Most Helpful Customer Reviews
366 of 406 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A big hoax by a charming liar, March 21, 2004
Gavin Menzies is a charming, seductive, inventive story teller, but his book is just an elaborate literary hoax, and belongs on the fiction list. Gavin claims he has real, tangible evidence. Not true. Just check out for yourself some of the sources he cites. His own sources do not support the claims he makes. For example, at pp 201-2(hardcover) Gavin writes of a pulley "for hoisting sails" found on the beach at Neahkahnie, Oregon, about 60 miles south of me. I drove down there and spoke with the curator of the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum. He had talked with Gavin in 2002 and Wayne told Gavin the pulley had already been carbon dated (in 1993) to 1590; and, the wax was beeswax for candles, prized and common cargo for the Spanish trade galleons that traveled between the Philippines and the west coast of North America, on a regular basis, between 1564 and 1815. The pulley was from one of those Manila galleons. In his book (page520) Gavin lists as a source "Tales of the Neahkahnie Treasure", prepared by the Nehalem Valley Historical Society Treasure Committee, 1991, published by the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum. It clearly states (p5) the beeswax, not as Gavin states "paraffin wax" a hydrocarbon product, had been carbon dated to 1681. Further, a pollen study of the beeswax had revealed its source was northern Luzon in the Philippines where there was a certain variety of shrub the bees visited for pollen. Gavin ignores the inconvenient facts, hides them from the reader, and writes as if he is just waiting for the lab to confirm the finding of some possible real Chinese evidence. It's not possible, as Gavin well knows, the lab work has long since been done and it does not fit his time frame. For another example consider the Bimini road story. Gavin devotes a short chapter to this (pp265-277). The Bimini road is a long standing hoax in its own right. Gavin claims all the experts agree it is man made. Not true. He only cites one "expert", David D. Zink, who was not a scientist, rather a former English teacher, a Cayce discple, intrigued with megalithic (big rock) structures and with the origins of myths. All the real experts know it is a natural geologic formation. Just by coincidence I noticed a timely article by Dr. Eugene A. Shinn, a geologist with USGS, in the Jan/Feb 2004 Skeptical Inquirer, pp38-44; "Natural submerged beachrock off the island of Bimini in the Bahamas has been deemed a remmant of Atlantis by the faithful since the 1960s. In spite of geological research demonstrating the stones are natural, 'true believers' continue to be drawn by the strong 'force field'." Take a look at that article and see if you can still believe the nonsense Gavin writes. I could go on and on. Open any page and you will encounter nonsense. Gavin cites sources to be sure, but, if you take the time to read the claimed source material, you will invariably find it doesn't support what he writes. Gavin is desperate for some real, tangible evidence, and he simply ignores or misstates his own source material, and writes whatever he wishes, whatever he thinks may convince the reader his grand fantasy is true. The book is a hoax and belongs on the fiction list.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
93 of 102 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A terrible book on an interesting topic, July 5, 2006
The subject of this book, the Chinese exploratory voyages of the early 15th century, is an interesting one, and questions remain as to exactly how far they got and what they did. Unfortunately, there is little factual information in this book that is not to be found in other sources, and the novel claims are poorly substantiated. All too often, the "facts" cited are wrong, the nature of the argument Menzies means to make is unclear, or the evidence that he claims to exist is not actually produced. Let me illustrate from some of Menzies linguistic arguments. He claims that the Squamish language (which he mistakenly locates on Vancouver Island rather than on the coast of the mainland of British Columbia) contains no less than forty words that are identical with Chinese words. He does not cite any of the Squamish words and cites only three Chinese words. Not one of the three alleged Chinese words actually occurs in Chinese. At another point, he cites the fact that there is a village in Peru whose people speak Chinese. Aside from the questionable source of this claim, even if true, what would it prove? To constitute evidence that the Chinese had visited Peru prior to Columbus, he would have to show that the people in this village had spoken Chinese hundreds of years ago. He does not even assert this, much less provide evidence of it.
Menzies' own account of his research techniques leaves one gasping with incredulity at his incompetence. He claims to have inspected a stone inscription in the Cape Verde Islands in a language unknown to him. Thinking that it might be from India, he sends a photograph of it to the Bank of India. The Bank responds that the inscription is in Malayalam. In response to Menzies' query as to what Malayalam might be, according to Menzies the bank responds that it is a language now spoken by only a few people but was more widely used in the 15th century. In point of fact, Malayalam is the principal language of the state of Kerala and is spoken by over 35 million people. It is one of the 22 languages listed in Schedule 8 of the Constitution of India. I am hard put to believe that the Bank of India told him that a language of which any educated Indian is well aware is spoken by only a few people, but if they did, it is stunning that he never bothered to make any further enquiry about it. Simply googling for Malayalam produces 185,000 hits. His own account reveals Menzies to be incompetant as a researcher. Incidentally, he never reveals what the inscription says, assuming that he ever found out. You'd think it would be relevant. As it stands, we are apparently to assume that the only way an inscription in Malayalam might have ended up in the Cape Verde islands is by having been written by someone travelling with Zheng He. It is at least as likely that a ship from India was responsible.
In the areas with which I am familiar, not a single argument is even plausible, much less convincing. Menzies' website, which is supposed to provide details that could not be included in the book as well as new information, is no improvement. The missing 37 Chinese words and 40 Squamish words, for instance, are not to be found on the website. This book is junk, pure and simple. If you want to learn about the voyages of Zheng He, read Louise Levathes' When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405-1433. Unlike Menzies, Levathes knows what she is talking about.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
119 of 135 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
He Really Believes It..., September 7, 2005
I was not expecting to believe all the claims in this book, though I was intrigued by the possibility of unexpected new findings about the age of exploration. The Europeans were clearly not the first to sail great distances and discover new lands. You would have once been dismissed as a crackpot for claiming that the Vikings reached the Americas 500 years before Columbus, but that's now accepted history. There's also plenty of proof that the Chinese were regularly sailing to the Middle East and East Africa centuries before Europeans could even leave their own shores. But this book, claiming that the Chinese momentously and influentially circumnavigated the globe in 1421-1423, is a disaster of hyperbolic claims and selective interpretation of historical evidence. That's because Gavin Menzies started with an idea, compiled evidence that seemed to point in the right direction, and convinced himself that he was finding mindboggling breakthroughs. But there is little reason for us to be as convinced as he is.
You can see plenty of other reviews (here and elsewhere) debunking the many, many research errors committed by Menzies. Most of these criticisms are more believable to me than Menzies' assertions. On a higher level I'll add that Menzies is an unabashed member of the "incredible coincidence" school of history. In just a couple of examples, among multitudes, he claims that the presence of Asiatic birds in South America means "the conclusion is inescapable" of visiting Chinese sailors; or an ice-free depiction of Antarctica on a map "confirm[s]" that the Chinese were there during a January. Menzies also unquestioningly accepts Chinese court histories as accurate, without considering the possibility that they may be distorted by embellishments or state propaganda. The same goes for his faithful belief in the accuracy of folklore and oral histories. An especially damaging methodological error is that Menzies doesn't question the alleged years of origin of any of the maps he examines, which are of course mindblowingly and impossibly old. The Piri Reis map is the most important example, as there is much scholarly dispute (unacknowledged by Menzies) over whether this map really dates from 1513.
There are surely many mysteries about the age of exploration, as compelling pieces of physical and anecdotal evidence give us plenty of reason to doubt accepted histories. But what makes this book such a failure is that Menzies has one grand answer for all unsolved mysteries - a single momentous Chinese expedition. Some other reviewers have made telling comparisons to the farcical "Chariots of the Gods" which does the same thing, except with spaceships and aliens.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
