Got the book as a gift and it took me 3 years to finish it just to call it: "pseudo-history".

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.

Fabricated; not convincing; far fetched.

This book discusses Chinese voyages that reached the North American continent years before Columbus did. I was unaware that voyages such as these had taken place, probably due to my lacking American education that only focuses on Christopher Columbus, but it seems very reasonable that many other peoples could have voyaged that distance if Scandinavians also did. This book had a lot of information about the fall of the Chinese empire during this time, and it would have been a good book to read when I was in my Modern China class last term.

I totally enjoyed this book. There's some controversy over his claims (surprise, surprise), but the wealth of evidence out there makes a pretty good case whether each individual part of it is 100%. I do believe the true history of the Americas is in its infancy and there may be many surprises for all before it's entirely unraveled!

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

We Westerners are of course familiar with the historical period known as the Renaissance; taking place between the 1300s and 1600s, it's the period when Europeans finally crawled out of their Dark-Age hole, rediscovered such ancient Greek concepts as science and philosophy, and started doing such things for the first time as sailing to the far corners of the planet. But did you know that China as well went through its own brief Renaissance at the same time, actually sailing around the planet on a regular basis a full 50 years before the Europeans started doing so, and that it was the maps and tips these Chinese gave to the Europeans that allowed the great figures from the "Age of Discovery" to make their voyages in the first place? Well, okay, so not everyone completely agrees with this theory; but it's the surprisingly strong one being espoused in the books 1421: The Year China Discovered America and 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, both of them by a retired British naval commander named Gavin Menzies, a hobbyist scholar who just happened to start stumbling across more and more evidence during his studies to support the theory mentioned above. See, the whole thing is problematic, because the Chinese actually went through a major period of isolationism right after this brief period of world-traveling, specifically as a overreaction to Ghengis Khan and his Mongol Hoard Horde(!), which had actually held and ruled China all the way up to the beginning of the 1400s, or in other words the beginning of the Ming Dynasty in that country.

According to well-known history, the Chinese were so set on turning inwards at this point, they actually destroyed most of their own records regarding their globetrotting sea voyages from this period, just so no one else would be tempted to make such trips again; according to Menzies, he has slowly been putting the pieces back together through shreds of evidence in other countries, stone markers and rescued scrolls and the like, revealing that the Ming Dynasty's own period of global seafaring was actually much larger than any of us have ever realized, a systematic series of successes that would've virtually guaranteed China's eventual world domination, if they had simply stuck with it instead of embarking on a four-hundred-year period of profound isolationism like they actually did. It's certainly an intriguing theory, and Menzies does a pretty credible job backing it up; these are giant thick books we're talking about (over a thousand pages altogether), just chock-full of evidence both direct and circumstantial. Combine this, then, with Menzies' tech-savvy prose concerning the problems of map-drawing and chart-creating in that period, which is why certain documents from that period need to be widened or narrowed in Photoshop before they'll actually line up with real coastlines; it's just one of the dozens of little issues and problems with all this old evidence, he argues, that prevented it from being all added together by anyone else before now. (See, one of the things Menzies did while in the navy was actually sail the ancient Chinese routes talked about in these books; he therefore has an expert's understanding on what these routes must've been like for the original Chinese sailors, and can thus explain the inconsistencies in the maps and charts they left behind.)

These were great reads, books that really crank the gears of the mind into action (why, just the descriptions of a glittering, wealthy Southeast Asia in the 1400s is worth the cover price alone); I'll warn you, though, that these are denser books than the usual airport and beach reads, not exactly academic in complexity but definitely stories you need to pay careful attention to while reading. That said, they both get a big recommendation from me, especially for the growing amount of people in the western half of the world who are becoming more and more curious these days about the mysterious history of the eastern half.

Out of 10: 9.3

I wouldn’t say this is “pseudo- history”, as many people do (I reserve that more for the ancient aliens/ chariots of the gods sort of ideas), but it certainly is not an accepted mainstream historical belief. This book is more of a speculative (alternative) history that struggles to lift up its theory with often flimsy supporting evidence. However, not all of the evidence is easily dismissed, and historians even admit there are some things that are yet to be explained. At the least it’s a fun way to exercise some critical thinking for the non- historian when you start to compare the two schools of thought on 15th century China

This is my sixth or seventh time attempting to read this stream of consciousness fiction of a pseudo-history, and it just makes me sad.
What I was hoping was for another straight shot of the madness that made his equally baffling 1434 an entertaining impossibility, but here Menzies demonstrates a complete lack of coherency. Granted, Menzies (as always) demonstrates that he is in far over his head, but this volume --which is treated with an odd degree of respect for being utter bosh-- is simply unreadable.
My suspicion is that the success of this volume convinced Menzies that the public was with him, so he pulled out all the stops for 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, and no longer feeling the need to even present that pretense of a scholarly work, he just lied happily about the evidence and sources. That chutzpah is what I enjoyed. By comparison, this 1421 is weirdly constrained by Menzies being tethered to the pretense of making an actual case that any of what he is claiming is true.
None of this is true or possible. I think by now, nearly two decades past the publication and three decades into a resurgent China as a player on the world stage, that not only would there be evidence of all these massive treasure ship fleets sprawling out across the globe, but also that China as a nation would be happily promoting its early lead in sciences and exploration.
To be clear, Menzies mania for discovering the Chinese everywhere, and his perfectly irrelevant but also unconvincing digressions relating his adventures finding the 'one map that explained everything', or his adventures on a submarine where he knew some later important personage, these are present in both of his books that I have read, but here it is totally irrelevant. His being a passenger on a submarine (a powered vessel) that followed the well-described and recorded voyage of a sailing junk (wind driven and without a keel) as far as Mozambique, Africa, is entirely irrelevant. I've been to Mount Vernon, it doesn't make me an expert on slave management or leading a colonial revolt against the oppressive British Crown. And see, here is a major point against Menzies, a junk has no keel, so his pretense that it was even possible for these ships to sail into the wind AS A FLEET is simply insane. One ship might make it through the cross currents of the Cape of Good Hope, or against winds of the roaring 40s, but the majority would be wrecks.
Then there is the matter of these maps for which Menzies has so much affinity. None of them are as described, and that is obvious in the carefully added illustration Menzies allows. His misrepresentation of what these maps depict, and what convulsions he makes to to get us to agree with his peculiar sense of what he is seeing in them is a warning of how irresponsible he is. I remember the election of 2012, where idiots of a particular stripe 'corrected' polls of the Romney/Obama contest and determined that all the pollsters were in the bag for Obama. Maybe, but Obama actually won by the predicted margins. Reality trumped delusion, and that happens in 1421. Menzies does that same manipulation with maps. In one egregious example he is "longitudinally correcting" one Korean map so that Europe and Africa resemble what we know of the current configurations, while clipping out the parts of the map that show Korea the size of China, and Japan a small fringe island. Even more, he ignores the evidence that this map was drawn from sources in the Mongol Empire, one that explored right up to the limits where this map becomes oddly unreliable.

Nah, done with this twaddle. Bye Menzies

Reading books like this are the reason I love reading history . Nowadays we know that people from the Far East are advances in technology and engineering, even science. While this was an amazing read it's no surprise to learn that their sailors hardly ever suffered from scurvy when they carried fruit on their voyages.
Christopher Columbus discovered America by accident when the wind blew him off course.
I think these Chinese sailors knew what they were looking for. I have never been to America but from reading the book the American chickens and other fowl are similar to what you find in the Far East. No coincidence really?

Quoting Johnny Rotten:
"Do you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"
To anyone with a gram of sense this whole book is obviously a sham. I thought it might be fun but I just found myself frustrated because it was such a waste of time.
I read every word until page 136, then skimmed a few bits. I recommend any of the many 1421 debunking articles on the interwebs for any of the terminally gullible who think this is nonfiction.
What got me on page 136:
The whole premise of the book is that the Chinese fleets were pushed thither and yon by the winds and currents (their square sails & rigging prevented them from sailing effectively into the wind). By p. 136 one of the fleets has arrived at the Straits of Magellan. The first full paragraph begins "By the next morning the fleet had been sucked halfway through the strait [by the ferocious current and prevailing winds]. Try to ignore the way he can be so precise about how / when the fleet would have found the entrance to the strait. ...
"The strait becomes narrower and narrower leading into the Canal Geronomino -- less than a mile wide and far too narrow for his huge ships to manoeuvre, their turning circle being nearly a mile. As a result, the fleet was forced to reverse its course, and hence the cartographers drew the Canal Geronomino as a river, just as it must have appeared to them."
He doesn't explain how they were able to "reverse course" without turning around, or how the fleet was apparently able to sail against wind and current when the entire rest of the book's guiding principle is that they couldn't. At that point I decided my evening would be better spent polishing my dog or trying to create the Death Star explosion in origami.

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.

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.