From the moment I saw this book in the store I was fascinated. When I brought it home I had already made a mental plan as to when I would read this book. I was reading two books at the time and decided to put it third in line. As I read the other books I found that my mind was wandering and I was having trouble concentrating. 1421 was in my mind, 1421 was in my blood, I was hooked. I deserted the two books I had been reading and dedicated myself to this new quest. Historians place their faith in a premise that certain facts are above suspicion and can be accepted as truth. One of these assertions is that Christopher Columbus discovered the New World in 1492. What if historians were wrong? What if a fleet of Chinese ships made the discovery 71 years earlier and this fact was deliberately deleted from the annals of history? Everyone has heard of the wonders produced during the Ming Dynasty so why couldn’t these great rulers muster the men and ships to undertake a sea voyage of world exploration? Gavin Menzies spins a believable yarn, introducing obscure facts and figures to hypothesis.

Ok, I don't typically give up on books, nor do I put up reviews for books I only got 1/3 of the way through. But as I was reading this one, I grew more and more uneasy with the content. Not that I have some problem with the Chinese as epic explorers or that they beat Europe to the goods, but because some of the things he seemed so comfortable portraying as fact didn't seem to have the weight of adequate sources or valid research to back it up. So I put it down and started doing some of my own research and found several cites by credentialed academics debunking many of the author's assertions.

So, I put it down. Not interested in a "history" that is not.

I finally finished this book. For some reason, when I read non-fiction, I fall asleep, no matter how interesting the subject matter. So this is a long time coming.
Basically, the book is about how towards the end of China's expansive age, they sent out a gianormous fleet of huge ships to collect tribute from all the nations of the earth in a good Buddhist way. And as a bonus, they were to chart the world and update all their scientific data (or whatever the 15th century Chinese terminology for it was). And then, because they did this, the charts spread to Europe and gave them the boost they needed to go exploring and try to catch up to Chinese navigational superiority. It did help that while this big fleet was gone, the Chinese government turned upside down and they decided they didn't want to deal with the outside world anymore, so they burned all their evidence that these voyages ever happened.
When I picked up this book, I was all ready to accept every word. OF COURSE the Chinese discovered the world first. Now that I've finished it, I find myself pretty skeptical. Of this author's version of things at least. How do people really know which plants and animals originated where? Were they there? Is carbon dating really all that accurate? If we are trusting DNA and carbon records, are we following it in the right directions? (OK, those are mostly my own stumbling blocks.)
How come the Chinese didn't already know about America and have their own rudimentary maps, the same way that the Europeans did? (In the end he hints that they might have...part of the problem is that they got rid of their own records to be isolationists.)
Shouldn't they have sent people directly across the Pacific instead of the long way 'round? (Again, he says prevailing winds and currents make the long way a little easier. Plus they were apparently dropping off people in India. But still, nobody thought of this option?)
On a similar note, why was there no exploration of the eastern side of Central America? Shouldn't one of the priorities have been to create that direct route--especially with a fleet so large? No maps ever show farther than the Caribbean Islands.
If one of the points of the exercise was to take detailed notes and charts, why weren't the people who stayed in the places they landed at (shipwrecked usually) still interested in keeping records? They had promises that they would be rescued, and since they didn't know the political climate at home, they should have assumed any records from actually living in the land would be as valuable or more to their homeland. So why has no one found these kinds of records?
Anyway. Those are some of my concerns. Mostly, I didn't like the parts where he puts his conjecture forward as though this is the only way it could have possibly happened. I did like when he tied it all back to the Europeans though--the way they got ahold of the charts and began to use them for themselves.
I believe that people were exploring the oceans and the world before the Europeans became the driving force behind things. I don't think that means we should think less of the European explorers (give Columbus his holiday back!). I would most certainly not be here or the same without them. Especially since the European influence has been stronger, even if it was not as nice as the Chinese who "colonized" America first.

Exactly how history should not be done. Take a compelling event and then use it to string together just about every unexplained or mysterious archeological find or coincidence across the globe. Could barely finish this book it got so silly.

Before European explorers such Columbus, Magellan, and De Gama, departed on their voyages to the new world. They had highly accurate charts that laid out their destinations. Who provided the information for those charts?

According to Gavin Menzies, this information originated with sailors from a series on Chinese “treasure fleets” that sailed around the world between 1421 and 1423. Menzies, a former Royal Navy submariner lays out an elaborate case for how and why these various fleets explored both poles and every continent, and possibly even set up colonies in their journeys.

Menzies work is the subject of incredible controversy, particularly because many of his assertions lack hard proof. There are several mentions of inconclusive tests or those waiting on results or frequent assertions by the author that “it’s possible”. Menzies uses genetic, biological, and archeological assertions to assert a Chinese presence in several parts of the world but these are not always convincing. In one case he makes the assertion that stones with certain inscriptions may have been placed by Chinese sailors in places like the Canary Islands or the Congo River. However the inscriptions are Indian, not Chinese. In another example, he points to the “Mahogany Ship”, a mysterious shipwreck in Western Australia, as a possible Chinese wreck. A check of this found little evidence that anyone believes this ship was Chinese. (Most think it was Portuguese).

With such a broad and complex theory, there are bound to be problems and Menzies does have evidence to back some of his claims. The idea that the treasure fleets managed to reach the east coast of Africa is not really disputed, but after that the evidence starts to become thinner. Menzies notes statements by previous explorers and local legends that seem suggest some sort of Chinese presence that predates European explorers.

Despite the controversy, this is still a fascinating theory worth exploring. I recommend so each reader can decide for themselves.

Fabricated; not convincing; far fetched.

There are books that break new ground with bombshell research and there are books that spellbind us with the skill of their deception. This book is the latter.
Menzies takes a tremendous dump on the sensibilities of his readers, bombarding us with outrageous claims backed up with erroneous facts and arrogant speculation. A typical "fact" presented by Menzies is introduced with "By this point I was sure..." or "I realized that Zhou must have...." or even "From my days as a navigator, I knew that ...." Then Menzies will absurdly postulate about what the Treasure Fleet MUST have been doing in uncharted territory, with no trace of written or oral record, halfway across the globe nearly 600 years ago. He claims he knows the exact date that the the Fleet passed certain islands in the Caribbean due to their haphazard presence and occurrence on later European charts (the absence of the moon excuses when these oddly shaped islands are misrepresented or missed on the charts). Then he will wax appreciatively about how precise Chinese navigators and cartographers were, attributing stone structures (Menzies' alleged observation decks) all around the globe to Chinese astronomical prowess and their desire to properly construct latitude and longitude by measuring eclipses all across the globe. Of course, the Chinese never bothered to go back to these places to collect the results. Nor did they return to the dozens of colonies they set up everywhere from South America to Massachusetts to Gympie, Australia. Nor did they return to collect the fruits of the mines they set up all over the world. Menzies will say that this is because of the isolationist policy China soon after adopted. But if you really think about, and if you read later editions' postscripts and visit his website - you will soon realize that he is trying to collect all of the unaccountables and unexplainables of history and wrap them up in a flimsy and manipulative description of a massive journey and colonization campaign that most likely never even happened. This book is the nadir of pop history, and, sadly, it shows how dedicated propagandists have been stretching history to their own means for centuries - mix your audience's curiosity and ignorance with a fantastical proposition and then support it with smart and thorough sounding explanations based on baseless facts, and then sit back and let their imagination take hold.

It may be added that the HMS Rorqual, the submarine that Menzies briefly commanded, experienced its only collision under his steerage. So much for his great navigational deductions.

Fascinating "nonfiction" book about the evidence of pre-Columbian Chinese journeys to the Americas. The book is long (more than 600 pages), and it's sumptuously illustrated with photos and maps.

Problem is, Menzies didn't really find much evidence to back his claims. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending how you look at it), most of the Chinese records of this period of exploration were destroyed. What little evidence Menzies did find (such as evidence from wrecks of Chinese junks in the Americas) he exaggerated wildly. That's the sort of thing legitimate historians don't do. In fairness to Menzies, he's honest about his approach. He even writes, "I fully accept that it requires some leaps of the imagination that are not, as yet, backed up by hard evidence." Just a few pages later, Menzies makes a startling claim that is the basis for the book's title:

I suggest that the first settlers of North America came not with Columbus nor any other European pioneer, but in the junks of Admiral Zhou Wen's fleet, landing around Christmas 1421, and there is now ample DNA evidence to back up this assertion. Perhaps New England should now be renamed New China.

And that's why at times the book reads like van Däniken's Chariots of the Gods, a book that suggested that technological innovations and religious myths of many ancient civilizations were inspired by the visits of extraterrestrial astronauts.

I offer the van Däniken comparison as high praise, not criticism. van Däniken knew what he was doing: building a valuable franchise around a specific conspiracy theory. When I was a kid, I loved van Däniken's book. But I didn't take it seriously. I read it purely for its entertainment value, which is why today I'm addicted to all those History Channel shows about ancient astronauts. Don't expect me to believe any of that nonsense, however. They are simply tall tales.

Like van Däniken, Menzies is a dogged researcher, an avid traveler, and an imaginative and enthusiastic storyteller. Throughout this book are excellent details about Chinese history and culture that are entertaining in their own right. As long as you're patient and can separate the wheat from the chaff, there's a lot of fascinating information here.

I really wanted to like this book. Sadly it became a long, non-stop series of suppositions along the lines of Chariots of the Gods. If I had to read one more mention of the Asian chickens in the New World I would have gone mad!Or another use of "the ONLY thing this could mean was that the Chinese had been there before anyone!" He has a lot to learn about inescapable conclusions and the evidence leading up to them. I gave it one star for the few things I actually found interesting, but given the rest of the book it makes me want to double check even those.

Too bad.

History rewritten with Chinese characters.

Ex-submarine officer Gavin Menzies received a calling to investigate medieval Chinese history after receiving an old European nautical map. After the initial examination of the chart he believed that it likely contained information not available to Europe prior to the year 1492 CE. The result was an odyssey of research spanning several years and trips around the world about one of history's greatest admirals, Zheng He.

As fleet commander of one of the largest naval armadas in human history Zheng He sailed throughout the seas and oceans surrounding Asia. Gavin Menzies took where history ends and theories and legend began: that Zheng He's ships circumnavigated the world and accurately mapped everything from West Africa, to the Caribbean and even New Zealand.

As the reader I have never read such book that made learning about history (and our theories about it) so fun! The book is controversial (at least to some people) because of two things: There are nearly no existing Chinese records of the 1421-1423 voyages of Zheng He's ships due to a brutal medieval censorship in the 15th century. Second, Gavin Menzies backed up his theories as a retired naval officer using his knowledge of the weather and ocean currents therefore reverse engineering how it was physically possible for the Chinese fleet to explore the world in the 1420's.

For the record I believe Menzies is correct that an international fleet lead by the Chinese navy navigated the world over seventy years before Europeans. He also discovered that he was far from the only person who spent years researching the subject eventually becoming an honorary college professor in China. I ultimately believe him due to the way he connects various pieces of evidence. I also believe him because Menzies claims to not have all the answers, that there is so much more to this mystery in every part of the world.

Pros:
Rewriting large amounts of commonly accepted history.
In-depth knowledge of extremely advanced Chinese naval techniques and technology.
Great analysis of naval voyages typical of that time.
Complicated information about oceans explained in simple ways for a general audience.
The famous Simon Vance narrating the audio book version.

Cons:
It takes a while for the book to finally get to the part about the Chinese fleet (understanding the prologue is very important however).
Sometimes the explanations of the navigation methods used by the Chinese feature too much information.

Interesting and a much better theory than Aliens.

Gavin Menzies, a former submarine commander in the British navy and amateur historian, argues in this book that between 1421 and 1423 squadrons from Zheng He's fleets reached the Americas prior to the Europeans. The problem is that the author offers very little proof for this provocative theory.

As the author acknowledges in his introduction, later Ming Dynasty rulers destroyed all records documenting the sea voyages made by the Chinese during Zheng He's rule. Thus, the author bases his argument on three claims: 1) Chinese maps from as early as 1428, allegedly showing parts of North and South America and some Atlantic islands, which the author claims, European explorers (including Columbus) used to their advantage 2) evidence of pre-Columbian contact between America and Asia based on flora and fauna exchange that he asserts must have occurred as the result of human contact and 3) his past maritime experience as a British naval officer (of which the author regularly reminds the reader ).

The problem is these subjective claims for the most part are not adequately substantiated with hard evidence. While the extremely accurate pre-Columbian maps will give the reader reason to consider his theory, the many leaps of logic contained in this book should give one pause before abandoning 500 years of history. For example, Menzies never provides the DNA evidence supposedly linking native Americans and the Chinese. With the exception of the maps, he never cites any primary sources and cannot, since by his admission, he does not speak or read Chinese. The author also contradicts himself on several occasions. For example, at one point in the book, he claims that Greenland was navigable in the 15th century because it was warmer then (p. 306); but just 50 pages earlier, the author had asserted that 21st-century sea levels are lower because of global warming (p. 257)! He also fails to identify the "local experts" who supposedly have found evidence of Chinese shipwrecks off the coast of New Zealand

Thus, at this point, Menzies's theory remains just that -- a provocative theory, but one for which he failed to provide adequate substantiation.