Gavin Menzies and "1434"

Went last night to the Royal Geographic Society for a talk and book launch by Gavin Menzies! You know him! He's the guy who wrote "1421: the Year China Discovered America"

This new book is called "1434: the Year China Ignited the Renaissance." Haven't read it yet but, from what's on the back, yup, it seems that history has it all wrong and that it was China's sending in a vast fleet of magnificent ships to visit Rome that actually started blah, blah, blah! Really, you think someone in Italy would have spotted a vast fleet of magnificent ships and we'd all know about it today. Oh, and it would appear the fleet came through the Suez Canal. Mmmh mmh!

These books are not fictional. No, seriously, they're not. Look, here they are:

See! They really do exist. They have substance, shape and form. But as for the content .... mmmh mmh!

Back when I was doing my M.A. I did a Historiographology unit (that means "the study of how history is written" and it's fascinating, I promise you!) and for a tutorial paper I had to choose a historian and comment on his/her epistomological and discursive practices. It only had to be a thousand words but I chose Gavin Menzies and, for the life of me, even after the most savage editing, I could not bring my criticism of his practices to less than six thousand words. Honestly, he's that bad.

But to give him his due, he's not a historian and definitely not a scholar. He's a submarine commander. Although ....

... OK, here's the thing: in "1421" he talks about how an ancient Chinese compass was found in Fiji and he gives the latitude and longitude of the spot where it was located. Since I'd never heard of such a thing, I looked up the lat. and long. to see where it was - so I could work out who I knew from around there, in order to ask them about it - and what I got was ... Vanuatu!

Vanuatu is NOT in Fiji. Vanuatu is in Vanuatu; the island group formerly known as New Hebrides! It's an entirely different country and nearly a thousand kilometers away from Fiji. Since this is precisely the sort of thing a submarine commander should know, you'll forgive me for not wanting to go anywhere in Gavin Menzies' submarine!

And then there's the bit about how records from the French Mission in Fiji tell about how the locals reported that an enormous fleet of giant ships had come into their area "just there!" several hundred years earlier. Well, the French Mission in Fiji was in a place called Lomari and that's along Fiji's Coral Coast on the island of Viti Levu ... and they call it "The Coral Coast" for a reason: it's reef-locked. There's no way anything other than a very small boat can come in "just there" or even anywhere near "just there"!

Gosh, he is a bad historian; like truly and amazingly bad. However, as Keith said to me "Go to his talk. Buy his new book. You know how much you love being outraged." and it's true, I do.

I went to his last talk here, about two years back, and it gave me many hours of pleasure researching the "information" he gave in it, and discovering the myriad different ways he was completely wrong about everything. I also enjoyed "1421" for the same reason ...

Oooh, just remembered a delicious bit of outrage from last night. He's going on about how Zheng He's travels led to the creation of the astonishingly accurate 1418 world map that's in the Vatican, and somebody who wasn't me, although he was ahead of me by only seconds, asks "How can a journey in 1421 lead to a map being drawn up in 1418?" and Menzies replies "Obviously it came from Ghengis Khan's travels!" I mean, like, AAAAHHHHHH!!! Oh yeah! I can see this going down: in between all the raping and killing, burning and pillaging, Ghengis Khan took out his instruments and did a seriously great topographical study of his surroundings.

Oh yeah! And when someone asked "Why didn't this fleet bring anything back from Europe?" and the answer to that was "Noodles!" OK, OK, we all know that Marco Polo introduced noodles to Italy, but maybe, you know, when they saw the Italians eating their food, they got all huffy and took them back again ...

... right, now I'm getting stupid!

I could go on for hours about this but, to keep it under six thousand words, I'll stop now.

Oh, but I have to tell you that this time I met him and he's the most charming man, and, in all fairness, I have to give him kudos for his ability to generate publicity and, really, the world owes him a debt of gratitude for bringing Zheng He back into public consciousness. I mean, we all know - since it's a matter of real records - that Zheng He didn't get further than the next town down from Zanzibar on the coast of Africa - was this Dar es Salaam? - and that the only journey where he stopped coast-hugging and crossed the open ocean, it wasn't because he had suddenly invented navigating by the stars, but was because, this time, he had Indonesian navigators. But none of that detracts from the fact that He was a great man who didn't deserve to be forgotten by history and Menzies has definitely righted that wrong!

And maybe the way to view Menzies is not so much as a misguided, ridiculous, unscholarly idiot but as a Historical Van Guard; he napalms a historical space and then it's time for the real soldiers/scholars to come in and do all the real work.

Just wish the public would then read the work by the real scholars!