On March 15th, 2002, a retired submarine commander stood before the Royal Geographic Society

in London and dropped what he believed would be a bombshell that would forever change

our perception of world history.

The presenter was Gavin Menzies, a man who after retiring from the British Navy had embarked

on a rather ambitious new journey as an amateur historian.

After years of study, slowly collecting evidence and connecting dots, Menzies had come to some

rather radical conclusions.

All the celebrated feats of European navigation in the late 1400s and early 1500s, they were

merely following in the footsteps of the Chinese.

According to Menzies, the expeditions of Christopher Columbus, Bernal Diaz, Vasco de

Gama and Ferdinand Magellan were all made possible by earlier expeditions made by the

Chinese admiral Zheng He and his fleet of incredible treasureships.

It was the Chinese who first sailed to the new world, circumnavigated the globe and

solved the riddle of calculating longitude.

In other words, the history books would simply have to be rewritten.

In the following year, Menzies would attempt to do just that.

The result was the wildly popular 1421, the year China discovered America.

The book was part history, part hypothesis, but mostly a personal memoir of Menzies'

journey to discover the quote-unquote truth of early maritime exploration.

The book is constructed, so as a reader, you feel as though your discovering clues and

making connections in real time with the author.

You're with him as he an earth-subscurred old maps and libraries in the American Midwest.

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