China Discovered America First?

DiscoLad

New member
Montana Smith said:
I woke up less than an hour ago. I've got the 'flu again and I'm drugged up. What day is it? Where am I? What is this strange place? What are all you people doing here? :confused:

We are argui. . . discussing whether Chinese discovered America.
But A. Prof. came and shot everything down with logic and meaning. :p
Now that everyone's updated. :D
It's the 26th... You're in The Raven...It's a bar. :)

So you got the flu? Is that why you seem a little loopier than usual?
 

Sharkey

Guest
Reading this thread shows that Boogie Boy doesn't have his head screwed on right and is begging for some adjustment.
Gear said:
Um, okay. So, you're content to believe convenient history instead of questioning authority and seeking truth? To me, that seems pretty opposite the ideals of an American, but more-so the arrogance and pompousness of Idiot America.
Boogie Lad was patting himself on the back in the Black History Month thread for not being a rascist bigot. Now this. The Boogie Boy sounds just like Cartman having nightmares in the South Park show about Crystal Skull. 'No. No! It's the Chinese! They're gonna take over the world and bring down America! Leave us alone! Somebody's gotta stop them!'
DiscoLad said:
What, do you consider this totally archeology because they found two bits of junk?

"Random china man and his crew lost an achor, dropped scrap metal, and scurried back to Asia after stumbling upon today's North America"
Quite a difference from before when you said the theory had good points.
DiscoLad said:
You think I'm gonna fall for that one?
Post an answer so you can completely destroy it with your quick, smarty-pants replies?
=================
I just don't want to answer him because I know where he's going to take this.
You act like the cowardly lion from the Wizard of Oz. Stand up and be a man for once in your life! Too bad the Raven doesn't have a poppy field that could put you to sleep...PERMANENTLY!
Disco Douche said:
It's the 26th... You're in The Raven...It's a bar.
A bar with some under-aged minors hanging about. Somebody call the cops!
 

Montana Smith

Active member
9780061564895.jpg



1421: The Year China Discovered America Book Description

Based on 15 years of in-depth research, "1421" traces the voyages of an extraordinary fleet of Chinese ships who actually charted America 70 years before Columbus. Illustrations.
"The incredible true story of the discovery of America before Columbus was even born. Gavin Menzies's extraordinary findings rewrite history."

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, huge junks nearly five hundred feet long and built from the finest teak, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di's loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was "to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas" and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. Their journey would last more than two years and circle the globe.

When they returned in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships, now considered frivolous, were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in China's long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. Also concealed were how the Chinese colonized America before the Europeans and transplanted to America, Australia, New Zealand and South America the principal economic crops that have fed and clothed the world.

Now, in a landmark historical journey, Gavin Menzies, who spent fifteen years tracing the astonishing voyages of the Chinese fleet, shares the remarkable account of his discoveries and the incontrovertible evidence to support them. His compelling narrative pulls together ancient maps, precise navigational knowledge, astronomy and the surviving accounts of Chinese explorers and the later European navigators to prove that the Chinesehad also discovered Antarctica, reached Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook and solved the problem of longitude three hundred years ahead of the Europeans. 1421 describes the artifacts and inscribed stones left behind by the emperor's fleet, the evidence of wrecked junks along its route -- discovered in locations ranging from the middle of the Mississippi River to tributaries of the Amazon -- and the ornate votive offerings left by the Chinese sailors wherever they landed, in honor of Shao Lin, goddess of the sea.

"1421: The Year China Discovered America" is the story of a remarkable journey of discovery that rewrites our understanding of history. Our knowledge of world exploration as it has been commonly accepted for centuries must now be reconceived due to this classic work of historical detection.

...and apparently before him...


How the Ancient Egyptian Captain Rata and his Navigator Maui Discovered America in 232 BC


Who discovered America first is an important topic. Obviously the so-called Indians came by a land bridge from Asia some 16,000 years ago, but what about the earliest voyages? Eric the Red is mentioned a a Viking explorer who landed first at Greenland, and then there is Columbus whose voyage in 1492 is usually cited as the first. But what about the Muslim Admiral of the Chinese fleet, Zheng He, who sailed from China to the Western part of North America in 1421, fully 71 years ahead of Columbus. Then, astoundingly, there is the incredible voyage of the ancient Egyptians, Captain Rata and his Navigator Maui, who reached South America in 232 BC! That's 16 centuries before Zheng He and Columbus. How did they do this remarkable feat? Here is some recently arrived at understandings of the technology they used to find their way there and back home to Egypt.

Around the year 232 B.C., Captain Rata and Navigator Maui set out with a flotilla of ships from Egypt in an attempt to circumnavigate the Earth.1 On the night of August 6-7, 2001, between the hours of 11 PM and 3 AM, this writer, and fellow amateur astronomer Bert Cooper, proved in principle that Captain Rata and Navigator Maui could have known and charted their location, by longitude, most of the time during that voyage.

The Maui expedition was under the guidance of Eratosthenes, the great scientist who was also the chief librarian of the library at Alexandria. Could this voyage have demonstrated Eratosthenes' theorem that the world was round, and measured approximately 24,500 miles in circumference? One of the navigational instruments which Maui had with him was a strange looking "calculator" that he called a tanawa; such an instrument was known, in 1492, as a torquetum.

Intrigued by a photograph of the cave drawing of that tanawa in Irian Jaya, western New Guinea, I speculated that Maui must have been looking at the ecliptic to measure "lunar distance," in order to find his longitude. Maui's tanawa was of such importance, that he drew it on the cave wall with the inscription, deciphered in the 1970s by epigrapher Barry Fell: "The Earth is tilted. Therefore, the signs of half of the ecliptic watch over the south, the other (half) rise in the ascendant. This is the calculator of Maui."

Eratosthenes had just measured the circumference of the Earth, and the circumference of a sphere is the same in all directions. We know that Maui was thinking about this, because his cave drawings also include a proof of Eratosthenes' experiment to measure the Earth's circumference.
To test the hypotheses, we built a wooden torquetum and used a simplified version of it to measure the change in angular distance between the Moon and the star Altair, in the constellation Aquila (the Eagle). This success proves official dogma wrong, and proves that, in principle, Navigator Maui, during his voyage could have used tables brought from Alexandria, drawn up by Eratosthenes or his collaborators, compared those lunar distances with the distances that he measured, and come up with a good estimate of his longitude.

It is important to note that we are not claiming here that we know everything about the torquetum. We simplified our device for the proof-of-principle experiment, but we will carry out and report on more experiments, using the full instrument.

The torquetum's value, as an analogue calculator, must have been immense, because, once a planet or the Moon are not on the meridian, all "straight lines" become curves—so that calculations are difficult, even with a modern calculator. However, the 23.5-degree plane on the torquetum allows one to directly read the longitude and latitude of a planet or the Moon, relative to the ecliptic, without calculation. These data would be invaluable for predicting eclipses and occultations of various stars or planets by the Moon.

The Inspiration for the Experiment

This was intriguing! What was this "tanawa" for? Why the 23.5-degree plane, characteristic of the torquetum? It could only mean that Maui was looking at the ecliptic, the Moon, and the planets, the "wandering stars."
Of the two torquetums surviving in the world, one belonged to Nicholas of Cusa, and the other to Regiomontanus, both of whom were involved in calendar reform, including setting the date of Easter, which, along with some other religious festivals, is dated by the interaction of the lunar and solar calendars.

But what could Maui have been doing? Trying to determine longitude? The very thought was heretical. To take things out of the realm of speculation, the only solution was to build a torquetum, and see if longitude could be determined by using sightings of the Moon, with simple backyard equipment; if this succeeded, then Navigator Maui could have also succeeded.

Egyptian_map.gif


PROBABLE ROUTE OF THE EGYPTIAN VOYAGE IN 232 B.C.

Deciphered rock and cave inscriptions from the Pacific islands, western New Guinea, and Santiago, Chile, tell of an Egyptian flotilla that set sail around 232 B.C., during the reign of Ptolemy III, on a mission to circumnavigate the globe. The six ships sailed under the direction of Captain Rata and Navigator Maui, a friend of the astronomer Eratosthenes (ca. 275-194 B.C.), who headed the famous library at Alexandria. Maui's inscriptions, as deciphered in the 1970s by epigrapher Barry Fell, indicated that this was a proof-of-principle voyage, to demonstrate Eratosthenes' theorem that the world was round, and approximately 24,500 miles in circumference.

http://originalscientist.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.html
 

Montana Smith

Active member
Continued...

AD1_brss.jpg


A brass model of Maui's tanawa, constructed by Dr. Sentiel Rommel. The base (A) in the plane of the observer's horizon, is oriented so that the axis of symmetry is parallel to the meridian. (B) is the equatorial plane. (C) is the ecliptic plane (viewed from one side in Maui's drawing, hence appearing as a line).

Drawing by Matt Makowski in The Epigraphic Society Occasional Publications, Vol. 32, No. 29, Feb. 1975


Notes
1. For the story of the Rata-Maui Expedition, see "The Decipherment and Discovery of a Voyage to America in 232 B.C.," by Marjorie Mazel Hecht, 21st Century, Winter 1998-1999, p. 62; "Indian Inscriptions from the Cordilleras in Chile" found by Karl Stolp in 1885, 21st Century, Winter 1998-1999, p. 66; "On Eratosthenes, Maui's Voyage of Discovery, and Reviving the Principle of Discovery Today," by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., 21st Century, Spring 1999, p. 24; "Eratosthenes' Instruments Guided Maui's 3rd Century B.C. Voyage," by Marjorie Mazel Hecht, 21st Century, Spring 1999, p. 74; and "Maui's Tanawa: A Torquetum of 232 B.C.," by Sentiel Rommel, Ph.D., 21st Century, Spring 1999, p. 75. 2. Cited in Letters From A New World, 1992. Ed. Luciano Formisano (New York: Marsilio Publishers), pp. 38-39.
 

WillKill4Food

New member
DiscoLad said:
We are argui. . . discussing whether Chinese discovered America.
No, you were discussing whether you found it palatable that Chinese may have "discovered" America.

DiscoLad said:
If so. I told you earlier, Stoo. I just think it sounds better with Christopher Columbus. Besides, I just don't want to give anything to China, I dislike the them. (n)
Facts are not determined by "what sounds better." The Holocaust sounds indescribably horrible to me, and guess what: it happened.

The question intelligent people are asking here doesn't seem to be whether the Chinese were here before Columbus, but rather, whether what "some random Chinese dude" found constitutes a discovery.

I responded to that earlier, and similar points have been made by others.
WillKill4Food said:
And [doing the "paperwork" is] really all that matters for a "discovery," isn't it? The Chinese treasure ships and the Viking raiders may have found America, but Columbus was the one who opened it up, so to speak, so I really think it's weird to claim that the Chinese or Vikings "discovered" it, especially considering, like Lonsome said, the Native-Americans were here first.

On that note, when we speak of the "discovery" of King Tut's tomb, we talk about Carter (who found the tomb like Columbus found America), not the priests who interned the Egyptian king (which would correlate to the early natives of America) or the grave-robbers who found him first (analogous to the Vikings here).
If you want to discuss whether the evidence for a Chinese presence holds water, or whether anyone except the Native Americans "discovered" America, then fine.
However, Discolad, for you to just say "well this stuff sounds better so Imma believe it" is stupid and you surely know better if you think it through.
 

DiscoLad

New member
WillKill4Food said:
However, Discolad, for you to just say "well this stuff sounds better so Imma believe it" is stupid and you surely know better if you think it through.

I'm just tired of arguing with the likes of Stoo. :(
I was about to say more but he'll shoot that down too. . .
And that. . .
And this. . .
The past four lines too...
 

Indy's brother

New member
Montana Smith said:

Well, since this thread shows no signs of dying, I'll stoke the fire a bit and give DiscoLad a potential foothold (along with using his actual screen-name). This review of the book pretty much makes the author's theories sound less valid than Erich von Däniken's evidence of ancient aliens.

MUAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Here's a taste:

It would be nice if there were some evidence. I searched in vain for a potsherd, reliable carbon-14 date (these, Menzies tells us, are still being done), inscription, anything. Even when Menzies claims to have seen the evidence, he does not reproduce it. In one telling passage, he tells of his discovery of an inscription in Cape Verde in an unrecognizable script. Does he send it to the British Museum? A university? No. Noting that it looks like scripts on Indian banknotes, he sends it to the Bank of India, who pronounce that "it looks like Malayalam." Well, good: so it should be decipherable. Are we provided with a translation? No. Is the inscription reproduced in the book? No.
 

Stoo

Well-known member
DiscoLad said:
I'm just tired of arguing with the likes of Stoo. :(
Re: "the likes of..." Do you mean rational folks? WillKill is right. Even though you originally stated that the theory has "some good points", you are, NOW, unwilling to consider the possibilities simply because you don't like Chinese people.
DiscoLad said:
I just think it sounds better with Christopher Columbus. Besides, I just don't want to give anything to China, I dislike the them.(n)
A bit of wisdom to contemplate: "It is better to keep your mouth closed and appear dumb, than it is to open it and remove all doubt." (I don't remember the author.)
 

DiscoLad

New member
Stoo said:
(I don't remember the author.)
I was going to Google it and help you out, but came up with nothing. Tough luck. :(

EDIT: Why'd you put "Re" this time instead of just replying? Out of curiousity.
 

The Drifter

New member
DiscoLad said:
I was going to Google it and help you out, but came up with nothing. Tough luck. :(

EDIT: Why'd you put "Re" this time instead of just replying? Out of curiousity.

Mark Twain :p
 

The Drifter

New member
DiscoLad said:
Drifter!! You're screwin' up the boards with false information!! :p
Ha.

Samuel Clemens might as well have said it (if I was wrong). The man was full of great quips.
But, to be back on topic. I also wanna know why China discovering the Americas would be a bad thing. And, no; I'm not trying to put you through the ringer, Disco. I'm just curious.
 

InexorableTash

Active member
When in doubt, ascribe any witty aphorism to either Mark Twain or Benjamin Franklin. While you may not be correct, at least you'll be in good company.
 

Montana Smith

Active member
Indy's brother said:
Well, since this thread shows no signs of dying, I'll stoke the fire a bit and give DiscoLad a potential foothold (along with using his actual screen-name). This review of the book pretty much makes the author's theories sound less valid than Erich von Däniken's evidence of ancient aliens.

MUAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Here's a taste:

Even the New York Times Magazine quote on the front cover sounds dubious:

"[Menzies] make history sound like pure fun...This high-spiritedness, which infuses every page of 1421, makes his book a seductive read."

The editor of the Asian Review of Books doesn't hold back.

As a work of historical fiction, 1421: THE YEAR CHINA DISCOVERED THE WORLD would have been thought-provoking and a good yarn: intrepid Chinese admirals sailing the seven seas, meeting exotic alien peoples, boldly going where no civilized man had gone before in a sort of a 15th century Star Trek.

But, unfortunately, the book is presented as a collection of statements of fact.

In short, Menzies seems to have considerable difficulty with what one would consider normal historical and archaeological investigation and evaluation. He seems to take every inscription and written report at face value, without regard for possible hyperbole, politics, propaganda, superstition or ignorance.

That last part also applies to message boards like this.

On the up-side of pre-Columbiana discovery:

He seems to have largely missed the point. There is considerable evidence of both trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic pre-Columbian contact in the Americas. However, while these incidences are fascinating, the historical question is, regardless of who got to point X first, what happened next? Now of course, it was not Columbus's voyage that started the development we now call the Age of Exploration which in turn lead to an era of global expansion and trade that ultimately ushered in the modern age. But his landfall in the New World in 1492 (even if, contrary to Menzies's assertions, he didn't know where he was) is a convenient and not entirely inaccurate place to put the main historical milestone.

But,

If Zheng He and Co. really did visit the Americas and Australia, it was a historical dead-end. Perhaps as a result, Menzies also seems to want to demonstrate that the only reason the latter-day Western explorers set out on their voyages was that they already had accurate charts based on the Chinese "discoveries" and so already knew where they were going, and that therefore the explorers were not as "great" as we thought they are, that they did not just set sail into the unknown. But we knew that already, too.

http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/arb/article.php?article=201
 

Le Saboteur

Active member
DiscoLad said:
I was watching this thing on history channel this morning at breakfast and it was on how the Chinese discovered America before anyone else. I was tuning in and out but they said they found some metal in South Carolina...

I was going to write something else, but this comment re-caught my attention.

The Junk of yore lacked a keel and relied on a huge balanced rudder and daggerboard for both steering and lateral resistance. If it were to strike ground/rock/reef or be snapped off in heavy seas, the entire vessel would be lost; one strong wave to either port or starboard would sink the ship. Since this rudder was so immense, it extended well below the vessel and would be more susceptible to wave action.

On a related note, the Imperial Chinese Navy used square sails that are great for running with the wind, but make tacking extremely difficult to say the least. More so considering that the treasure ships were supposed to be around 438 feet long and 138 feet at the widest beam.

Why is this important? Two things -- the Cape Horn & the Cape of Good Hope. Neither is fun to sail around, and I doubt a junk without a keel would have a snowball's chance in hell of making it around either. And coming around the Cape of Good Hope, the Chinese would have been sailing directly into gale force winds (since they blow in a counter-clockwise direction).

The winds off Cape Horn can blow Eastward practically unimpeded by land, and give rise to the "roaring forties," "furious fifties," and "shrieking sixties." To round the cape, you'll have to dip to about 56° south. The extreme wind, waves, and ice around there make it highly unlikely that that any ship would without a keel or lug sails would survive.

Junks are great for river and littoral sailing, but anything that wants to attempt blue water needs a keel and lug/lanteen sails.

Oh, and metal can be moved by currents. It doesn't require human manipulation.
 
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