To start, this author is not a historian and he is so biased in his views, that I really don't know what to believe. His methods and "evidence" are suspect and at times contradictory. He takes no time to offer a balanced perspective, instead he repeats over and over how the evidence clearly points towards Chinese fleets discovering America. I don't know what percentage of this book is true, but I do know that I do not trust this author at all.



The other irritating part of the book is how the author constantly inserts himself into the story, bragging about all his "discoveries". Not only is he a hack historian, he's a hack writer too! Don't waste your time with this book.

Είτε πράγματι ταξίδεψαν πρώτοι οι Κινέζοι στον Νέο Κόσμο, -πριν από τους Ευρωπαίους δηλαδή, οι Βίκινγκς ήταν οι πρώτοι μάλλον- το βιβλίο αυτό είναι ένα πρωτότυπο ανάγνωσμα για μία χώρα και μία εποχή για την οποία ξέρουμε συνήθως ελάχιστα. Αξίζει λοιπόν να διαβαστεί, αφού εστιάζει στην πιο τρανή περίοδος της ιστορίας της Κίνας, η οποία έληξε, δυστυχώς, άδοξα.

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.

Short review (necessary in this case):

While going throughout the pages of this controversial book, I always had the feeling that Gavin Menzies decided to take it too far in many occasions. While some theories are quite interesting, many others almost made me drop the book ( Mylodons, seriously?).

I decided to rate it 4 stars, mainly because I started reading it aware of what it was and because I personally really enjoyed Gavin style.

The Strait of Magellan should be called the Strait of Hong Bao. Really? Why?

Because when Magellan traversed that homicidal passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific he had a chart to show him the way, a chart made by Chinese Admiral Hong Bao, one of the captains of the great Chinese treasure fleet that not only got to America 70 years before Columbus, but to Australia and Alaska 370 years before Cook.  This is history stood on its ear, backed by indigenous oral legends, physical artifacts, believe it or not the weather, and DNA.

Author and retired British submariner Gavin Menzies has sailed all of the waters he writes about, which makes for a you-are-there read.

Honestly a frustrating read. Presents as conclusive supposition and solid guesswork, without even hinting until very late in the tome that the legitimacy of one of its key pieces of evidence is contested as a possible forgery.

It’s very clear the author feels the world maybe was - and maybe is - “truly China’s” but at the end of it you have to ask, “so what?” He’s not arguing an academic point so much as an assertion that every advance through key points in history were done well after the Chinese accomplished them as (in his words) the “barbaric” Europeans availed themselves knowingly and unknowingly of Chinese achievement.

He even disparages Nordic accomplishment to suggest the Vikings never knew Greenland as well as the Chinese explorers did.

Again, that’s fine. It may even be true. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as parallel advancements or that the indigenous tribes of the Americas couldn’t have figured out things like lacquer or intricate carving on their own.

And to insist on one hand that currents couldn’t possibly carry artifacts across the seas and then use those currents as evidence that the Chinese must have made those same distant shores is a great example of arguing both sides of something without feeling the need to reconcile them.

Are there people that might get more out of this book than me? Sure. But I understand why I never heard of it til I paid $1 for it on the Goodwill bookshelf.

Actual rating: 1/2 star.

I like pseudo-science (and sometimes pseudo-history), but I couldn't finish this one. In large part that is because it is so poorly written, and so repetitive (Menzies informs us six times that he is a retired Royal Navy captain. In the first chapter.), and Menzies shows such a poor grasp on what good evidence is, that I had to bail.

I'm with the late Carl Sagan that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (and surely the claim that the Chinese discovered America is an extraordinary one), and Menzies doesn't provide anything like "extraordinary evidence." He does provide a lot of pretty pictures in the insert, which is why I give this one half a star.

I have to say that I enjoyed reading this book, if only because it made me so angry at the gross inaccuracies and completely imaginary scenarios that the author made up. He claims to have information from anthropology, archaeology, geology, geography, history, etc, but what he really has exists only in his own mind. Read on, intrepid reader, and be amazed as the author sidesteps issues which threatens his ideas, or completely ignores them!

There is absolutely no traceable path for his research, so scholars cannot even see how he came to his conclusions. Even better, some of his citations are inaccurately recorded to the point that one wonders if he's even read them!

He claims in interviews to have been ousted by the scientific establishment - in reality, if you read the scientific reviews of his work, scholars simply subjected his work to the same standards to which they subject their own work. If the author wishes to play in the big-boy sandbox of academia, he should be prepared to get a little dirty! Stop whining and do some decent scholarship for a change!

I actually didn't finish. Me saying that says a lot as I'm not a quitter and will usually plow through anything. I must say, this is only the second book as far as I could remember that I couldn't finish. I've been forcing myself to try to read this book for over 4 months. The beginning was really interesting (this explains the 1 1/2 stars) as the history of the Chinese history during this era of discovery. Unfortunately, the author became so caught up in proving his theory that the book increasingly became a history paper. I respect his knowledge and the detail but as someone who is reading for leisure, the exact nautical calculations became so much of an overkill that I lost interest in reading the book.

Didn't make it past the first 100 pages or so.

For such a big book there's a a whole lot predicated on conjecture posing as fact. While the premise is interesting, there's not much here beyond the idea that boats from China may have reached North and South America long before anyone else. After that, everything goes downhill so quick since flabby research and a whole lot of supposing are the only support presented. Usually a book like this can make for stimulating, thought-provoking reading, but there is so much resting on narrow, self-interested, wishful thinking and other hocus pocus, that it just isn't possible to sustain the interest needed to finish the book.

I've decided to shelf this one at chapter 4, page 197 and so withholding a rating in fairness. Maybe I'll return to this book when I have far more time to kill hunting down and cross referencing all the quasi-citations for the actual who, where, how, and why seemingly so often unprovided.

That said Menzies really could have saved face if he treated this subject like a Dan Brown novel. Just think of the movie that could have been made. I enjoyed the documentary, but this book has so much criticism. Great premise though, intriguing at first, quality printing, easy to read.

Unfortunately it turns into a wild good chase fairly quick, and all those citations... whenever I picked one to lookup it was either a mere comment, a totally unsubstantiated claim or a vague source that required an independent investigation of its own to little avail.

I would have preferred a far more limited work of honest speculation.

I started it, so I finished it…

As history, this would get a 1 (out of 10, not the forced 1 out of five that the site makes us give). As a story, whoever actually wrote this book—if Menzies had a ghost writer as some suppose—did a very good job of making it readable, which would get a 3 or 4 (out of 10). Is his premise that a Chinese expedition which has subsequently been wiped from history possible? Yes there are unexplained mysteries of history, although it rings of a conspiracy theory. Is it probable? Probably not. Skip the book and read a good fantasy instead.

When I studied history -- granted, many years ago -- we had to prove our thesis, not speculate widely and say, "this must be true because I cannot find another explanation." Menzies is not encumbered by that historical imperative.