Two Articles from Salon and NY Times on the Chinese Discovering
American before Columbus

--------------

The Chinese discovered America
Or did they? A dubious new book offers an object lesson in
amateurish research, slapdash editing and publishing greed.
By Natalie Danford
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2003/01/07/menzies/index.html

Jan. 7, 2003 | On March 15, 2002, Gavin Menzies, a retired Royal
Navy submarine commanding officer, made a speech at the Royal
Geographical Society in London that tipped a number of sacred cows.
Menzies declared that the Chinese -- traveling on a fleet of ships
under the auspices of Emperor Zhu Di -- had reached America 70 years
before Columbus. They had also, he posited, seen Australia 350 years
before Captain Cook and explored the Magellan Straits 60 years
before Magellan was born. In fact, our long-mythologized European
explorers, Menzies said, relied on maps provided by the Chinese. In
other words, the heroes of the West were slowpokes and copycats.

Publishers came knocking. U.K. publisher Bantam/Transworld eagerly
paid him a 500,000 pound advance for a manuscript that Menzies had
previously been unable to sell, to be titled "1421: The Year China
Discovered the World." Rights were sold to William Morrow in the
U.S. as well as to publishers in Japan, Germany, Italy, Taiwan and
eight other countries. Forty-seven television production companies
bid for the rights, with Pearson Broadband winning out for an
undisclosed amount.


The emperor, however, has no clothes -- and I don't mean Zhu Di.
Menzies' book is fractured history, a mishmash of off-base
conclusions drawn from amateurish research and wide-eyed "discovery"
of well-known facts. That hasn't hurt U.K. sales, though, and while
Morrow first planned to publish "1421" stateside in May 2003, the
swell of publicity beginning after that March presentation and
leading up to the Nov. 4 publication in the U.K. led the publisher
to rethink its timing. It will publish 100,000 copies of "1421" on
Jan. 7.

That publicity included coverage of Menzies' presentation by news
outlets like ABC World News Tonight and the New York Times, which
lent legitimacy to his claims. Of course, just because the major
media report something, that doesn't necessarily make it so. In 1983
Newsweek and the New York Times rushed to cover the discovery of the
so-called Hitler diaries. The pages were revealed to be an
unconvincing forgery soon afterward, but not before the German
magazine Stern had paid 9.9 million marks for the rights to publish
excerpts.

Menzies' book is not a complete fabrication the way that the ersatz
Hitler diaries were (although there is a bit of trickery behind that
Royal Geographical Society presentation: Menzies was not invited to
speak as an esteemed scholar, but rented the lecture hall for 1,200
pounds and invited the audience). Nor is Menzies' own identity
subject to doubt, as are the autobiographical credentials provided
by Kola Boof, author of the short story collection "Long Train to
the Redeeming Sin" published in November 2001, who claims that she
is the subject of a fatwa in her home country of Sudan.

The Chinese eunuch admiral Zheng He did command fleets during the
early 1400s, and those trips are well documented. In fact, Louise
Levathes, author of "When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet
of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433," has faulted Menzies for ignoring
Chinese primary sources, namely the "Ming shi" and the "Ming shi
lu," that provide a detailed record of the voyages but make no
mention of the Americas. (Menzies does not read Chinese, although he
waxes nostalgic in his introduction to the U.K. edition about the
Chinese amah who raised him until the age of 5.)

"He has not, unfortunately, discovered anything new," said
Levathes. "What he's done is to present it in a jumbled manner so
you have no idea what's going on and what the time frames are."
There was one aspect of Menzies' work that Levathes admitted to
admiring, however: "His promotional machine is nothing less than
extraordinary," she said.

Experts in other areas were equally skeptical. Carol Urness is
curator emeritus of the James Ford Bell Library in Minneapolis,
which houses the Pizzigano chart, a map that Menzies holds up as
proof that the Portuguese were not the first to explore the
Caribbean. Said Urness, "The book is thought-provoking, stimulating,
interesting, even fascinating. Whether it's going to turn out to be
historically correct -- that's another issue. It's fine to say that
the Chinese sailed all over and did all this mapping, but we have no
extant copy of it."

Patricia Seed is a Rice University history professor specializing in
the history of navigation and cartography of the 15th century and
the author of "American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the
Pursuit of Riches." Having read sections of Menzies' book and viewed
a lengthy proposal for a documentary based on it, she dismissed
Menzies' premise that ships nearly 500 feet long passed through the
Mozambique Channel, mastering the difficult Aghulas current,
as "meteorologically impossible." She added, "He's got absolutely
the wrong progression of maps and mapmaking." Seed also noted that
Menzies' claim that he used his modern naval knowledge to track
voyages made over 600 years ago is absurd.

In a telephone interview, Menzies was charming, but oddly robotic.
He had a tale to tell, and he would not be hurried. "I found out
this strange story entirely by accident," he began. "My wife and I
went to China to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. We had a
lovely cold morning on the Great Wall. The adrenaline surges through
your blood as you stand up there."

Whether writing or speaking, Menzies simultaneously provides an
overload of detail and glosses over important facts. The pages
of "1421" are filled with calculated leaps. An example: Menzies
learns of the existence of the Stone of Letters on the Cape Verde
Islands. The stone has some inscriptions in Portuguese, marking the
death of a sailor, and then further inscriptions in another language
that historians have never been able to identify. "After receiving
the necessary approval from the Cape Verde authorities, some of the
lichen was removed. This revealed two pieces of calligraphy. I hoped
that, helped by computer enhancement, I would at least be able to
determine the language, but the calligraphy was quite extraordinary,
unlike anything I had ever seen in my travels anywhere in the
world."

Menzies muses over what language it might be, then faxes a copy not
to a linguist or other specialist in the field, but to the Bank of
India, where an unnamed source helpfully and easily does what so
many historians have failed to do:

"'It looks like Malayalam,' they replied. It was a language I had
never even heard of. I faxed again. 'Where was this language
spoken?' 'It was the language of Kerala.' 'Was it in use in the 15th
century?' 'Yes, it had been in common use since the 9th century. It
has largely ceased to be spoken today, though it is still used in a
few outlying coastal districts on the Malabar coast.'"


Menzies, overjoyed at the news from this mysteriously erudite
teller, asserts that the Portuguese were not the first explorers to
reach the Cape Verde Islands. From there, in the author's mind, it's
a short hop to the conclusion that the Indian ship recorded as
arriving in Matadi Falls in the Congo -- where there is a similar
stone -- "around the year 1420" was actually Chinese, and the
interpreters who traveled with the Chinese fleet inscribed both
stones in a foreign language.

Most readers will wonder why Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins,
didn't question these unorthodox research methods or the veracity of
the statements Menzies has built on them. Sadly, many observers
concur that accuracy matters little to publishing houses, especially
when fudged facts are almost guaranteed to generate controversy, and
therefore sales. "The publishing industry's gullibility is boundless
and its devotion to the bottom line endless, so if they can maintain
their fealty to P.T. Barnum and put one over on the public, they'll
do so without losing a wink's worth of sleep," commented Steve
Wasserman, literary editor of the Los Angeles Times, who formerly
worked on the editorial side of the publishing industry.

To my questions about how his finds had been vetted, Menzies
responded vaguely, "The evidence is just so overwhelming that it's
impossible to argue against." For her part, executive editor Claire
Wachtel defended Menzies by insisting, "He's not a crazy loony."
Wachtel theorized that skeptics are threatened by Menzies' attack on
the status quo: "People don't like the basis of their fundamental
knowledge to be challenged, and we all know that in 1492 Columbus
sailed the ocean blue."

As further proof, Menzies reported that after his March presentation
and the surrounding publicity, corroborating evidence arrived at his
doorstep. He recalled, "A walnut farmer north of Sacramento called
up and said, 'We've always known there's a Chinese junk underneath
our land.' I thought, this chap's clearly a nutter, but now it looks
as if it's true."

When asked for the exact location of the walnut farm, Menzies
declined to answer, saying, "Pearson Broadband has spent quite a bit
of money assembling experts to survey the junk in Sacramento. They
understandably want to keep control of publicity surrounding it."
Likewise, the British edition of the book grandiosely promises
that "three-quarters of the evidence has had to be omitted for lack
of space."

Menzies certainly isn't the first author backed by a major publisher
to refuse to reveal crucial information. In 1997, Little, Brown was
prepared to publish "The City of Light," the purported diary of
Jacob d'Ancona, a Jewish merchant who wrote about reaching China in
1271, four years before Marco Polo. The house had published the book
in the U.K. when word spread that China scholar Jonathan Spence, the
Sterling professor of history at Yale, had written a review for the
New York Times Book Review that questioned the book's provenance.
Despite growing pressure, David Selbourne, the Englishman residing
in Italy who translated the diary, refused to make the original
manuscript available for public scrutiny. At the last minute, an
embarrassed Little, Brown pulled the diary from U.S. publication
(although the Kensington imprint Citadel published "The City of
Light," its origins still unverified, in 2000).

For his part, Pearson Broadband executive producer John Steele
backpedaled somewhat when asked about the Menzies connection. "We're
doing a documentary of the Ming fleet's exploration of the world
using Gavin's book as a source," he explained. "The first two parts
deal with the well-documented exploits of the Ming fleet in India,
Africa, etc. In Parts 3 and 4 we're going to put the viewer on a
boat and take it through Gavin's theory. We're saying, 'Gavin has
opened an incredible door that could rewrite history. Let's go
through it.'"

Other documentarians have responded to Menzies' book with even more
doubts. Evan Hadingham, senior science editor for "Nova" at WGBH,
was approached about filming a program based on Menzies' initial
presentation but declined. "The limited information provided so far
raises concerns about the journalistic soundness and historical
accuracy of Menzies' approach, and for that reason we decided not to
commission a show," he said.

Perhaps an amused but skeptical article by Jack Hitt in the Jan. 5
issue of the New York Times Magazine, referring to the "gossamer
strength of Menzies' evidence," will further bolster resistance to
the author's theories, and "1421" (to be published in the U.S. with
the slightly altered subtitle "The Year China Discovered America")
will not be accepted at face value here. On the other hand, Hitt
seems less troubled by the book's numerous inaccuracies than he is
entertained by their author's panache.

Menzies' theory might just turn out to be one of those stories we
love too much to kill. "The Education of Little Tree" is a
documented fake -- not a memoir of a Cherokee boyhood, as claimed
when it was first published in 1976, but the fictional work of a
segregationist and Ku Klux Klan member. Yet it still appears on high
school and college reading lists, and the University of New Mexico
Press published a 25th anniversary edition in 2001. Sometimes an
emperor parades naked down the middle of the street, and a crowd not
only gathers to applaud, but willingly shells out the ticket price
as well.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Natalie Danford is co-editor of the Best New American Voices series
and contributes frequently to Publishers Weekly. She first wrote
about "1421" for PW.


==================


Goodbye, Columbus!
By JACK HITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/magazine/05MENZIES.html?
ex=1043045689&ei=1&en=1dd5cb8ab99e668e

he evidence is massive,'' said Gavin Menzies of his new
theory. ''I've got it coming out of my eyes!'' His voice was filled
with excitement, just as you'd expect from someone propounding one
of the most revolutionary ideas in the history of history. A retired
navy man with white hair, Menzies still has a hint of red in the
eyebrows that frame his ocean-blue eyes. Dressed in a handsome
sports jacket and tie, he cheerfully invited me into his stately
Georgian house in the Canonbury section of London. What he had to
say, his publicists had warned me in breathless e-mail messages,
would make ''every history book in print obsolete.''

Menzies' book, ''1421,'' boldly asserts that the Chinese discovered
America 70 years before Columbus. Riding the tube out to his house,
I saw ''1421'' promoted on the billboards at the station stops,
alongside Eminem's new album and J. Lo's latest movie. The London
papers have feverishly debated Menzies' radical thesis since its
publication in November; his book will finally arrive here in the
New World later this week, accompanied by a huge publicity campaign
from its American publisher, William Morrow.

''My wife, Marcella, and I were in Beijing for our 25th anniversary,
in 1990, and we went to the Great Wall,'' he said, explaining the
origins of his discovery. ''I asked when the section we visited was
completed, and the guide said 1421. Later we went to the Forbidden
City and learned it was completed in 1421.'' Menzies quickly
discovered that a great deal of Chinese history gathered itself up
in 1421, and he resolved to write a book. But the focus of his book
changed as he learned more, especially after looking into the life
of the eunuch admiral Zheng He. Zheng was also known as Sin Bao, and
his seven major sea expeditions became legendary, even in the West,
as the voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.

''Zheng set sail in 1421,'' Menzies said. ''The famed Treasure Fleet
junks were five times larger than Columbus's caravels. Each held a
thousand men. Two years later, in 1423, seven ships returned. Then,
in a decision that would change all of history, the Ming emperor
ordered all the ships dismantled. He pensioned off the sailors. And
he burned all the records.''

Traditional historians would agree with Menzies that in 1423 China
abruptly abandoned exploration and turned inward after the Treasure
Fleet returned from sailing no farther west than Kenya. But Menzies,
a self-taught historian publishing his first book at age 65, says
that he has found evidence proving that the Chinese didn't turn
around after Kenya -- but rather rounded the Horn of Africa and
discovered the New World.

At a time when big books must declare an end of something or a
theory of everything, Menzies has accomplished both. His thesis
upends the entire Western age of discovery, from Columbus to Cook,
and shifts the achievements and adventure from Europe to Asia.
Figures like da Gama and Pizarro are written off as war criminals
and replaced with a peaceful Chinese trading mission that supposedly
charted all seven continents (even the North Pole). As to America,
Menzies says that he has found proof that the Chinese thoroughly
explored the East Coast from what is now Florida to Rhode Island. On
the West Coast, he argues, they sailed into San Francisco Bay --
humiliatingly running aground upriver near Sacramento. Another
Chinese fleet checked out the center of the continent, especially
Missouri, and at some point lost another ship in Kansas.

''It's either Wichita or Kansas City; I can't remember which,'' he
said, pouring me some coffee.

Menzies is a charming man. He can zestily tick off one piece of
suggestive data after another -- reports of Asian jade found in
Aztec tombs, allegations of Chinese ideograms found on pre-Columbian
pottery. He makes history sound like pure fun. This high-
spiritedness, which infuses every page of ''1421,'' makes his book a
seductive read.

All this helps account for his manuscript's success with publishers.
He received an advance of more than $800,000 from Bantam, his
British publisher. Foreign rights were promptly sold to 20
countries. His global book tour will take him to Oxford and
Cambridge in England, Yale and Harvard in America and the top
universities in Shanghai and Beijing. It's the kind of itinerary any
established scholar would envy.

Yet despite Menzies' powers of persuasion, his scholarly methods
will not satisfy everyone. Sitting at his dining-room table, Menzies
explained that he had found San Francisco Bay on a 1507 map -- that
is, decades before historians believe it was first reached by
Westerners. Menzies owns a large replica of this map, which was
drawn by Martin Waldseemüller, a German cartographer. It's a map I
know very well, partly because of its fame as the first map
featuring the word ''America.'' Only bare chunks of Florida, a few
Caribbean islands, Venezuela and Brazil are visible on the map,
because that was all that had been charted. On the Western shore,
Waldseemüller just colored in some nice blue, bulbous mountains,
like the ones a 10-year-old might draw. The mountains are mere place
holders, no more literal than the fat-cheeked cherub named Zephir
seen puffing along the coast. Menzies pointed at these cartoon
mountains and said, ''You can see San Francisco here.''

I looked at the smooth curved line of the mountains' edge. To my
eyes, there was nothing that remotely signified San Francisco. He
smiled. I smiled. I wanted to say something, but he spoke before I
could. ''Here's Los Angeles,'' he said, pointing at another part of
the cartoon. There was something about his jolly audacity that was
appealing. I felt that I should just listen to what else he had to
say. Besides, it seemed rude to point out that along the length of
those supposed mountains near pre-Columbian Frisco, Waldseemüller
had written, in bold type, ''Terra Incognita.''

Sipping his coffee, Menzies said that although Waldseemüller had not
seen America's West Coast with his own eyes, he had clearly
benefited from seeing a Chinese ''master chart of the world.''
Nobody has ever seen this chart; Menzies just presumes that it
existed. How did it come to Europe? Menzies has surmised the answer:
it was carried by a 15th-century Italian traveler named Niccolo da
Conti. He converted to Islam in order to move among the Arab
merchants; arriving in Calcutta, he witnessed the arrival of Zheng's
Treasure Fleet. (This is not disputed by scholars.) Menzies told me
that da Conti must have hitched a globe-trotting ride, arriving in
China in 1423. The next year, he argued, da Conti returned to Venice
and had to sell his master chart to Dom Pedro, the king of
Portugal's brother, to buy a pardon for converting to Islam. By the
time Columbus sailed, Menzies said, he had surely seen copies of
this map -- and used it to guide his first voyage.

''When he landed, Columbus was said to have made a great mistake,
saying that he had encountered Chinese people,'' Menzies said. ''I
think he did encounter Chinese people!''

For Menzies, connecting history's dots is easy. Other scholars
aren't so sure. ''He's put five gallons in a half-pint pot,'' said a
chuckling Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, an Oxford professor and author
of ''Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years,'' an
acclaimed history text. ''What he doesn't understand is that maps at
that time were as much acts of the imagination as cartography.''
Renaissance maps, Fernandez-Armesto explained, were not meant to be
read as A.A.A. printouts. Fernandez-Armesto's disdain for Menzies is
beyond rebuttal: ''It's not really worth my time. What's really
interesting about it is that the book's taken off. It's like some
Elvis fad!''

Fernandez-Armesto was stunned at the book's P.R. blitz in Europe.
Menzies appeared on every major TV program. His books were placed in
every bookstore window. Menzies' media strategy in America this
month will try to duplicate the same surge of enthusiasm and
debate. ''I still don't understand how it happened,'' Fernandez-
Armesto said.

n a brisk, sunny morning, I met Menzies once again at his home, and
we took a long constitutional into Canonbury's market area for
several book signings. He explained that he had originally placed
the book with a small academic press, but as his theory changed and
grew, he eventually placed it with a mass publisher who understood
the marketing challenge ahead.

''Our big problem was going to be British professors of history,''
he said conspiratorially, ''who would be completely brassed off at a
novice upsetting the apple cart. We worried we'd be taken to
pieces.'' Speaking with an unusual fondness for book strategy and
financing, Menzies explained how in ''Phase 1,'' his publisher
presold foreign rights. ''That would cushion a disaster if we
published in England and got egg on our face.'' Phase 2 was timing
British publication to ''the end of October, when booksellers send
out their Christmas catalogs.'' Having presold it to the bookstores,
Menzies said, ''the critics can come in and give it a snotty review,
but the booksellers aren't going to pulp them. They're committed.''

Later that morning, back at his table, Menzies could sense my
skepticism. ''How many books would you guess have been written about
the Chinese discovery of the Americas?'' he said. Before I could
answer, he bolted from the room and quickly returned. ''More than
6,000!'' He presented me with a bibliography published by two
American academics, John Sorenson and Martin Raish, listing
thousands of publications plumbing the kind of evidence Menzies
specializes in -- reports of sunken junks, findings of Chinese
cannons. The bibliography Menzies showed me is often used to support
something called ''diffusion theory.'' Briefly put, this is an
umbrella idea encompassing various alternative theories of America's
discovery. Columbus (and Zheng He and Leif Ericsson) had a lot more
competitors than most people think: Prince Madoc of Wales, the Zeni
brothers of Venice, Jo-o Vaz Corte Real of Portugal, Poland's Jan of
Kolno. The fact is, crossing the Atlantic was probably not as big a
deal as Columbus-centric historians described it. Diffusionists may
not be able to pinpoint who beat Columbus to the punch -- but
they're sure someone did. And they may well be right. But if you
scrutinize the evidence of any of these specific claims, they melt
away. Which is why these theorists like to emphasize quantity over
quality.

''The evidence grows by leaps and bounds every day,'' Menzies told
me at his table. ''Come, you must come see this

We went to the third floor of his house, where he invited me to read
through shelves of printed e-mail messages alerting him to findings
of sunken ships and pre-Columbian shards of Chinese pottery. The
sunken junks, especially, seemed to be multiplying like medieval
chunks of the True Cross. According to Menzies, Chinese junks clog
the harbors of every port town in the world. His original fleet
estimate of 100 boats will be emended in future editions.

''New evidence suggests it was closer to 800 ships, making the
population of the fleet bigger than all but one city in Europe,'' he
said confidently. Many of those ships were lost, but others stayed
behind, he said, establishing ''settlements in San Francisco and
Vancouver Island.'' He paused. ''The entire country of Peru was a
Chinese settlement.''

Trying to navigate a safe course through Menzies' evidence made
Odysseus's voyage past Scylla and Charybdis seem like a breeze. I
tried to follow one piece of evidence -- the California junk -- to
its source.

''It was up the Sacramento River,'' Menzies said. A ship nearly the
length of a modern aircraft carrier heading up a river? I've only
skippered a Sunfish, and even I know that would be foolhardy.
Menzies said there had been reports of finding medieval Chinese
armor at the site. Great, but it turned out that the armor was found
more than 20 years ago, lent out to a local high school and then
lost.

I pressed on to the discovery of a pre-Columbian Chinese corpse in
Mexico. ''Yes, yes, found at Teotihuacan.'' Who found it? ''The body
was found by a Professor Niven.'' Could I contact him? ''He found it
in 1911.'' A century ago? ''Oh, yes, but it's very exciting. Our
real drive is to confirm it.'' Where's the body? ''It appears to be
split up.'' Split up? ''We believe part is in Switzerland and part
of it is in Sweden,'' he confessed. ''I've told my assistants, Track
down the body and get DNA on it!''

On it went. The Kansas evidence was another presumed junk. The East
Coast evidence turned out to be the squishiest of all. The Chinese
astronomical tower and the Chinese writing, it seems, are the
Newport Tower in Rhode Island and the Dighton Rock in Massachusetts.
As an amateur historian of amateur historians, I have to say that
the tower and the rock are two of the greatest Rorschach monuments
in American history. At one time or another people have claimed the
Newport Tower to be an Indian lookout, a Viking outpost, an Irish
oratory. The Dighton Rock is covered in indecipherable scratches
that are apparently of human origin, and you would be hard pressed
to find a culture that hasn't claimed these petroglyphs as its own.

By connecting with the tower and the rock, Menzies has hooked into a
great historical tradition: the obsessed amateur. Traditional
historians try to ignore them, these gadflies who claim to know
better than the experts. But it's not so easy. You can laugh aside
the various Jans of Kolno, but one of these theories is occasionally
correct. In the mid-20th century, traditionalists mocked the ideas
of an obsessed Norwegian lawyer named Helge Ingstad. He was
convinced that the Viking sagas about discovering ''Vinland'' were
based on truth. A self-taught historian like Menzies, he traveled at
his own expense to the eastern shore of Canada hoping to find
evidence of landfall. Same methodology as Menzies', essentially.

One day in 1961, Ingstad found the ruins of a Viking settlement in
L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. A crackpot theory suddenly
became authentic history. Ingstad received numerous honorary
degrees; when he died, he was hailed as a great archaeologist.

Amateurism is derided by professionals because it is so often wrong,
but think of what paleontology or astronomy (or jazz or the
Constitution) would be without them. It's quite possible that the
Chinese came to the Americas in 1421. It's also likely that a
mission devoted largely to trade would easily be forgotten in a few
years. Exchanging textiles for pepper isn't quite as memorable as,
say, an army on horseback armed with cannons eager to rape and kill.

Given the gossamer strength of Menzies' evidence, however, it is
unlikely that history departments will soon be dressing him in
Ingstad's garlands. But that hasn't stopped him from trying. While I
was in London, Menzies received a speaking invitation from the
Oxford Student Union.

Standing in a hall lined with flaking editions of Chaucer and
Hobbes, Menzies gave his talk. ''Massive evidence, simply
overwhelming,'' he said, prancing amid the massive overwhelmingness
of it all. He reprised his stories of junks and jades. He talked of
peculiar ''bowel afflictions among the Indians once thought to be
unique to the Chinese.'' Then there is the matter of the Chinese
chickens in South America. Menzies cited his own experience for
knowing well ''how the morning call of the Asiatic hen's 'kik-kiri-
kee' was markedly different from the 'cock-a-doodle-doo' of their
European counterparts.'' Menzies suggested that somewhere in South
America, the crew of the Treasure Fleet dropped off some of Admiral
Zheng's chickens -- scoring another historical milestone with the
first delivery of Chinese takeout.

After Menzies' talk, a man in a fine suit, presumably a scholar,
raised his hand. I anticipated a rough question. But the gentleman,
a pickled Oxford hanger-on (the kind who haunts every university
town), asked: ''How do you talk without notes and without pause? It
must mean you are right.'' Even the few skeptical questions from
students became occasions to pick through more middens of evidence.
At one point, Menzies claimed that more than 100 Peruvian villages
in an area called Ancash have names linguistically linked to
medieval China. ''They speak Chinese still,'' Menzies said, ''but
cannot understand each other's patois.'' Verification is pending.

''Torrents of information are pouring in,'' Menzies later told me,
explaining why he has hired ''a permanent team of people who can
translate medieval Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese.'' A television
series ''is coming out next year, and the Web sites are up and
running.'' For a fee, interested readers can subscribe and gain
access to Menzies' latest ''confidential'' postings of fresh
evidence. The plan is to keep the book constantly updated; his
assistants, Menzies promised, will be creating new editions of the
book ''long after I'm dead.''

Last month, as part of his book tour, Menzies traveled to China.
According to The Times of London, when he arrived in Nanjing, he
was ''pinned down in the corridor of a Chinese conference hotel'' by
admirers. Many Chinese academics were skeptical of Menzies' claims.
But among the popular journalists and the pickled hangers-on in the
big university towns, Menzies is a rock star.

A Chinese admiral now plans to build a replica of a Treasure Fleet
junk, the way Spain built modern versions of Columbus's caravels 10
years ago, and sail it around the world. ''I have heard about this,
and I am so excited about it,'' Menzies said in the cab back to
London, marveling at the coincidences that will fuel sales of future
editions. This year, China may launch its first manned spaceship,
and in 2008 Beijing will be the host of the Olympics. The global
markets are rejoicing in China's awakening, as it returns to center
stage for the first time since Emperor Zhu Di dismantled the
Treasure Fleet. China is coming out, and at the costume ball of pop
history her most handsome escort is Cmdr. Gavin Menzies, late of Her
Majesty's Royal Navy.

Jack Hitt, a contributing writer for the magazine, last wrote about
environmentalist mercenaries.