WHAT DO Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan and Captain James Cook have in common? The answer, according to retired Royal Navy submarine commander Gavin Menzies, is they were all losers. Columbus didn't 'discover' America, Magellan wasn't the first man to circumnavigate the globe, and Cook's exploration of the southern hemisphere was nothing new. The Chinese, led by the legendary eunuch admiral from Kunming, Zheng He, got there before them.
Menzies, 65, propounds this theory in his literary debut named after the year the admiral began his odyssey, 1421. The work stems from 15 years of research. Supported by his wife, Marcella, Menzies traced the voyages of Zheng's fleets all over the globe. He visited 120 countries, more than 900 museums and libraries and every major seaport of the late Middle Ages (not to mention rocky headlands, coral reefs, lonely beaches and remote islands), before returning to his home in Islington, north London.
Menzies looks a far cry from the cliche of the grizzled explorer. Instead, he cuts a dapper, diminutive figure with an air of wistfulness. Curiously, when prompted, he has scarcely anything to say about his travels. He gives the impression that seafaring is so much part of his personality that he does it on autopilot, albeit relentlessly.
At home, he leads me upstairs to his databank: a bookcase full of box files. Hovering before this monument to his labours, he gesticulates, briefly almost lost for words. Then he offers some background in a measured, leisurely delivery, revealing he initially just planned to write a book about the global significance of the year 1421. While he researched the project in Venice, he was shown a planisphere (flat representation of the heavens) dated 1459, which included southern Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. The Cape, however, was not officially 'discovered' as a sea route from Europe to India by Vasco da Gama until 1497. Noticing a reference on the planisphere to a voyage round the Cape in 1420 and a picture of a Chinese junk, Menzies sensed he was on to something.
Now he is certain China charted the world. The evidence is 'incontrovertible', Menzies says. The thrust of his argument is that archaeological finds and contemporaneous accounts show the Chinese mapped it from 1421 to 1423, before destroying most of their records and abandoning global seafaring a few decades later.
Their knowledge nonetheless found its way to early Western map-makers through the Portuguese, via Italian traveller Nicolo da Conti, who went on the Chinese voyages. One of Menzies' most striking pieces of evidence for the global sweep of those voyages is a quotation ascribed to Zheng which proclaims: 'The countries beyond the horizon and at the ends of the Earth have all become subjects and to the most western of the western or the most northern of the northern countries, however far away they may be.'