Chapter 22 – Tragedy on the high seas: Zheng He’s fleets destroyed by a tsunami

Chapter summary:

NEW ZEALAND
In 2003, Cedric Bell, a marine engineer, visited 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 southeast coast of the South Island. 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 and smelters to make iron. So we embarked on a series of independent tests on one barrack block, one wreck and one smelter that he had found.

Accelerometer mass spectrography and carbon dating tests were conducted. To our astonishment the iron dated from 352BC to 19 AD; mortar 769-983 AD: slag 1115-1270 AD: pipi 1220-1420: further mortar 1675 – 1945 AD: and wood 1520 – 1820 AD. Cedric Bell’s conclusion that this smelter had been worked before Europeans arrived, by an unknown people (the Maoris did not smelt iron) had been proved correct, save that the smelter had been in use for some two thousand years. 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.

When Cedric Bell returned to New Zealand in 2004 he found yet more startling evidence – not least that wrecked junks were to be found impaled upside down high up on the cliffs of South Island. Some wrecks were charred; some were upside down and tilted as if a giant had hammered them into the cliffs, some lay nearly one hundred feet above the sea. The only feasible explanation for such widespread destruction was a huge tsunami. As New Zealand lies on a fault line, the tsunami and forest fires could have been caused by a seismic event but an earthquake would not explain how the wrecks had been turned to charcoal before being impaled in the cliffs. Aborigines in Australia and the Maoris in New Zealand both reported a comet being the cause of the ‘mystic fires’. Then in November 2003 researchers announced they had found that a comet had impacted the sea between Campbell Island and New Zealand South Island, blasting a crater twenty kilometres across.

The comet, named Mahuika for the Maori God of Fire, hit 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.

OREGON
In 2007 Mr Dave Cotner emailed me describing his finding of what he believed were the remains of a very old Chinese junk buried about 130 deep in sand dunes some 1,600 yards from the ocean. Like Cedric Bell, Mr Cotner had made his discovery using the Magnetic Anomaly System. The wreck is in William Tugman State Park, part of the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, at approximately 43° 30′ N where the Caribbean explorers Juan Rodriguez, Cabrillo and Bartolome Ferrello had reported a wrecked Chinese junk in 1542. There is a mass of further corroborative evidence in the area.

PERU
We have received a great many emails relating to pre-Columbian presence of Chinese people and of wrecked junks in South America, especially in Peru. Zheng He’s Fleets would have traded with the civilisations then existing in South America. The people living along the Pacific coast of southern Ecuador, Peru and northern Chile have an endless bounty of fish, mussels, clams, crabs, birds and sea lions for food so it is not surprising that this stretch of coast has produced rich human civilisations since the dawn of time.

Peru is awash with evidence of Chinese visitors over the past two thousand years. There are still one hundred villages in the Ancash province of Peru which retain their Chinese names to this day. Inca people have east Asian admixture in their blood to such an extent that their DNA profile could almost be called Chinese. Peru appears on Chinese world maps long before the 1418 map and before Zheng He’s nautical chart. Diego Ribero’s master chart of the world of 1529 shows the coast of Peru in great detail with an inscription which describes Peru as “Province and Cities of Chinese silk.”

So it seems safe to assume that Zheng He knew of Peru before he set sail. He would have visited ports where his fleets could trade.

The Inca conquest has always seemed to me extraordinary. They arrived from nowhere around 1400 – 1450 and within 150 years had conquered an Empire in South America about as large as the Roman Empire – and created a system of roads and bridges totalling 30, 000 kilometres. At its greatest extent the Inca Empire stretched 4300 kilometres north to south – an empire of some 20 million – only exceeded in extent and numbers by the Chinese. Why did all the civilisations of South America, save for the Incas, collapse in the 1440’s and four decades after that? In my view the Mahuika tsunami was responsible – besides destroying the Chinese fleet, it wrecked the rich cities of the coast, leaving the mountain peoples, the Incas, to take over.

What is certain is that the Mahuika Tsunami destroyed huge Chinese fleets in New Zealand, South and East Australia, in the Indian Ocean, along the east coast of South Africa, and along the Pacific coasts of North and South America. It was a catastrophe from which China never recovered. There were to be no more great voyages. China withdrew from the world stage to mourn her losses. The great adventure was over.

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