1421

Bob agreed to wander through the bookstore with me, which came as a surprise. Bob had been retired for a while and he prided himself on being a doer not a reader. We had met while sailing the coast of Mexico en route, in our respective sailboats, to the Caribbean. Bob was a good friend and he and his wife Barb were excellent company, inveterate card players and excellent hosts. A retired electronics engineer he loved to fix things, and found my love of reading amusing but impractical. He told me he read perhaps one book a year. In this California bookstore Bob prodded me towards the shelves and started telling me I should read this and that. I nodded dumbly, astonished by his fervor. "This," he said. "You have to read this, it will blow your mind."

Well, I have to admit I was a bit dubious. He had previously recommended to me a book and in my opinion he got the thesis all wrong on that one. It was a good book, though, titled "Guns, Germs, and Steel," which posited that Indo-Europeans had received environmental advantages that helped put them ahead of rival cultures. Bob wasn't at all sure that other ethnicities could have profited from the advantages that Europeans used to get ahead. Europeans were the greatest, he said at the time. Not any more, nowadays Bob was reading voraciously and his world view was expanding, and he wanted mine to do the same.

The author of 1421, a retired Royal Navy Captain, spent 17 years researching a detective story about who actually traveled round the world first. The author's conclusions, beautifully detailed and meticulously researched, are absolutely devastating. He claims China sent fleets to all corners of the world where many of them crashed and sank and left behind colonies of Chinese sailors and concubines who created outposts of Chinese culture, genes and agriculture everywhere including Australia, South and Central America, Africa and of course to us most astonishingly, the United States.

The author is levelheaded, thoughtful and precise. His story is unimpeachable as far as I'm concerned and reminds me once again how little we can believe the stories told us by our elders and betters. Everyone believes in self preservation first and truth second. So while his theories are scoffed at by professional academics, the author employs common sense and an understanding of sailing more complete than a land based historian or archaeologist could bring to the subject. I have sailed some of the seas he discusses and everything he says about them makes perfect sense to me.

I found his explanation of the famous Bimini Road, a strip of carefully placed underwater stones off the beach on North Bimini, obvious and simple once explained. Others have concluded the stones were placed by aliens or were part of the myth of Atlantis or some other rubbish. Menzies figures, with lots of research that the Bimini Road was a pair of slipways to haul the Chinese Admiral's junks damaged in a recent hurricane.

His explanation to a sailor is obvious and simple. I believe his other explanations for anomalies in the history of exploration merit serious consideration. This book has turned my world upside down. There are 500 closely reasoned pages, a superb read, a fantastic detective story simply told and easily understood and packed with details. I recommend it highly to anyone with a mind open enough to accept that perhaps Columbus sailed West with a Chinese map in his hand, after lying to the Spanish monarchs about his plans in order to get money out of them for a chance at adventure, fame and fortune.

This is not history as one learns it but it makes the extraordinary a matter of common sense. My mind is reeling.