Gavin Menzies Popular Books

Gavin Menzies Biography & Facts

Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies (14 August 1937 – 12 April 2020) was a British submarine lieutenant-commander who authored books claiming that the Chinese sailed to America before Columbus. Historians have rejected Menzies' theories and assertions: 367–372  and have categorised his work as pseudohistory. He was best known for his controversial book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, in which he asserts that the fleets of Chinese Admiral Zheng He visited the Americas prior to European explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492, and that the same fleet circumnavigated the globe a century before the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan. Menzies' second book, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, extended his discovery hypothesis to the European continent. In his third book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, Menzies claims that Atlantis did exist, in the form of the Minoan civilization, and that it maintained a global seaborne empire extending to the shores of America and India, millennia before actual contact in the Age of Discovery. Biography Menzies was born in London, England, and his family moved to China when he was three weeks old. He was educated at Orwell Park Preparatory School in Suffolk, and Charterhouse. Menzies dropped out of school when he was fifteen years old and joined the Royal Navy in 1953. He never attended university and had no formal training in historical studies. From 1959 to 1970, Menzies served on British submarines. Menzies claims he sailed the routes sailed by Ferdinand Magellan and James Cook while he was commanding officer of the diesel submarine HMS Rorqual between 1968 and 1970, a contention questioned by some of his critics. He often refers back to his sea-faring days to support claims made in 1421. In 1959, by his own account, Menzies was an officer on HMS Newfoundland on a voyage from Singapore to Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and on to Cape Verde and back to England. Menzies claimed that the knowledge of the winds, currents, and sea conditions that he gained on this voyage was essential to reconstructing the 1421 Chinese voyage that he discusses in his first book. Critics have challenged the depth of his nautical knowledge. In 1969, Menzies was involved in an incident in the Philippines, when Rorqual rammed a U.S. Navy minesweeper, USS Endurance, which was moored at a pier. This collision punched a hole in Endurance but did not damage Rorqual. The ensuing enquiry found Menzies and one of his subordinates responsible for a combination of factors that led to the accident, including the absence of the coxswain (who usually takes the helm in port) who had been replaced by a less experienced crew member, and technical issues with the boat's telegraph. Menzies retired the next year, and campaigned unsuccessfully as an independent candidate in Wolverhampton South West during the 1970 United Kingdom general election, where—standing against Enoch Powell—he called for unrestricted immigration to Great Britain, drawing 0.2% of the vote. In 1990, Menzies began researching Chinese maritime history. He had, however, no academic training and no command of the Chinese language, which his critics argue prevented him from understanding original source material relevant to his thesis. Menzies trained as a barrister, but in 1996 he was declared a vexatious litigant by HM Courts Service which prohibited him from taking legal action in England and Wales without prior judicial permission.: 371 ff. ) Menzies was made an honorary professor at Yunnan University in China. 1421: The Year China Discovered the World Writing and research Gavin Menzies had the idea to write his first book after he and his wife Marcella visited the Forbidden City for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Menzies noticed that they kept encountering the year 1421 and, concluding that it must have been an extraordinary year in world history, decided to write a book about everything that happened in the world in 1421. Menzies spent years working on the book and, by the time it was finished, it was a massive volume spanning 1,500 pages. Menzies sent the manuscript to an agent named Luigi Bonomi, who told him it was unpublishable, but was intrigued by a brief section of the book in which Menzies speculated about the voyages of Chinese admiral Zheng He and recommended that he rewrite the book, focusing it on Zheng He's voyages. Menzies agreed to rewrite it, but admitted that he was "not a natural writer" and requested Bonomi to rewrite the first three chapters for him. Bonomi contacted the firm Midas Public Relations to persuade a major newspaper to run a promotional article for Menzies's book. Menzies hired a room at the Royal Geographical Society, which convinced The Daily Telegraph to publish an article about his speculations. Publishers immediately began courting Menzies for the publishing rights to his book. Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers, offered him £500,000 for the world publishing rights to it. At this point, Menzies's rewritten manuscript was only 190 pages. Bantam Press stated that the book possessed enormous marketing potential, but considered it to be poorly written and sloppily presented. According to Menzies, they told him, "You know, if you want to get your story over, you've got to make it readable, and you can't write, basically." During the revision process that followed, over 130 different people worked on the manuscript, with a large part being written by a ghostwriter named Neil Hanson. The authors relied entirely on Menzies for factual information and never brought in any fact checkers or reputable historians to make sure that the information in the book was accurate. After the rewriting process was complete, the book was at a publishable length of 500 pages. Publication, claims, and commercial success The finished copy of the book was published in 2002 as 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (published as 1421: The Year China Discovered America in the United States). The book is written informally, as a series of vignettes of Menzies' travels around the globe examining what he claims is evidence for his "1421 hypothesis", interspersed with speculation regarding the achievements of Admiral Zheng He's fleet. Menzies states in the introduction that the book is an attempt to answer the question: "On some early European world maps, it appears that someone had charted and surveyed lands supposedly unknown to the Europeans. Who could have charted and surveyed these lands before they were 'discovered'?" In the book, Menzies concludes that only China had the time, money, manpower, and leadership to send such expeditions and then sets out to prove that the Chinese visited lands unknown in either China or Europe. He claims that from 1421 to 1423, during the Ming dynasty of China under the Yongle Emperor, the fleets of Admiral Zheng He, commanded by the captains Zhou Wen, Zhou Man, Yang Qin.... Discover the Gavin Menzies popular books. 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