1434 (34 page)

By 1410, the Moors had been pushed south as far as Antequera, which fell to the Christian army led by the order in that year. By 1434, they were pinned into an enclave bordered by La Línea de la Concepción, Ronda, Antequera, Martos, and Huesca. South of that line, in a pocket shielded by the Sierra Nevada, the Arabs farmed sheep and paid tribute to Castilian overlords.

From Veves, where the order had its headquarters, to the Sierra Nevada, which was the frontier between Christian and Islamic lands, the order held sway. Legacies of that era are evident everywhere—in churches of Santiago from Cáceres in the north to Antequera in the south, fortresses of Santiago from Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the west to Jaén in the east. There are hospitals of Santiago in Zafra and Mérida and seminaries in Caldera de León and Zafra. Virtually every town has its Calle de Santiago.

In 1410, the medieval line of kings of Aragon came to an end when Martin V died without heirs. Civil war loomed. By the Compromise of Caspe in 1412 Ferdinand of Antequera, a member of a junior branch of the Trastamara dynasty, the royal house of Castile, became king of Aragon.

In England, King John married for the second time. His bride, Isabella of Portugal, bore a daughter, also called Isabella. She would eventually defy her advisers and marry Ferdinand of Aragon, putting the seal on a united Spain, one that had been unified for all practical purposes by the Compromise of Caspe.

A unified Spain possessed the prime ingredients for launching voyages of discovery—the Extremadurans. They had the example of their forebear, El Cid, who had achieved his victories over insuperable odds by virtue of superhuman will and courage. And they had the daily reality of no bread.

Save for Cortés, every one of the famous conquistadores we have mentioned came from a poor family; not a single illustrious Castilian family took part in their voyages of exploration. It is no coincidence the conquistadores were intensely legalistic. They negotiated with the monarchy in advance, with the division of spoils spelt out in detail.

For once, Extremadurans could keep the spoils. At home, Extremaduran hidalgos struggled to obtain food for their children. Overseas, conquest, land, and wealth afforded them a purchase on nobility. Embarking on voyages of exploration, the conquistadores could hope for three separate rewards—spiritual salvation for waging war against the infidels, material gain in the form of vast tracts of land and wealth, and, once they returned home,
fama, gloria,
knighthoods, and castles to brighten their twilight years.

The awesome dangers and difficulties the conquistadores faced in exploration must have seemed little different from those they had already encountered in the Reconquista. Provided that they exhibited the same extreme courage as their forebears, they could overcome any obstacle, secure in their faith that the Virgin Mary and Saint James would protect them. In the end, victory would be theirs.

Besides, by 1434, Islam had been squeezed into the southern tip of Spain between the Sierra Nevada and the sea. North of the mountains, there were no lands left to reconquer. For six hundred years, their ancestors had been waging battle; fighting was in their blood.

The hardships of the
tierra sin pan
explain their urge to leave Extremadura but not how the conquistadores overcame their homeland's lack of maritime tradition. That was remedied by the union of Castile with Aragon after the Compromise of Caspe. Having pushed Islam out of Spain, Castile was busy absorbing the immense estates it had recently acquired.

Aragon, on the other hand, had completed her part of the Reconquista two centuries before Castile and used the interim to create a maritime empire. By 1434, she had two centuries of valuable experience. Aragon possessed ships that could sail the world and cartographers who had begun to map the Atlantic and Africa. Her savants knew the earth was round and that the Americas existed across the
Atlantic. Despite this, Aragon was weak; she would be the junior partner doing what Castile required of her.

The conquistadores had the example of the Portuguese before them. In 1415, Henry the Navigator had taken the colossal gamble of invading Africa, the home of Islam. By 1421, Madeira had been populated, on the way to becoming a thriving Portuguese colony. Henry's ships had set sail for the Americas—the Portuguese knew the earth was round, that the seas did not tumble off the earth, that India and the East could be reached by rounding Africa.

And what could the conquistadores expect to find when they reached the fabled Americas, land of Amazons? In an age of romantic literature, their dreams were no doubt fired by the epics such as
The Amadis of Gaul
. Nubile, sex-mad women awaited them in marble palaces. Handmaidens would wash their feet and clothe them in golden gowns. White rubies and green emeralds the size of pigeon eggs would be theirs for the taking. Small wonder Pizarro had such an easy time selecting two hundred comrades from among the many who answered his call that blistering summer's morning outside Trujillo's Church of Santiago.

Fortune favors the brave. The conquistadores found three desperately weakened empires in the Americas. The Aztecs had become psychopaths—cannibals who ate their fellow tribes in Mexico. Cortés was welcomed with open arms as millions of Mexicans supported his invasion. In Central America, the same ghastly cult had poisoned the Maya. Weakened by civil war, they too offered only token resistance. In South America, the “mummy cult” of the Incas had reached its inevitable conclusion.

With nowhere to expand, the Incas had taken to fighting one another. They had no iron. An army of padded dolls awaited Pizarro. By a series of amazing coincidences, each empire succumbed to fatal weakness at the very moment the conquistadores landed. The three fruit trees had ripened simultaneously, each without thorns. The conquistadores plucked the fruit.

Our quest to rediscover the world of Zheng He's era ends at San Lúcar de Barrameda, on the estuary of the Guadalquivir. This
powerful, melancholy river symbolizes the change from Old World to New. Once the grand highway that joined Córdoba, the magnificent capital of Islamic Spain, to the rest of the Islamic world in the East, the river became the link between Seville, capital of New Spain, and her New World colonies in the West.

If the Guadalquivir could speak, she might wearily agree that so extraordinary were the events of Zheng He's era that it seems God had grown tired of his creation and decided to try something new.

The last word goes to Omar Khayyám (circa 1074).

Our long journey of exploration into the medieval world is over. Like our predecessors, we now commend ourselves to God's keeping.

This book is a collective endeavor and could not have been completed without the help of hundreds of people. I am afraid these acknowledgments are likely to be incomplete: if anyone feels aggrieved at being omitted, please let us know. For more extensive acknowledgments, please visit our website.

I am grateful to the following people who conducted major independent research that they funded themselves and that lasted for more than two years:

Lam Yee Din

I had the good fortune to meet Mr. Yam Lee Din in Hong Kong in 2003. Mr. Lam has studied Zheng He maps in exhaustive detail and published his findings in four lengthy papers that are shown on our website. Mr. Lam is, in my opinion, the greatest living expert on Zheng He's voyages. At my suggestion he was invited to deliver his findings to the Library of Congress, which he did on May 16, 2005. His speech was broadcast to China and Asia by Phoenix Television.

Tai Peng Wang

Tai Peng Wang is a historian and journalist based in Vancouver. His family is from Quanzhou, and he can read and speak the version of Mandarin used in his native province. This has been very important in
the discussions on the authenticity of the 1418 map, which was created by a Quanzhou cartographer.

Tai Peng Wang has written and published five papers of the greatest importance, particularly his thirty-two-page paper entitled “Zheng He and His Envoys' Visits to Cairo in 1414 and 1433.” This is not to imply that Tai Peng Wang agrees with all the statements I have made in this book.

Cedric Bell

Before visiting New Zealand in 2003, Cedric read
1421
and decided to do some research on the beaches of New Zealand's South Island. He sent the results to a company then making a television documentary on
1421
. Cedric had found some forty wrecks buried in sand or in cliffs and also the ruins of barracks that the shipwrecked survivors had built ashore and the remains of smelters built to refine ore. To confirm this, I retained well-known ground-penetrating radar and carbon-dating laboratories to check a wreck, a barracks, and a smelter. The results are on our website
1421,
along with Cedric Bell's research. They show conclusive evidence that Chinese people have been smelting iron in New Zealand for two thousand years. Cedric, in my view, because of his finds and subsequent analysis of wrecks coupled with his experience as a marine engineer, has become the leading authority on the construction of junks in Zheng He's fleets.

Rosanne Hawarden and Dave Bell

Rosanne and Dave have followed through on Cedric Bell's research in New Zealand, investing their own time for four years and without financial support from me. They have done the groundwork that has enabled us to put forward an alternative and less simplistic history of the settlement
of New Zealand and the South Pacific—that the original settlers were the Chinese who brought others of South East Asian origin with them. The Polynesians, including the Maori, are their descendents. Rosanne and Dave's work has been of very great importance in furthering
1421
evidence in New Zealand, Australia, and the islands of the South Pacific.

Liu Gang

Mr. Liu Gang, the founding partner of the second-largest law firm in China, has collected maps and works of art for several decades. Five years ago he found in a Shanghai bookstore “Zheng He's 1418 Map of the World,” described in detail on our
1421
website. At the time, he knew little of Zheng He and filed the map as a curiosity. In 2005 Liu Gang purchased the Mandarin version of
1421
and realized he owned the first recognizable, accurate world map drawn up after Zheng He's earlier voyages. Please refer to the
1421
website for more about this map and its authenticity.

Dave Cotner

In 1985 Dave Cotner, a retired U.S. Navy pilot, found the wreck of an old ship along the Oregon coast, buried in water beneath thirty feet of sand. The local museum curator classified the wreck as Chinese. When Dave contacted us, we commissioned a well-known firm, GPR Geophysical Services of Portland, Oregon, which conducted the ground-penetrating radar surveys of “Cotner 1” and confirmed in all respects Dave's MAS survey of 1985—position, size, shape, depth, angle, and sitting. Core drilling started in November 2007. The wreck has unfortunately deteriorated into wood slurry. A few small wood chippings have been retrieved, and these will be dated and classified in early 2008. Dave has found a number of other buried wrecks in the area. Very substantial sums will be required to excavate them.

Dr. Gunnar Thompson

Dr. Thompson is an expert in pre-Columbian New World discovery, and his books and research on multicultural findings and early Asian voyages to the Americas have been invaluable to the development of
1434.
In
Secret Voyages,
Thompson provides evidence that between 1277 and 1287 Kublai Khan, emperor of China, dispatched Marco Polo to the Americas, where he reached Hudson Bay. Dr. Thompson presented his findings at the Library of Congress on May 16, 2005. His research can be found at www.marcopolovoyages.com.

Dr. Siu-Leung Lee

Dr. Siu-Leung Lee was born and educated in Hong Kong, where he graduated from the Chinese University. He has a PhD from Purdue University, did postdoctoral research at Yale University, and became a professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University, pioneering in the enzyme biosynthesis of natural products.

Dr. Lee has set up a very popular website called Asiawind (www.asiawind.com). In collaboration with Ms. Fu Yiyao, Dr. Lee published a calligraphy book on Chinese wisdom. He is an internationally known expert on Chinese calligraphy.

Since 2002 Dr. Lee has been a reasoned critic of
1421
. However in 2006 he acquired a medallion that had been found buried near Asheville, North Carolina. Dr. Lee believes this was part of the gifts intended by the Xuan De emperor for American chieftains through his representative. Having found a great deal of corroborative evidence, Dr. Lee now believes that during the Ming dynasty, the Chinese visited North Carolina. In June 2006, he presented his findings at the University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong History Museum, and the City University of Hong Kong. See Dr. Lee's website for further details.

Paul Chiasson

Paul Chiasson is a fifty-five-year-old Canadian architect born on Cape Breton Island. Paul built up a successful practice with a distinguished list of clients. His specialty became Asian art and architecture.

There is a legend of the local Mi'kmaq people of Cape Breton Island that long ago foreigners came from the other side of the world and settled on a headland now called Cape Dauphin. Five years ago Paul decided to explore the colony where these strangers built their town. On climbing onto the plateau he found the remains of a stone town laid out on Buddhist lines overlooking the Ciboux Islands. Paul's findings are now contained in his best-selling book,
Island of the Seven Cities.

In 2005 Paul invited Cedric Bell and me to join him on a survey of the site in Cape Dauphin. In my view the site, while Buddhist, is not of Zheng He's era but much older. Eventually I feel it will be shown to be from the voyages of Kublai Khan's fleet.

Charlotte Harris Rees

Charlotte Harris Rees has researched extensively about the early arrival of Chinese to the Americas. As a child she lived in Taiwan then Hong Kong with her Baptist missionary parents Marjorie and Dr. Hendon M. Harris. Dr. Harris's find of an ancient Asian map displaying the western coastline of the Americas led to his 1975 book
The Asiatic Fathers of America: Chinese Discovery and Colonization of Ancient America
. In 2006 Charlotte came out with an edited and abridged version of that book.

The oldest of the Hendon Harris Fusang Maps are Ming Dynasty. They are believed by some to date back to a 2200
B.C.
Chinese map. The Harris Map Collection was at the Library of Congress from 2003 through 2006 while it was being studied. It was examined by Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee, chief of the Asian Division; Dr. John Hebert, chief of
Geography and Maps Division; and by Professor Xiaocong Li, from Peking University, Beijing. At my request Charlotte presented her findings at a Library of Congress symposium in May 2005. She continues to write and speak. Her website is www.asiaticfathers.com.

Professor Robert Cribbs

Professor Robert Cribbs is an adjunct professor of engineering at California State University and a visiting professor of scientific archeology and music in Cairo, Egypt. He started, and runs, several corporations involved in medical and industrial ultrasound and high-speed video and radar processing. He also possesses the world's third-largest collection of medieval astrolabes. In consequence he has become, in my opinion, one of the world's leading authorities on the different methods used by ancient and medieval astronomers to determe latitude and longitude, the diminution of the ecliptic, the equations of time of the sun and moon, and the determination of longitude by the slip between sidereal and solar time or by the angular distance between moon, planets, and stars.

Professor Cribbs has explained these methods to me with such clarity that I have been able to explain them to others. Professor Cribbs presented his findings at a seminar on Zheng He held at the Library of Congress on May 16, 2005.

M. Benoit Larger and Dr. Albert Ronsin

M. Larger is a retired French banker living in Saint-Dié-des-Voges. He sponsored an exhibition held at Musée Pierre-Nöel between May and September 2007. The exhibition drew together the work of a group of savants including Martin Waldseemüller who had been recruited by Saint-Dié's ruler, Duke René II, to produce a world map copied from separate maps received from Portugal. This exhibition,
which prominently featured the work of Dr. Albert Ronsin, honorary conservator of the museum, was the collation of the lifetime's research of many learned scholars into Martin Waldseemüller's maps of 1507 and 1516 and globe of 1506. Their research has been adopted in this book. I am very grateful for it—it saved me a lifetime of research.

Dr. Tan Ta Sen

Dr. Tan Ta Sen is a leading Singapore businessman who is also president of the International Zheng He Society. This society collates knowledge relating to Zheng He's voyages between 1403 and 1434. I have been invited to attend many of the society's meetings and have in consequence learned a great deal from the experts. Dr. Tan introduced me to the foreign minister of Singapore, who suggested the
1421
exhibition subsequently held in 2005. Dr. Tan kindly lent several priceless works of art to this exhibition, financed the production of model junks of Zheng He's fleet, arranged the loans of very valuable artifacts, and provided invaluable support in many other ways. The
1421
exhibition is now in Dr. Tan Ta Sen's museum in Malacca in the former offices and warehouse of Admiral Zheng He.

Lynda Nutter

Lynda Nutter is a dancer and choreographer who understands Japanese, Chinese, and the Nyungah language of the aboriginal people who live in the Swan valley east of Perth in Western Australia. Five years ago Lynda found carved stones that form an astronomical observatory from which longitude may be calculated. These stones have inscriptions in a medieval Chinese script and are at the heart of the Nyungah territory. Lynda has correlated markings on Zheng He's navigational chart with the coastline around Perth as a result of reading and translating the Chinese.

Cristopher Pollard

Christopher Pollard has spent a lifetime studying medieval Spain, notably the history of Extremadura. The final chapter of this book is an abridgment of my notes of Christopher's lectures. For those who wish to explore the subject in more depth, Christopher runs Christopher Pollard's Tours based in Taunton, England, and personally leads these tours through the magical cities of medieval Spain.

Libraries

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Owners of Waldseemüller's 1507 and 1516 world maps. The Library of Congress kindly invited me and supporters of
1421
to a symposium on May 16, 2005, on the subject of Zheng He's voyages. They were roundly abused for doing so by critics who claimed that
1421
was a fraudulent book and hence such an august body as the Library of Congress should not give us a platform. The library replied they believed in the basic academic principle of free speech, and the symposium went ahead as planned.

The British Library

The British Library provides a superb service. An array of helpful experts is there to help those of us who cannot speak the language. If by chance the British Library does not hold the book (certain constituent books of the
Yongle Dadian
, for example), one is quickly put in touch with the library that does hold that book. I and five researchers have been using this superb service for years. Without it
1421
and
1434
could not have been written.

The Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge University

This holds the 1408 astronomical calendar.

Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

Holder of the Waldseemüller Green Globe of 1506 and Dr. Monique Pelletier's research into the provenance and authenticity of that globe—a vitally important map in the
1434
story.

Hong Kong Central Library

The principal library in Hong Kong is modern and most efficient. The majority of Chinese illustrations found in
1434
came from here and we are indebted for their services.

Library of the Duchess of Medina-Sidonia, Sanlucar de Barrameda, Andalucia, Spain