The book draws on Menzie's navigational experience, as well as the findings of a team of experts he assembled to collate and decipher an ever-growing body of multilingual, cartographic, and biological evidence.Īs with any epic, "1421" begins with a history lesson. "At the time," he added, "I was really brassed off (angry) about it." So I abandoned my book, and started this one. "I looked at other charts, and found it was the Chinese. "So here was a Portuguese claim that the whole world had been charted 70 years before Columbus. Then, while vetting the manuscript (which would have been titled "Two Emperors on Horseback") among historians, Menzies learned of a Portuguese chart, dating from 1424, depicting islands in the Caribbean. Delving further, Menzies found himself enmeshed in a 10-year research project on the instigators of the two monumental constructions, the Chinese emperor Zhu Di and his nemesis, the Mongol Tamerlane.
While on an anniversary trip to China with his wife, Menzies recalled, he became fascinated with the history of the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, coincidentally completed in 1421. Menzies, a former Royal Navy submarine commander, is a soft-spoken and diminutive presence, not at all the obsessive eccentric he's been painted in the press. "It was a complete freak," the author said.
Indeed, even he was surprised at the results of his research, he said in an interview in the New York offices of his American publisher, Morrow. The book has already garnered mixed reviews from the British media, as well as skeptical articles from The New York Times Magazine and. Needless to say, his assertion has raised an international flurry of debate. NEW YORK (CNN) - In his new book, "1421: The Year China Discovered America" (William Morrow), Gavin Menzies claims that a massive Chinese fleet of huge junks and support ships made a two-year circumnavigation of the globe, with extensive exploration of the Americas, nearly a century before Magellan and Columbus.
William Morrow (HarperCollins): '1421: The Year China Discovered America'
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