Ken Ringle, writing in the Wash Post (Jan. 12, 2004):

If the Chinese discovered America before Columbus , wouldn't they have hungered an hour later to discover someplace else? This is only one of the galaxy of intriguing questions provoked by Gavin Menzies, a former submarine commander in the British Royal Navy, who since retirement has submerged himself in the maps and mysteries of China 's short-lived and little-known age of nautical exploration.

Last year he hit the New York Times bestseller list with a 550-page book asserting (with a fair amount of rhetorical arm-waving) that a fleet of Chinese treasure ships led by a eunuch admiral named Zheng He reached the New World 71 years ahead of Columbus and, just for good measure, circumnavigated the globe, discovered how to calculate longitude and maybe even stumbled upon Antarctica as well.

Saturday at the Omni Shoreham, as part of the American Historical Association's annual meeting, Menzies defended his sensational thesis before a politely skeptical audience by proclaiming yet more groundbreaking developments in the story. New genetic studies, he asserted, show the Chinese colonized everywhere from New Zealand to Oregon and left traces of their DNA in such isolated locales as the Azores, Greenland and Scotland's Outer Hebrides islands.

No one fluent in DNA methodology was on hand to examine, much less challenge his latest claims, and the historians did their best to remain unprovoked in the face of Menzies' less-than-critical, grab-bag approach to every e-mailed rumor that might tend to buttress his case -- even when the author breezily confessed to deliberately oversimplifying his argument "so the book would sell," adding, "I wanted huge sales and a lot of money" to finance continued research.

John E. Wills Jr. of the University of Southern California said he usually found books like Menzies' "1421: The Year China Discovered America" "entertaining and generally harmless." But, he said, since the author's "notorious" 2002 lecture before the Royal Geographic Society in London and its subsequent dissemination by the BBC, Menzies has been trumpeting more and more purported evidence for his argument with little apparent regard for its reliability or its context.

Chinese chickens in South America, Chinese stone anchors off Los Angeles and third-hand reports of ancient "yellow" visitors in Mexico have all been put forward by Menzies as proof that he knows what he's talking about. "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link," Wills told the audience, and Menzies' links of evidence "are amazingly varied in quality."

Yet the author's dismayingly unscholarly methodology does not necessarily mean that he's wrong, Wills said. Professional historians should welcome the questions raised by the "obsessed amateur," such as Menzies, he said, because they help focus public attention on debates that might otherwise remain arcane disputes in academia.

What helps make Menzies' arguments so intriguing, said Valerie Hansen of Yale University , is that Adm. Zheng He really did exist. His extraordinary voyages, though little known generally in the West, are painstakingly documented in the official chronicles of the Ming Dynasty, for which they apparently were intended to provide proof of divine validation.

Zhu Di, the third Ming emperor (1403-24), was in fact a usurper, she said: a kind of Chinese Macbeth who instead of stabbing his 25-year-old nephew, the legitimate ruler, burnt him alive in the palace after a four-year civil war. To convince the Chinese people that he was really only acting out his destiny, Zhu, who also built Beijing and its famous Forbidden City , dispatched Zheng He on seven trading voyages to bring back exotic animals such as lions and giraffes, whose arrival, according to Chinese mythology, signals divine approval.