Reviews for 1421

The average rating for 1421 based on 2 reviews is 1 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-07-07 00:00:00 Duncan Stevens 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-06-28 00:00:00 Randy Corbin From time to time, this reviewer comes across a publication so crackpot that I hardly know where to start in reviewing it here. I'm happy to see that Gavin Menzies' thesis in 1421: The Year China Discovered America, that a Chinese fleet launched in 1421, embarked on a tour around the world, discovering all major points before Europeans and leaving artifacts, has already been generally debunked by numerous sources. Perhaps the most substantial is Robert Finlay's review "How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America" in the Journal of World History, June 2004, where Finlay shows that there are no "lost years" in Ming dynasty sailing, and so Menzies' book is completely without foundation. My fellow reviewers here have also offered some important critiques. I would like to offer a perspective from my own individual profession, linguistics. Menzies writes, for example: "Linguistics provide further evidence. The people of the Eten and Monsefu villages in the Lambayeque province of Peru can understand Chinese but not each other’s patois, despite living only three miles apart. Stephen Powers, a nineteenth-century inspector employed by the government of California to survey the native population, found linguistic evidence of a Chinese-speaking colony in the state." The first assertion, on the Peruvian village, is not sourced at all and is either the personal fancy of the author or some minor crank idea. The second, however, is cited to an 19th-century bit of scholarship evidentally done without appropriate field methods. He goes on to claim that Chinese sailors shipwrecked on the East Coast of the United States would have been able to communicate with locals, as these would have included Chinese who had walked over the Bering Strait. Chinese walk across to Alaska and across all North America, but end up speaking Middle Chinese, and yet leave no trace of this dialect on neighbouring Native American languages? Risible fantasy. There's even an assertion that Navajo elders understand Chinese conversation, and an assertion that the Peruvian village name Chanchan must be Chinese because it sounds (at least to him) like "Canton". Perhaps the silliest Peruvian connection is between Chinese "qipu" and Quechua "quipu"; Menzies seemingly doesn't understand that "q" represents a completely different sound in each language. So, I hope that the reader with some training in linguistics can see what kind of arguments are used in the book, and beware accordingly. If I may be permitted one final indulgence, I should like to protest Menzies' weird view of Chinese culture. He blasts European explorers for committing genocide, claiming that continued Chinese expansion would have led instead to a world of peace and Confucian harmony. This is the naive romantic view of the Orient held by a child flipping through National Geographic. A man of Menzies' age and experience should have realized that all civilizations have it within them to commit do in indigenous peoples--the marginalization of Tibetan and Uighur language and culture and the disappearance already of a distinct Manchu people stand as proof that the Chinese are no exception.