To wit: A 1424 Venetian nautical chart Menzies came across more than a decade ago depicts land in the Caribbean. "I know maps," says Menzies, 65, who helmed a nuclear submarine in the late '60s, "and they don't lie." What makes him think Chinese voyagers inspired the Venetian map-maker? China was the world's top naval power at the time, and Zheng He (the Sinbad of legend) is known to have made numerous ocean journeys. "It could only have been the Chinese," says Menzies, who spent 12 years researching—and expanding—his theory. Bolstered by such evidence as his observation that Peruvian roosters say "ki-ki-ki-ree," like those in Asia, instead of "cock-a-doodle-do," he now believes Chinese fleets circled the globe a century before Magellan as well.
Menzies is clearly onto something—at least in terms of capturing the public's imagination. His book has hit the New York Times bestseller list and is being made into a PBS series, and he gets e-mails from scores of fans each week. Mainstream historians aren't among them. Fifteenth-century maps, they point out, often included land masses inspired by legend, so Menzies's maps prove nothing. "This book," says Louise Levathes, author of When China Ruled the Seas, "strikes me as supposition on top of wild guess."
Like the explorers of old, Menzies—who lives in London with wife Marcella, 59, the owner of a real estate business—is certain of his course. "There's not one chance in a hundred million," he says, "that I'm wrong."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
