Where the Chinese Settled when They Discovered America
Having just finished the fascinating book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies, I was in the mood for some corroborating tales of China’s lost history of discovery. I have had this book on my shelf for quite a while, and so with whetted appetite, I devoured Paul Chiasson’s take on this alternative view of history and truly enjoyed it.
I was most impressed by Chiasson’s personal tone in this book, as he seeks to pursue a local mystery as a therapeutic distraction whilst battling the painful effects of HIV. Especially in contrast to Menzies’ approach, Chiasson’s investigation is quiet and intensely personal, taking the reader along through his library halls and up his mountain hikes on this voyage of discovery.
Although not a scholar and certainly an amateur hiker and even researcher, Chiasson brings his own expertise (engineering) to the table, which helps justify some of the identifying claims he makes while staring a heap of rubble. These claims, backed by several years of research (especially into what the rubble is not), become increasingly plausible as he progresses through the stages of discovery. His conclusions based upon the silence of history, Chinese architecture, and local native culture and folklore all seem to point to the single possibility that Chinese travelers not only landed upon Cape Breton Island (Nova Scotia) in the decades or centuries before the Portuguese and French, but also settled there.
It was also exciting to read about how Chiasson and Menzies met and collaborated in the months following Chiasson’s initial completion of his Seven Cities manuscript. To “meet” the authors in this way (and to get a sense of what the reaction to 1421 must have been like back in 2003) was very helpful in my own understanding of how these historical theories have affected the cultural mindsets both here and in Europe since their initial mainstream revelation a decade and a half ago (clearly, the Chinese have known about it for far longer than that!). That Menzies would find enemies in the fallout of his book was obvious; that some of those enemies made threats on his life was shocking.
I have no deep love affair with Christopher Columbus or the Portuguese, and I barely know a hint of my own European roots, so hearing that we all might have been hoodwinked by centuries of history doesn’t really bother me, it excites me. And if the Chinese are the ones who prove to be the history’s greatest navigators and discoverers, all the better! How wonderful to know that their history before closing in on themselves and purposefully forgetting their own past was vibrant and global. I don’t know how such revelations would offend people so much, though I suppose we all have our own little gods.
I highly recommend this book, but it’s a far better read when taken immediately following 1421.
©2017 E.T.
As an archaeologist who has visited the site of Chiasson’s mountain-top ‘city,’ I can state unequivocally that there was no Chinese city on Kelly’s Mountain. The walled city is a product of a well-documented 1952 forest fire on Kelly’s Mountain, the walls being pushed up by bulldozers for a fire break. The ‘suburbs’ outside the city were simply test sites for a proposed gravel quarry in the late 1980s. And the road that took “hundreds of men and many years to build” was actually made by one man on a bulldozer in five hours in the fight against that 1952 forest fire. These facts were quickly revealed after the publication of Chiasson’s book. There is too much fantasy and sloppy history in the book to hold up. It is an entertaining read, but I feel it does a disservice to the remarkable voyages made by Zheng He to the Middle East and the east coast of Africa.