Isidore Gabriel's response to my assertion of Chinese maritime preeminence over the spurious claims to the contrary by Europe and the Anglo-American establishment is understandable but unfortunate. He places his reliance on a vitriolic paper published by Robert Finlay in 2004 in the Journal of World History, which is more of a personal attack on Gavin Menzies, a retired submarine commander in the British Royal Navy, than a scholarly rebuttal of the latter's assertion.
Ironically, in his berating of Menzies, Finlay does explicitly, though perhaps inadvertently, acknowledge the unequivocal existence of a sixth Chinese maritime expedition led by Zheng He but kills himself disputing the whereabouts of the first five–which could have been a tour of the China Sea for all Finlay cares!
Yet Finlay fails to answer the fundamental question that plagues the West: from whence did the map that Columbus used to both convince Ferdinand and guide him to the New World come? Columbus acknowledged in his logs that 18 years before he set sail, he had a map of the Americas.
It was on the basis of that map that he could contract himself as Viceroy to the Americas. Captain Pinzon who sailed with Columbus also asserted that he had seen such a map in the Papal library. When Magellan came to that apparent cul-de-sac with his crew so hungry that they had begun to eat rats and to mutiny, one of his crew saved the day by coming to defend Magellan's claim to knowing his whereabouts, since he too had seen a map that lay in the treasury of the King of Portugal.
So I ask Isidore: how do you say that Columbus "discovered" the New World when he had a map to guide him there? How can you name the straits at the tip of South America after Magellan who catch his nennen and almost died getting there using somebody's else's map?
No one said it better than Anthony Sutton, an eminent historiographer, who lamented the "'dumbing down' of American education" when he asserted: "During the past 100 years any theory of history or historical evidence that falls outside a pattern established by the American Historical Association and the major foundations with their grant-making power has been attacked or rejected–not on the basis of any evidence presented, but on the basis of the acceptability of the argument to the so-called eastern liberal establishment and its official historical line."(2002)
So returning to Isidore who seeks to heap scorn on my deceased mother for giving me my (real) name, I challenge him on the origin of these maps. And incidentally, the greatest beneficiary of the Falklands war was Margaret Thatcher whose popularity soared after the British bullying in the Malvinas.She would never have won a second term had it not been for the emotivepatriotism which that victory evoked from the British population or the oil deposits off the islands. Predatory capitalism, Isidore, just like Columbus!
Steve Smith
via e-mail