evidence to deny his core claim of the Chinese presence in the Americas and elsewhere, long before the Portuguese and Spanish explorers “discovered” these lands.

My biggest takeaway from this book is not the realization of Chinese influence on the New World and the credit they deserve for their contributions, although that is truly significant. Rather, what I found most interesting is how all this evidence was present, an inch under the surface, and yet it was found by an amateur hobbyist, not the thousands of professionally trained, establishment historians and archeologists in the world. It speaks to me of the folly of my initial trust in the conventional wisdom, the accepted story we all believe as we make our way in the world. It was a reminder to me that the channels I have tended to trust most to inform my views of the world are not always the most reliable, and that sometimes it pays to have a more open mind.