Hard astern, skipper!

Menzies’ claims fall like autumn leaves.

 1434: The Year a Magnificent

Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance

 By Gavin Menzies

 Published by HarperCollins, 2008

 Available at Asia Books, Bt650

 Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

 The Nation

 Gavin Menzies' "1421: The Year China Discovered the World", published six years ago, was blown out of the water by an international armada of scholarly critics, backed up by a flotilla of incensed, torch-waving Eurocentrics, so he's really got some balls coming up with another audacious theory so soon.

The man must surely love the limelight, even if all he has left is the old British Navy skipper's uniform on his back, and that's in tatters too because his nautical lore is leaky.

 "Junk history" was the punning name given Menzies' 1421 hypothesis in Australia after he swore that Admiral Zheng He's massive fleet had left behind a calling card there, centuries before Captain Cook ever saw the place.

 Queensland's Gympie Pyramid turned out to be a local farmer's stopgap against erosion, not a mediaeval Chinese shrine. Just the same, Australian sales of the book promptly tripled. It's soon to be a major motion picture from Warner Bros.

 Since "1421" was indeed a best-seller, scores of Menzies' fellow amateur historians continue sending him titbits of fresh information, which has become an online wiki of speculation.

 Helpfully, some of this addressed one of the primary criticisms of his first book, which the original Wikipedia encapsulates thus: "the conspicuous absence of an explanation of why these Chinese fleets seemed to touch every coastline of the world except that of Europe".

 Say no more: Here's the proof that they did. The mammoth Chinese fleet not only sailed into Venice harbour in 1434, it brought all the sea maps and star charts the Europeans needed to get over to America and see for themselves what Zheng He had already seen.

 And not only did Columbus and Magellan sail westward with a confidence born of their ancient Asian guidebooks, the treasure trove of knowledge that the Chinese shared with the Italians showed Da Vinci the way to greater inventions and Galileo the path to greater discoveries.

 In fact, it fomented all the glories of the gilded Renaissance.

 Menzies stops short of saying Michelangelo shared his Sistine scaffold with Chinese artisans, but not by much.

 Menzies' claims fall like autumn leaves. He suggests Europe would have gone a lot longer without the pleasures of porcelain, gunpowder, printing, the compass and the crossbow had the Chinese not shown up with their manuals in 1434. In fact, all of these were there already.

And the Asians who appear in some classic European paintings of the time aren't Zheng's sailors. They're either Asian slaves, by then well known in Italian ports, or, just as probably, a "hallucination" stemming from misperception.

 At least for amusement's sake, might "1434" be read with the same suspension of belief that intelligent people gave "The Da Vinci Code"? That would be wise, except that Menzies is no Dan Brown.

 It's a very sad thing to have to say, but as a writer, Menzies doesn't even meet

Brown's lowbrow standard. It's surprising, for example, how quickly the book bogs down in logistics and other minutiae of the voyage.

 As a historian, though, he certainly gives Dan Brown a run for the money.

 While professional historians credit Zheng De with a great deal, they place him no further from home than Iran. In "1434", Menzies puffs Zheng's sails out on a second great mission - to revisit all of the faraway territories he'd previously charted and this time share with the barbarians China's 11,000-volume "Yongle Dadian", a compilation of all Eastern wisdom. In return the Chinese emperor expected global obeisance.

 Zheng's fleet was "a floating university", and from it the Europeans borrowed hungrily: machines, canals, weaponry, agricultural and architectural innovations ... and Chinese concubines to sow some genes.

 Menzies traces many of Leonardo Da Vinci's inventions to the Chinese tourists

of 1434, but can't bring himself to completely trash the old man.

 "In my eyes he remains the greatest genius who ever lived. However, it is time to recognise the Chinese contributions to his work. Without these contributions, the history of the

Renaissance would have been very different, and Leonardo almost certainly

would not have developed the full range of his talents."

Galileo gets the same backhanded adulation. Elsewhere he's credited with discovering Jupiter's four largest moons in 1616, but here we meet Gan De, the Chinese astronomer who spotted a "small, red star" next to the "Annual Star" in 364, and these, in Menzies' view, were probably the jovial gas planet and its satellite.

Menzies drops a clattering hint that his next book will be about Zheng's final voyage - to his death in Asheville, North Carolina!

 But this book ends poking around in New Zealand, where it seems the Taiwanese were the indigenous inhabitants, not the Maoris. While we await DNA testing, we have constructions like this from Menzies: "It's clear to me that [Europeans] may have had access to [Chinese knowledge]."

 Clearly, maybe.