1434 (30 page)

Alberti knew every branch of mathematics—geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music. In
De pictura,
his system of perspective and human proportions constitute the technical foundations of Renaissance painting and sculpture, introducing to art ideas and values that had far-reaching cultural implications for the age. Alberti's work covered painting, sculpture, architecture, aesthetics, mathematics, cartography, surveying, mechanics, cryptography, literature, and moral philosophy.

Burckhardt regarded the Renaissance pioneered by Alberti as the first age, the genesis of modern European civilization and culture.

Europe Becomes Mistress of the World

It was the combination of a massive transfer of new knowledge from China to Europe and the fact that it came in one short period that sparked the revolution we call the Renaissance.

Not only did kings, captains, and navigators have, for the first time, maps that showed them the true shape of the world, but they also acquired instruments and tables that showed them how to reach those new lands by the quickest route and how to return home in safety.

When they arrived in the New World, an international trading system created by Chinese, Arabs, and Indians awaited them—one that accounted for half the world's gross national product. This system was based upon the transfer of Chinese manufactured goods in exchange for raw materials from the rest of the world. The trading pattern had been built up by thousands of sea voyages over hundreds of years honed by centuries of experience of monsoons and trade winds. When China left the world stage, this trading system was Europe's for the taking.

Europeans found not only rich new lands but the results of sophisticated transplanting and genetic engineering pioneered by the Chinese—maize in Southeast Asia, which originated in America
²⁷
cotton in the Azores, the result of cross-pollination of Indian and American strains; sweet potatoes from South America, which fed indigenous peoples across the Pacific to New Zealand; rice taken from China to Brazil and to “New England”; orchards of citrus trees in the Carolinas, Florida, Peru, West Africa, and Australia.
²⁸

The same went for animals: vast snail factories in the Paraná River of South America; Asian chickens across South America; American turkeys in India (
de l'inde-dinde
); Chinese horses in North America; fish farms in New Zealand. Plants that have fed (maize), clothed (cotton), and housed (coconuts) the world for the past six hundred years had been transplanted or transhipped between continents before Europeans arrived in the New World.

Raw materials had been mined and shipped across continents. Europeans found worked gold mines in Australia, iron mines in New Zealand and Nova Scotia, copper in North America, and a sophisticated steel industry in Nigeria.

New methods of cartography enabled Europeans to map the fabulous riches of the New World. Printing enabled news of these exotic discoveries to spread far and wide—not least amongst the newly emergent, brash, competing European nation-states.

At the same moment, Europeans learned of Chinese gunpowder coupled with advanced Chinese weapons—bazookas, mortars, exploding shells, rockets, and cannons. The poor Incas, armed with their feather tunics and clubs, were mown down by the brutal, ruthless, but incredibly brave band of conquistadores under Pizarro. Atahualpa stood no chance; neither did Montezuma. As a result of Pizarro's massacre, Spain gained access to the world's most valuable silver mines, which she grabbed.

Knowledge of printing spread the riches of the New World accurately and rapidly. With gunpowder weapons European rivalry took on a new potency and urgency, resulting in frenetic competition to conquer the New World.

The same dramatic changes can be seen in Europe, not least in food production, mining, and processing of raw materials. The introduction of rice in the Po Valley in the 1440s depended for its success on the aqueducts, canals, and lock systems designed by Leonardo da Vinci and Francesco di Giorgio, coupled with the new Chinese bucket pumps that enabled water to be transferred in a timely and economic way across the rice fields.

Milan's building boom was assisted by harnessing the River Po—through the use of “Chinese” locks and feeder canals. Higher firing temperatures for kilns and smelters were achieved with compressors powered by water turbines. Corn could now be ground by new efficient windmills whose designs had been developed over the centuries by Chinese engineers.

In art and architecture the new rules of perspective explained by the rational mathematics of Alberti and perfected by the genius of Leonardo da Vinci could be applied to create all manner of new buildings—which could be accurately and quickly explained and described by printing. These new ideas spread out from Florence like a forest fire.

Perhaps the most important single transfer of knowledge from China to Europe was that of how the universe worked. Greek and Roman concepts that the earth was at the center and sun and planets rotated around it were replaced by a rational system explained by mathematics. Man now could, and did, look at everything anew and examine his place in
the world. This new spirit of inquiry was applied to every aspect of life—in physics, mathematics, science, and technology as well as the arts and religion. Everything could be explained without the blessing of the Church. Thought was freed from centuries of religious dogma.

In the double page diagram in color insert 3, the “inventions” and discoveries of Toscanelli, Alberti, Nicholas of Cusa, Regiomontanus, Taccola, Pisanello, Andrea Bianco, Francesco di Giorgio, and Fontana are shown. As may be seen, they produced little of consequence before 1434 and then came an explosion of new ideas, inventions, and theories.

The transfer of intellectual knowledge in 1434 was between a people who had created their civilization over thousands of years, and a Europe that was just emerging from the thousand-year stagnation following the fall of the Roman Empire. The Chinese seeds fell on very fertile ground.

Until now the Renaissance has been portrayed as a rebirth of the classical European civilizations of Greece and Rome. Chinese influence has been ignored. While Greece and Rome were unquestionably important, in my submission the transfer of Chinese intellectual knowledge was the spark that set the Renaissance ablaze.

It is time for an agonizing reappraisal of the Eurocentric view of history.

I
n 2003, Cedric Bell, a marine engineer, visited his son and family on New Zealand's South Island. Magnetic anomaly surveys he made during his stay threw up an astonishing possibility: a considerable number of junks had been wrecked on the island's southeast coast. Survivors had apparently managed to get ashore and had built stone barracks as living quarters, had sown rice fields and set up fish farms for food and smelters to make iron. Cedric believed an entire Chinese fleet had been wrecked by a colossal storm.

Cedric Bell's report was so far-reaching that at first I was incredulous—my initial reaction was to do nothing. However, a meeting with Mr. Bell convinced me that he was a disciplined practical engineer not given to exaggeration or flights of fancy. So we agreed to embark on a series of independent tests on one barracks block, one wreck, and one smelter; if anyone could disprove his results, we would not publicize his work.

The barracks block was the ruins Cedric had scanned under an Akaroa cricket grounds, where satellite photographs taken in midsummer had shown the grass above the buried walls to be parched; the walls were outlined when looked at from space.

We retained an independent company, GPR Geophysical Services of Auckland, to carry out a ground-penetrating radar survey there. These corroborated Cedric's work, save that one of the walls seemed too
straight to be true. We asked the local authorities for underground plans of buried service pipes beneath the cricket pitch. The dead straight wall was one of these, but the barracks' other three outer and interior walls were not. Cedric Bell was vindicated on that one.

We chose the smelter at Le Bons Bay, near Akaroa, because it was on public land, easily visible and accessible, and near iron ore deposits. Moreover, it had a sophisticated design: two streams powered a water turbine, which in turn powered air compressors to raise the firing temperature of the ore. There was a storage house nearby. Accelerometer mass spectrography and carbon-dating tests were conducted by Rafter Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory and by Waikato University (both of international standing and previously unknown to me or Cedric Bell) on different old buildings. The dating certificates can be seen on our website. Cedric Bell's conclusion that this smelter had been worked before Europeans arrived, by an unknown people (the Maoris did not smelt iron), was proved correct; smelting by sophisticated methods with high firing temperatures had been in use before the Maori.

Research by Dr. R. N. Holdaway corroborated this. Asian rat bones he had found in New Zealand were shown by carbon dating to be two thousand years old. As rats cannot swim more than a few yards, humans must have brought them.

The wreck selected for analysis was also in Le Bons Bay, not far from the smelter, covered by sand and underwater other than at low tide. Analysis carried out by GPR showed two foreign objects of the same size and the same position as Cedric Bell's magnetic anomaly survey with the same shapes. (Results are on our website.)

Cedric Bell's survey of a barracks, a smelter, and a wreck had by now been investigated by several methods by different reputable organizations whose results had in broad terms corroborated his work. Their findings disclosed that a sophisticated people who arrived by junks had lived and worked in New Zealand long before the Maoris, the Europeans, or, indeed, before the arrival of Zheng He's fleets.

Our next research was into the Maori people. Who were they? Dr. Geoffrey Chambers and his team, notably Adele Whyte, had conducted
DNA tests to find the answer. They concluded that the Maori mitochondrial DNA was Chinese from Taiwan, as the foreign minister of New Zealand, Dr. Winston Peters, agreed in his address at the meeting in Malaysia of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on July 25, 2006: “My point is very simple, that the indigenous people of New Zealand came from China…. DNA is irrefutable evidence.”

We now hope the New Zealand government will moderate its approach in representing New Zealand's early history: in particular that sites currently off limits to the New Zealand people will be opened; and that human bones that predate the Maoris' arrival now in possession of the New Zealand government will be DNA-tested. I have offered to pay for these tests, and a distinguished professor of genetics at Oxford University with a worldwide reputation has agreed to conduct them. All we now await is government agreement.

Cedric Bell Returns to New Zealand

After tests on his earlier finds had been concluded, Cedric Bell returned to New Zealand in 2004 and found yet more startling evidence—including wrecked junks impaled upside down high on the cliffs of South Island. The outline of the wooden hull was clearly visible. So was the concrete hull lining, which was proved by analysis to be manmade from a mixture of burnt lime and volcanic ash. Marks were found in the cement where it had been bonded to the hull by rice glue. Some wrecks were charred; some were upside down and tilted as if a giant had hammered them into the cliffs; some rose nearly one hundred feet above the sea. The cliffs sometimes disgorged cannonballs, counterweights, and miscellaneous objects including the remains of a ship's bell, a laminated knife, and a very old Buddhist brooch inscribed with the Chinese word for “mountain.”

The only feasible explanation for such widespread destruction was a tsunami. Great waves had smashed the junks into the cliffs, leaving them impaled when the seas subsided. We learned that Professor Ted
Bryant of Wollongong University had published in a carefully documented book,
Tsunami: The Underrated Hazard,
his findings that New Zealand's South Island had been devastated by fires and by a tsunami sometime between 1410 and 1490—dates that he obtained from den-drochronography of the trees. Professor Bryant's book was published well before my own
1421
. As New Zealand lies on a fault line, the tsunami and forest fires could have been caused by a seismic event, as many New Zealand experts, including Dr. J. R. Goff, have argued. However, an earthquake would not explain how the wrecks had been turned to charcoal before being impaled in the cliffs, for it would not cause massively hot fires in the ocean from whence the junks had come.

Professor Bryant's book describes how the Aborigines in Australia and the Maoris in New Zealand both reported a comet being the cause of the “mystic fires.” Both Chinese and Mayan astronomers describe a large blue comet seen in Canis Minor for twenty-six consecutive days in June 1430, a date compatible with Professor Bryant's den-drochronography. Then in November 2003 Dallas Abbott and her team at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, New York, announced that they had found that the comet had impacted the sea between Campbell Island and the South Island, blasting a crater twelve kilometers across.

Let us now imagine a fleet of junks sailing north after leaving Campbell Island, homeward bound. Two days out from Auckland Island, the lookout would have reported a group of low-lying islands right ahead (the Snares Islands at 48°10' N, 166°40' E). The fleet would have to alter course to round the islands: one half turns east, the other west, and the two halves are some twenty miles apart centered on position 48°10' N, 166° 55' E.

Then comes the comet, twenty-six times brighter than the sun, its hundred decibels screaming, blowing out the eardrums of the sailors. Its colossal heat sets their skin on fire. Then the comet hits the ocean some sixty miles south of the combined fleet. Gigantic waves, more than six hundred feet high, toss the ships about like matchsticks. The masts and rigging are afire, fanned by four-hundred-mile-an-hour
winds. Here is the extract that Dallas Abbott, Andrew Matzen, and Stephen F. Peckar of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and Edward A. Bryant, of the University of Wollongong, Australia, submitted to the meeting of the Geological Society of America in the fall of 2003:

In more recent correspondence, the Lamont-Doherty team has narrowed the dating to 1430–1455. The impact fireball was seen over 1,000
miles away. The tsunami was more than 220 meters (700 feet) high when it reached Stewart Island farther north (beach sand had been carried to that height) and 130 meters (400 feet) when it reached Australia. The wind's maximum velocity would have been 403 miles per hour (Lamont-Doherty calculations). Increased pressure caused by the comet's kinetic energy would have created a Coriolis effect on wind direction. Waves radiating outward from the impact zone running up New Zealand's south coast smashed the ships into the cliffs; many others were hurled ashore on either side of the Tasman Strait in southeast Australia.

Cedric Bell's full report on the junks impaled on New Zealand cliffs is contained on our website www.1421.tv under the heading “Independent Reports” and includes a full schedule of wrecks with the latitude and longitude of each. The eighty wrecks he had discovered by 2004 are from three principal locations: at the Catlins on New Zealand's southeast coast; farther north around Moeraki; and north again around the Banks Peninsula.

The wrecks on Australia's south and east coast can be briefly summarized as follows. The one on the east side of King Island has brass pins similar to those in the Ruapuke wreck. After storms the wreck on the east coast of Tasmania in Storm Bay disgorges Hong Wu (Zhu Di's father) coins. The first settlers to reach Kangaroo Island found feral Chinese pigs. Other feral pigs around Warrnambool have similar flea characteristics (Asian and European pigs have very different fleas). There are a further three unidentified wrecks between Warrnambool and Kangaroo Island. The stretch of coast named the Coorong includes a number of old “Chinaman's” wells. According to the aboriginal people who live along this stretch of coast, foreign people settled among them after a shipwreck that occurred long before Europeans arrived.

The tsunami from the Mahuika impact position would have carried wrecked junks towards Australia. As they approached the coast to the north of the Bass Strait, the coriolis winds would have driven them through the Bass Straits dumping two on Flinders Island, one on the east coast of King Island near the Elephant River, another on the Warrnambool coast, and on Kangaroo Island. Wrecks here are com
patible with known facts about the Mahuika comet and resultant tsunami, as are Cedric Bell's discoveries in New Zealand's South Island.

Evidence of the Tsunami: a Wrecked Chinese Fleet in Oregon and British Columbia

On January 31, 2007, Mr. Dave Cotner, an eighty-two-year-old American citizen, e-mailed me from his home in Las Vegas, describing his finding of what he believed were the remains of a very old Chinese junk buried about 130 deep in sand dunes inland some 1,600 yards from the ocean. Like Cedric Bell, Mr. Cotner had made his discovery using the magnetic anomaly system.

I met Mr. Cotner in Las Vegas the following February 20. Together we studied the plans of his findings. The next day, we flew to Coos Bay, Oregon, hired a car and explored the site.

The wreck is in William Tugman State Park, part of the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. The location, at approximately 43°30' N, is where the Caribbean explorers Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and Bartolome Ferrello had reported a wrecked Chinese junk in 1542. Dave Cotner's MAS survey had shown the wreck of a seven-masted wooden ship broken in half lying on its side, listed about twenty degrees to port under twenty to forty feet of sand at about seventy-five feet above sea level. The anchor extends to the northwest of the wreck. When Mr. Cotner originally found the wreck in 1985, he dug an eight-foot hole, put in a pump, and extracted wood. He found the wreck to be a very odd shape, resembling a barge constructed of large (twenty-four inches square) timbers for a keel running its full length. The position of the anchor indicated that it was in use when disaster struck. The position of the anchor relative to the wreck showed that the junk must have been carried sideways to be dumped sixteen hundred yards inshore at an elevation of seventy-five feet by a wave at about that height.

We based our planning on the assumption that the tsunami responsible was a result of the Mahuika comet and therefore would have hit
the Oregon coast on its passage from New Zealand on a bearing of about 040. The beach shallows gradually into the ocean over several hundred yards—an ideal condition for a tsunami run-up—there are no outlying islands to blunt the force of the impact.