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Gavin Menzies

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Gavin Menzies
Born Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies
(1937-08-14) 14 August 1937 (age 80)
Occupation Author, retired naval officer
Nationality English
Genre Pseudohistory
Notable works
  • 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (2002)
Spouse Marcella Menzies

Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies (born 14 August 1937)[1] is a British author and retired submarine lieutenant-commander who has written books promoting claims that the Chinese sailed to America before Columbus. Historians have rejected Menzies' theories and assertions[2][3][4][5][6][7] and have categorised his work as pseudohistory.[8][9][10]



Photograph of the HMS Newfoundland, on which Gavin Menzies claims to have been stationed as an officer in 1959.[11]

Menzies was born in London, England, and his family moved to China when he was three weeks old,[12] he was educated at Orwell Park Preparatory School in Ipswich, and Charterhouse School.[13] Menzies dropped out of school when he was fifteen years old[14] and joined the Royal Navy in 1953,[15] he never attended college[14] and had no formal training in historical studies beyond the secondary school level.[14] From 1959 to 1970, Menzies served on British submarines.[15] Menzies claims he sailed the routes sailed by Ferdinand Magellan and James Cook, while he was commanding officer of the diesel submarine HMS Rorqual between 1968 and 1970,[15] a contention questioned by some of his critics.[16]

In 1959, by his own account, Menzies was an officer on the HMS Newfoundland, on a voyage from Singapore to Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and on to the Cape Verde Islands and back to England. Menzies claims 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.[11] Critics have challenged the depth of his nautical knowledge;[17] in 1969, Menzies was involved in an incident in the Philippines, when the Rorqual rammed a U.S. Navy minesweeper, the USS Endurance, which was moored at a pier. This collision punched a hole in the Endurance but did not damage the Rorqual, the ensuing enquiry found Menzies and one of his subordinates responsible for a combination of factors that led to the accident, including the absence of the coxswain (who usually takes the helm in port) who had been replaced by a less experienced crew member, and technical issues with the boat's telegraph.[12]


1421: The Year China Discovered the World

Writing and research

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.[14]

Gavin Menzies had the idea to write his first book after he and his wife Marcella visited the Forbidden City for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.[14] Menzies noticed that they kept encountering the year 1421 and, concluding that it must have been an extraordinary year in world history, decided to write a book about everything that happened in the world in the year 1421.[14] Menzies spent years working on the book[14] and, by the time it was finished, it was a massive volume spanning 1,500 pages.[14] Menzies sent the manuscript to an agent named Luigi Bonomi, who told him it was unpublishable,[14] but was intrigued by a brief section of the book in which Menzies speculated about the voyages of Chinese admiral Zheng He and recommended that he rewrite the book, focusing it on Zheng He's voyages.[14] Menzies agreed to rewrite it, but admitted that he was "not a natural writer"[14] and requested for Bonomi to rewrite the first three chapters for him.[14]

Bonomi contacted the firm Midas Public Relations to convince a major newspaper to run a promotional article for Menzies's book.[14] Menzies hired a room at the Royal Geographical Society, which convinced The Daily Telegraph to publish an article about his speculations.[14] Publishers immediately began courting Menzies for the publishing rights to his book.[14] Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers, offered him £500,000 for the world publishing rights to it.[14] At this point, Menzies's rewritten manuscript was only 190 pages.[14] Bantam Press stated that the book possessed enormous marketing potential,[14] but considered it to be poorly written and sloppily presented.[14] According to Menzies himself, 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."[14] 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,[14] the authors, however, relied entirely on Menzies for factual information[14] and never brought in any fact checkers or reputable historians to make sure that the information in the book was accurate.[14] After the rewriting process was complete, the book was at a publishable length of 500 pages.[14]

Publication, claims, and commercial success

Map showing the voyages of Zheng He accepted by mainstream historians. In 1421, Gavin Menzies challenges these routes, claiming that Zheng He's fleet actually travelled all over the world, visiting the Americas, the Caribbean, Greenland, the Pacific, and Australia, establishing colonies, and eventually circumnavigating the globe.[14]

The finished copy of the book was published in 2002 as 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (published as 1421: The Year China Discovered America in the United States).[14] The book is written informally, as a series of vignettes of Menzies' travels around the globe examining what he claims is evidence for his "1421 hypothesis", interspersed with speculation regarding the achievements of Admiral Zheng He's fleet.[6][14] Menzies states in the introduction that the book is an attempt to answer the question: "On some early European world maps, it appears that someone had charted and surveyed lands supposedly unknown to the Europeans. Who could have charted and surveyed these lands before they were 'discovered'?"

External video
Presentation by Menzies on 1421: The Year China Discovered America, April 25, 2003, C-SPAN

In the book, Menzies concludes that only China had the time, money, manpower, and leadership to send such expeditions[14] and then sets out to prove that the Chinese visited lands unknown in either China or Europe,[14] he claims that from 1421 to 1423, during the Ming dynasty of China under the Yongle Emperor, the fleets of Admiral Zheng He, commanded by the captains Zhou Wen, Zhou Man, Yang Qing, and Hong Bao, discovered Australia, New Zealand, the Americas, Antarctica, and the Northeast Passage; circumnavigated Greenland, tried to reach the North and South Poles, and circumnavigated the world before Ferdinand Magellan. 1421 instantly became an international success;[14] it was translated into dozens of different languages[26] and sold over a million copies.[14] It was listed as a New York Times best seller for several weeks in 2003.[27]

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.[28] Menzies bases his main theory on original interpretations and extrapolations of academic studies of minority population DNA, archaeological finds and ancient maps. Menzies claims that knowledge of Zheng He's discoveries was subsequently lost because the mandarin bureaucrats of the Ming imperial court feared that the costs of further voyages would ruin the Chinese economy, he conjectures that when the Yongle Emperor died in 1424 and the new Hongxi Emperor forbade further expeditions, the mandarins hid or destroyed the records of previous exploration to discourage further voyages.


Mainstream Sinologists and professional historians have universally rejected 1421 and the alternative history of Chinese exploration described in it as pseudohistory.[29][30][31][14] The widely respected British historian of exploration Felipe Fernández-Armesto dismissed Menzies as "either a charlatan or a cretin".[14] Sally Gaminara, the publisher for Transworld, the company which publishes Menzies's book, dismissed Fernández-Armesto as merely jealous,[14] commenting, "Well, maybe he'd like to have the same commercial success himself."[14] On 21 July 2004, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) broadcast a two-hour-long documentary debunking all of Menzies's major claims, featuring professional Chinese historians;[14] in 2004, historian Robert Finlay severely criticized Menzies in the Journal of World History for his "reckless manner of dealing with evidence" that led him to propose hypotheses "without a shred of proof".[6] Finlay wrote:


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."[33]

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:[28]


Menzies has created a website for his readers to send him any information they can find that might support his hypothesis;[14] in response, his devoted fans have sent him thousands of pieces of purported evidence, which they claim serve as proof that Menzies's ideas are correct.[14] Academics have emphatically rejected all of this "evidence" as worthless[14] and have criticized what American history professor Ronald H. Fritze calls the "almost cult-like" manner in which Menzies continues to drum up support for his hypothesis.[14] In reaction to this criticism, Menzies has dismissed the experts' opinions as irrelevant,[14] stating, "The public are on my side, and they are the people who count."[14]







  2. ^ a b c d Castle, Tim (29 July 2008). "Columbus debunker sets sights on Leonardo da Vinci". Reuters. London. Reuters. Archived from the original on 27 January 2011. Retrieved 26 January 2011. 
  4. ^ Zheng He in the Americas and Other Unlikely Tales of Exploration and Discovery, archived from the original on 17 March 2007, retrieved 2007-03-22 
  5. ^ 1421: The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies, retrieved 2007-03-22 [permanent dead link]
  6. ^ a b c Finlay 2004
  9. ^ Melleuish, Greg; Sheiko, Konstantin; Brown, Stephen (1 November 2009). "Pseudo History/Weird History: Nationalism and the Internet". History Compass. Wiley. 7 (6): 1484–1495. doi:10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00649.x. Retrieved 10 October 2013. 
  10. ^ Henige, David (July 2008). "The Alchemy of Turning Fiction into Truth" (PDF). Journal of Scholarly Publishing. 39 (4): 354–372. doi:10.3138/jsp.39.4.354. Retrieved 10 October 2013. 
  11. ^ a b Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (2008 ed.), p. 113
  14. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap Fritze, Ronald H. (2009). Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-Religions. London, England: Reaktion Books. pp. 96–103. ISBN 978-1-86189-430-4. 
  15. ^ a b c Houterman, Hans; Koppes, Jeroen (2011). "Naval Officers (RN, RNR & RNVR) 20th Century (non-World War II)". Retrieved 23 June 2011. 1968–1970, Commanding Officer, HMS Rorqual 
  16. ^ Challenges to Menzies' nautical experience, retrieved 2007-03-22 ; see esp. note 5 of the Appendix.
  18. ^ Peter Evans (5 June 1970). "Immigrant girl will vote in despair – Powellism". News. The Times (57888). London. col C, p. 9. 
  22. ^ Ptak, Roderich; Salmon, Claudine (2005), "Zheng He: Geschichte und Fiktion", in Ptak, Roderich; Höllmann, Thomas O., Zheng He. Images & Perceptions, South China and Maritime Asia, 15, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, pp. 9–35 (12) 
  23. ^ a b Naval Historian Gavin Menzies' Unique Take on History Archived 15 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine., 13 Apr. 2011, retrieved 25 May 2011.
  24. ^ Goodman, David S. G. (2006), "Mao and The Da Vinci Code: Conspiracy, Narrative and History", The Pacific Review, 19 (3): 359–84 (371 ff.), doi:10.1080/09512740600875135, retrieved 14 March 2011. 
  25. ^ UK Justice list of vexatious litigants
  29. ^ "The 1421 myth exposed". Retrieved 2009-10-02. 
  30. ^ Newbrook, M (2004), "Zheng He in the Americas and Other Unlikely Tales of Exploration and Discovery", Skeptical Briefs, 14 (3), retrieved 2009-10-10. 
  32. ^ Finlay 2004, pp. 241f.
  34. ^ The 1421 myth exposed: 1434 – No Way – No Canal, retrieved 13 June 2012.
  35. ^ Heeffer, Albrecht (2008). "Regiomontanus and Chinese Mathematics". Philosophica. 82: 87–114. Archived from the original on 17 December 2009. 

External links