Shyzer.com

The only times I ever saw my college advisor was when it came time to pick classes for the next semester. I never knew exactly what I wanted to take though, so I always just scribbled down the first five classes I could think of, he’d sign off on them, and then he’d ask me six months later why I didn’t take a single one of the original classes he cleared me for. In fact, the only time he was useful was when he let me know what classes I still needed in order to graduate. A science class here, a math class there, etc. In fact, the only time he brought up my history requirements was when he noticed I’d been skimping on taking the Craft.

Any history major at USC was (and may still be, I’m too lazy to look it up) required to take a class titled History 300: The Historian’s Craft. Ugh. Shoot me now. The name of the class alone brought up images of stiff and musty old white professors in tweed jackets with leather elbow patches who talk with the same excitement in their voice as a person reading a technical manual. The only redeeming idea for the class was the outside chance that maybe my professor would smoke a pipe. He didn’t.

The class itself was mind numbingly boring, yet in hindsight kind of important. Basically, it was created to help weed out the idiots who didn’t know how to properly research a history paper or assignment and thus, the entire semester was spent emphasizing the importance of primary sources. For instance, if I was writing a paper on George Washington, I couldn’t simply quote some of the many books that have been written about him in the twentieth century. I’d have to research and pull up actual papers and essays Washington had wrote or newspaper articles from the time. Good God, I can’t tell you how many times my professor told me I needed primary sources. I could have gotten an interview with Jesus himself for a paper on the origins of Christianity and my professor still would have chided me for not getting a sit down with God.

So why am I telling you this? Oh, no big reason, other than to explain why 1421 is one of the shoddiest pieces of “history” reporting and research I’ve ever read. For those of you fortunate to have never read this trash written by Gavin Menzies (though by book sales numbers, far too many of you HAVE read this), the basic premise is that a massive Chinese fleet left port in 1421 and not only sailed around the world, but accurately mapped it as well. Australia, India, Africa, Antarctica, South & North America - you name it, the Chinese supposedly sailed there decades, if not centuries, before any Europeans.

I say supposedly because there’s about as much primary evidence for this having happened as there is for me being the first human to teleport to the surface of the moon and establishing the first galactic Starbucks.

The book (and subsequent PBS “documentary”) is littered with paragraphs that are meant to confuse the reader. He continually tosses in references to his own expertise in navigation and cartography, though the only qualifications shown are a mention here and there that he served in the Royal Navy of Britain. Awesome, I went to high school for four years, I’m therefore an expert in English literature. Whenever Menzies finally decides to stake a claim, he passes off conjecture as fact. Take for instance the following quote, which I kid you not, was selected by opening the book to a random page:

In talking about why the Chinese would have bothered mapping Antarctica: Why had the Chinese bothered to do so? I began to wonder if they really had gone there. Then the answer that I should have seen at once suddenly came to me. They had chosen to sail to Antarctica in order to get underneath Crucis Alpha, the leading star of the Southern Cross. I could only shake me head in wonder at the skill and sophistication of these Chinese mariners of so many centuries ago…

NO! Stop shaking your head, damnit! THAT’S NOT A FACT! Please show me one piece of evidence that proves they sailed there to check out the stars. One journal entry, one letter home, one anything that clearly says, “why did we sail into all these icebergs again? Oh yeah, so we could check out some stars.” Until then, saying they went there is simply Menzies’ best guess! Just because they might have wanted to map the southern stars, there’s no PROOF that’s why they traveled to the South Pole when they did. My best guess is that Amelia Earhart simply crashed in the Pacific and maybe survived for a month or two on a deserted island, but I have no proof that events unfolded this way, so I could never say it was fact. Maybe she really was spying on Japan, maybe she landed and led a normal life out of the spotlight, maybe she was captured by aliens, who the hell knows. I certainly don’t and neither does Menzies.

Here, let’s flip to another page. In fact, let’s look at the claim that Chinese sailors not only made port in my foreign hometown - Newcastle, Australia - but also left behind ruins.

On evidence found near Newcastle of early Chinese fleet activity: In 1965, sand-miners unearthed a huge wooden rudder from this site; some said it was 40 feet high. If this description was even remotely accurate, it eliminates the possibility of an unknown Portuguese or Dutch voyage.

Okay, excuse me while I go punch myself in the face so as to alleviate some of this frustration I have pent up now. What do you mean IF it’s accurate? This happened barely 40 years prior - GO INTERVIEW SOMEBODY WHO WAS AT THE UNEARTHING! If you can’t find anybody who was there, then say so! And where the hell is this rudder? Did it vanish? Did they stick it back in the ground? Who the hell knows because Heaven forbid Menzies does some actually research and investigating.

The book is FULL of baseless “facts” like these. Menzies constantly cites “accounts” by many famous European explorers of encountering things that in hindsight don’t fit the historically accepted timeline, such as plant and animal life that’s only indigenous to Asia or how they found a map in Europe that already had the world mapped out for them before they set off to explore it. The only problem is that Menzies doesn’t reference any of these accounts! He provides not a shred of proof that any of these European explorers actually had these accounts. Come on! I can do that, Christ. Did you know that Columbus once talked about how shocked he was to encounter magical dragons protecting a gumdrop village in Cuba? Oh yeah, Columbus loved it there. The space aliens who supplied the village with endless amounts of chocolate milk treated him like royalty. Oh, you never heard of this tale? Don’t worry, it totally happened, Columbus once talked about it to his buddies.

Menzies does try to explain why he has such few primary sources. There was a great purge of exploration knowledge in China (though in reality it wasn’t nearly as bad as he makes it sound. In fact, there are still surviving primary sources from that era that Menzies either ignored or chose to leave out because they didn’t support his claims), or the DNA analysis hasn’t come back yet (THEN WAIT TO PUBLISH THE FUCKING BOOK!), or carbon dating on the ship wreckage was inconclusive, or no Chinese artifacts in the Americas have been found yet despite many people’s best efforts, or… Hell, whenever he actually goes out on the limb and references an actual source, there’s a decent chance that source is fake! He makes reference to a museum that doesn’t exist (page 220, the Kedumba Nature Museum in Katoomba, Australia) and to make matters even more hilariously frustrating, such a museum never existed in the first place.

Why didn’t the Chinese sail to Europe? They partied with effing penguins, but they couldn’t figure out how to find the center of civilization at the time? If the Chinese had settled amongst all so many Native American tribes, how come they didn’t have immunities to European diseases? Why didn’t the Chinese set up a single tribute colony, which was supposedly the whole purpose of their trip? How is it that Menzies is allowed to use ancient tales and superstitions by Native Americans (long ago, yellow people came from the sea…) as support for the “fact” that the Chinese showed up, but I’m not allowed to use them to support my hypothesis that a magical dragon kingdom of gumdrops and lollypop lanes did in fact exist?

To be fair, I haven’t finished the book. I say that only to point out that I doubt I’ll make it all the way through. After 200+ pages, there’s only so much I can take.

As humans, we hate not knowing something. It goes against our innate nature and I can most definitely sympathize with people who hate not knowing what happened in our past. I want to know just as much as the next guy whether or not the Chinese actually discovered the New World before Columbus. But people need to understand one simple fact, especially when it comes to teaching history: It’s far better to say you don’t know something than to pass off your assumptions and speculations as fact.