Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies (14 August 1937 – 12 April 2020) was a British submarine lieutenant-commander who authored books claiming that the Chinese sailed to America before Columbus. Historians have rejected Menzies' theories and assertions and have categorised his work as pseudohistory.

Menzies was best known for his controversial 2002 book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, in which he asserts that the fleets of Chinese Admiral Zheng He visited the Americas prior to European explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492, and that the same fleet circumnavigated the globe a century before the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan. Menzies' second book, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, extended his discovery hypothesis to the European continent. In his third book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, Menzies claims that Atlantis did exist, in the form of the Minoan civilization, and that it maintained a global seaborne empire extending to the shores of America and India, millennia before actual contact in the Age of Discovery.

Biography

thumb|Photograph of , on which Gavin Menzies claims to have been stationed as an officer in 1959. He was educated at [[Orwell Park School|Orwell Park Preparatory School in Suffolk, and Charterhouse. Menzies dropped out of school when he was fifteen years old and joined the Royal Navy in 1953. He never attended university He often refers back to his sea-faring days to support claims made in 1421.

In 1959, by his own account, Menzies was an officer on on a voyage from Singapore to Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and on to Cape Verde and back to England. Menzies claimed that the knowledge of the winds, currents, and sea conditions that he gained on this voyage was essential to reconstructing the 1421 Chinese voyage that he discusses in his first book. Critics have challenged the depth of his nautical knowledge. In 1990, Menzies began researching Chinese maritime history. He had, however, no academic training and no command of the Chinese language, which his critics argue prevented him from understanding original source material relevant to his thesis. Menzies trained as a barrister, but in 1996 he was declared a vexatious litigant by HM Courts Service which prohibited him from taking legal action in England and Wales without prior judicial permission.

1421: The Year China Discovered the World

Writing and research

thumb|Menzies was inspired to write 1421 after a visit to the [[Forbidden City in Beijing, China with his wife Marcella for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The Telegraph article was syndicated worldwide and became a sensation, even though Menzies had not yet even presented his claims. Arrangements were made for his presentation at the Royal Geographical Society to be simulcast live to 3 million Chinese television viewers. "Almost whether it's true or not, this is a great adventure story," Bonomi told the Telegraph reporter. "Gavin's confidence and research will swing it. He is a very English eccentric and people like him often hit on truths."

Publishers immediately began courting Menzies for the publishing rights to his book. Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers, offered him £500,000 for the world publishing rights to it. At this point, Menzies's rewritten manuscript was only 190 pages. Bantam Press stated that the book possessed enormous marketing potential, but considered it to be poorly written and sloppily presented. According to Menzies, they told him, "You know, if you want to get your story over, you've got to make it readable, and you can't write, basically." During the revision process that followed, over 130 different people worked on the manuscript, with a large part being written by a ghostwriter named Neil Hanson. The authors relied entirely on Menzies for factual information and never brought in any fact checkers or reputable historians to make sure that the information in the book was accurate. After the rewriting process was complete, the book was at a publishable length of 500 pages. and sold over a million copies.

Although the book contains numerous footnotes, references, and acknowledgments, critics point out that it lacks supporting references for Chinese voyages beyond East Africa, the location acknowledged by professional historians as the limit of the fleet's travels. The widely respected British historian of exploration Felipe Fernández-Armesto dismissed Menzies as "either a charlatan or a cretin". Sally Caminara, the publisher for Transworld, the company which publishes Menzies's book, responded to this quote by saying, "Well, maybe he'd like to have the same commercial success himself."

On 21 July 2004, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) broadcast a two-hour-long documentary debunking all of Menzies's major claims, featuring professional Chinese historians.</blockquote>

Tan Ta Sen, president of the International Zheng He Society, has acknowledged the book's popular appeal as well as its scholarly failings, remarking, "The book is very interesting, but you still need more evidence. We don't regard it as an historical book, but as a narrative one. I want to see more proof. But at least Menzies has started something, and people could find more evidence."

A group of scholars and navigators—Su Ming Yang of the United States, Jin Guo-Ping and Malhão Pereira of Portugal, Philip Rivers of Malaysia, Geoff Wade of Singapore—questioned Menzies' methods and findings in a joint message:

<blockquote>His book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, is a work of sheer fiction presented as revisionist history. Not a single document or artifact has been found to support his new claims on the supposed Ming naval expeditions beyond Africa...Menzies' numerous claims and the hundreds of pieces of "evidence" he has assembled have been thoroughly and entirely discredited by historians, maritime experts and oceanographers from China, the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. In response, his devoted fans sent him thousands of pieces of purported evidence, which they claimed serve as proof that Menzies's ideas are correct.

1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance

In 2008 Menzies released a second book entitled 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance. In it Menzies claims that in 1434 Chinese delegations reached Italy and brought books and globes that, to a great extent, launched the Renaissance. He claims that a letter written in 1474 by Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli and found amongst the private papers of Columbus indicates that an earlier Chinese ambassador had direct correspondence with Pope Eugene IV in Rome.

Menzies then claims that materials from the Chinese Book of Agriculture, the Nong Shu, published in 1313 by the Yuan-dynasty scholar-official Wang Zhen (), were copied by European scholars and provided direct inspiration for the illustrations of mechanical devices which are attributed to the Italian Renaissance polymaths Taccola (1382–1453) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519).

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a professor of history at Tufts University in the United States and at Queen Mary, University of London, examined Menzies' claim that private papers of Columbus indicate a Chinese ambassador in correspondence with the Pope and called this claim "drivel." He states that no reputable scholar supports the view that Toscanelli's letter refers to a Chinese ambassador. Martin Kemp, Professor of the History of Art at Oxford University, questions the rigor of Menzies' application of the historical method, and in regard to European illustrations purporting to be copied from the Chinese Nong Shu, writes that Menzies "says something is a copy just because they look similar. He says two things are almost identical when they are not." Geoff Wade, a senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, acknowledges that there was a cross exchange of technological ideas between Europe and China, but ultimately classifies Menzies' book as historical fiction and asserts that there is "absolutely no Chinese evidence" for a maritime venture to Italy in 1434.

References

  • Gavin Menzies' website
  • Australian Broadcasting Corporation's FOUR CORNERS Program Transcript of "Junk History"

; Criticism

  • 1421 Exposed&nbsp;– Website set up by an international group of academics and researchers
  • Hartz, Bill. In the Hall of Ma'at. Weighing the Evidence for Alternative History: Gavin's Fantasy Land, 1421