1434 (28 page)

Maps of the World

After 1434, European world maps changed. There was a shift away from the circular maps centered on Jerusalem, emphasizing religious subjects, to depictions of the world as it really is.

Toscanelli sent Columbus a map of the Americas; Regiomontanus advertised a world map for sale.
¹
Magellan possessed a world map. Andrea Bianco showed Florida on his Atlantic chart of 1436 (Newberry Library, Chicago); on his 1448 map, he described Brazil. Then, in 1507, Waldseemüller published his amazing world map accurately rendering North and South America.

All of these maps had something in common: they accurately depicted parts of the New World before Europeans ever reached those parts. The Waldseemüller showed the Pacific before Magellan set sail, Andrea Bianco showed Florida and Antilia fifty-six years before Columbus; the Cantino planisphere of 1502 depicted the Florida coast before Ponce de León “discovered” the place.

There is something else these maps had in common. All are copies in whole or in part of Zheng He's 1418 map. It was a logical and deliberate policy of Zheng He's mission to distribute Chinese maps of the world. For if the barbarians did not have accurate maps, how could they reach the Middle Kingdom to pay tribute?

At the Nanjing conference on Zheng He held in December 2002, Professor Liu Manchum described his research into judicial records of the early Ming dynasty, notably those of Fujian Province.
²
He came across an account of a Brazilian delegation that had reached Fujian in 1507, after a five-year voyage. The delegation bore expensive tribute, notably emeralds, and had their plenipotentiary powers engraved on a golden plate. They had found their way to China by means of a map.

Professor Liu Manchum realized that, at the time the Brazilian delegation left Brazil for China in 1502, Europeans had not reached both Brazil and China by sea.
³
Consequently, the map that guided them from Brazil to China could not have been European. He then searched Zheng He's records and found accounts of his fleets reaching the Americas. He concluded that Zheng He's fleets had reached Brazil before 1434, after which Chinese overseas voyages were prohibited by the emperor. Professor Manchum intended to write a book claiming that Zheng He, not Columbus, discovered the Americas. He then learned of my book
1421
and decided to postpone his own.

Brazil also appears on a Javanese map published before Europeans reached Java. In an April, 1512–letter to King Manuel of Portugal, Alfonso de Albuquerque, the first European to reach Malacca, refers to a world map he has acquired from a Javanese pilot and kept aboard his flagship, the
Fiore de la Mar
. (The
Fiore de la Mar
sank before reaching Portugal.):

Albuquerque does not find it necessary to point out that when Europeans first reached the East, the Javanese (and the Chinese) already knew the locations of Portugal and Brazil on a world chart. His letter reveals details of the interiors of kingdoms, implying authentic knowledge. Manuel Stock, to whom I am indebted for this information, has also found a reference to Brazil on a map dated 1447.
⁵
The Duchess of Medina Sidonia's Library at Sanlucar de Barrameda has maps of Brazil before Dias or Cabral.

In addition to their knowledge of Brazil and a route to the Spice Islands—before European explorers set off for such places—both the Venetians and the Portuguese knew of Australia by 1516 at the latest. Giovanni di Fontana, the Venetian doctor, in 1450 already knew of Australia, the Indian Ocean, and America.
⁶

The National Library of Australia holds a letter, dated 1516, written by a Venetian, Andrea Corsali, who had traveled aboard a Portuguese ship. The letter, written from Cochin, is addressed to the doge of Venice. Corsali describes his voyage around the Cape of Good Hope as far as New Guinea and Timor. He illustrates the Southern Cross with sufficient accuracy to prove he must have seen it. The letter asserts that the Portuguese knew of large lands to the south called India Australis (Southern), later referred to as Java la Grande.

Professor Jaime Cortesão, in “The Pre-Columbian Discovery of America,” describes the first Portuguese voyage to Brazil and includes a report to King John of Portugal. The King is advised to “please command that they bring you the world map of Pedro Vaz Bisagudo. And Your Highness will be able to see on it the position of this land. Notwithstanding this map does not declare whether this land [Brazil] is inhabited or not. It is an old world-map, but the Mina is registered there.”
⁷

So here we have a declaration that Brazil was on a world map before the first European expedition there. This squares with Brazil's appearance on Andrea Bianco's map of 1448 and is further proof that the Southern and Western Hemispheres were documented on maps long before European voyages of exploration started.

If, as I claim, Zheng He's 1434 visit provided maps of the world to the barbarians in order to enable them to pay tribute, then the Venetians and the Portuguese would have had knowledge of the New World by 1434.
⁸
And if the Venetians knew of the New World by 1434, we would expect them to have set sail for it shortly thereafter.

The voyage that is generally accepted as the first to Canada was the ill-fated expedition of Miguel Côrte-Real in 1502. Côrte-Real reached the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. When he arrived there, however, his sailors found a gilded sword hilt and silver trinkets of Venetian manufacture at a native village in Labrador.
⁹

Croatian Voyages West

In 1434, the Venetian Empire was at its peak. Venice controlled the Croatian coast. Dalmatian sailors crewed Venetian ships, and Venetian pilots were trained at Perast (see chapters 7 and 13). According to Croatian archives, which Louis Adamic describes in a 1972 publication of
Svetu Magazine
,
¹⁰
several Croatian merchant vessels foundered off the Carolina coast in 1449. They were said to be sailing to China via America.

This story is repeated in the East when Dalmatian ships accompanied the Chinese back to the East and “discovered” a number of Pacific islands to which they gave Dalmatian names—names that were changed to Spanish and Portuguese ones after the First World War.

As noted in my book
1421,
Columbus, Magellan, Albuquerque and Cabral all acknowledged that they had possessed charts of the Caribbean islands, South America, the Pacific, and Brazil, respectively. Toscanelli had sent Columbus a chart following his meeting with the Chinese delegation. Columbus's records, which were acquired by the family of the duchess of Medina-Sidonia, provide ample evidence that Columbus had voyaged to the Americas before 1492.
¹¹
Dr. Marino Ruggiero's book, cites evidence that the pope financed a Columbus voyage to the Americas before 1485.
¹²

All of the above confirms that the Venetians and the Portuguese
understood world geography after 1434 and before European voyages of exploration started. Surely they received this information from the Chinese.

Zheng He's delegation also provided astronomical knowledge to Alberti, Regiomontanus, and Toscanelli, which Regiomontanus incorporated into his ephemeris tables and Alberti used for multiple purposes. Regiomontanus's tables were issued to Portuguese navigators in 1474 and later to Columbus and Vespucci, who used them to calculate longitude. These tables also enabled sailors to calculate latitude at the meridian passage of the sun by using declination tables. This method was successfully applied by Dias, who accurately determined the latitude of the Cape of Good Hope at 35°20' S.
¹³

So not only did Zheng He's delegation show the way to the New World but they provided Europeans with the knowledge to enable them to calculate their latitude and longitude to reach the New World and return home safely.

The transfer of knowledge went further than maps. Nicholas of Cusa was the first European to blow apart Aristotelean and Ptolomaic theories of the universe. He revolutionized knowledge by postulating that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the solar system, that the earth and planets traveled in an elliptical orbit around it. To reach this conclusion, I submit that both Nicholas of Cusa and Toscanelli used the Chinese astronomical calendar that Zheng He's delegation presented to Pope Eugenius IV.

Regiomontanus's ephemeris tables, with the positions of sun, moon, the five planets, and the stars, contained no information that was not already in the Chinese astronomical calendar, the
Shoushi
. In the forty years after the Chinese visit of 1434, knowledge of the universe was changed as fundamentally as knowledge of the earth.

As Professor Zinner explains, Copernicus could have learned about and been influenced by Regiomontanus. Copernicus studied at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (1491–1494) and then in Italy, mostly in Bologna (1496–1503).
¹⁴
At that time, Cracow was the European university where the teachings of Regiomontanus had gained the surest foothold.
¹⁵
Copernicus's interest in sine tables may have been inspired
by Regiomontanus's
Tabulae diretorium
, which was printed in 1490 and later found in Cracow.

Zinner describes the connection:

The use of sine tables and spherical trigonometry to meet the need for precise calculations with observational instruments had all been developed by Guo Shoujing two centuries earlier. Yet Guo Shoujing is not mentioned in European biographies of famous mathematicians.
¹⁷

Zinner continues: (p 184)