Did China Discover America First ???

www.reuters.com... It seems that the Chinese planted their flag about 71 years before Columbus. I also know that the Vikings had a settlement for some time in eastern Canada long before that. And as far as I can tell, the place was already populated long before any of these groups "discovered" America... Ask a Native American who discovered it and you'll get a more truthful response. They beat everyone else by thousands of years.

In this politically correct time, I suggest that replacing Christopher Columbus with the Chinese as the discoverers of North America does not properly explain who the native people who greeted these explorers were.

so I guess you answered you own question, no the chinese did not discover america first.

we change now, many schools does not take a day off on Christopher Columbus day, he kill millions of native Americans i think.

Native Americans did not 'find it first'.

If the theories about the land bridge across the Bering Strait are correct, it would have been Asians who crossed from west to east millenia ago.

In any case, they would not have been native to 'America' as that word only became relevant once utilized by Amerigo Vespucci, a European, some thousands of years post-dating their migration.

It always amazes me this..."discovered" anyplace....how can something be discovered that was inhabited.....if there were already humans living here.....how can it be "discovered"?

Originally posted by ulshadow
we change now, many schools does not take a day off on Christopher Columbus day, he kill millions of native Americans i think.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. I think you must be thinking of Cortes.
www.carpenoctem.tv...

Cortes conquered the Aztec empire of five million people with only a couple of hundred people, due to superior weaponry and brilliant planning. He basically recruited the conquered people to fight for him against the next town, until he had conquered all of them.

As for the Chinese being the first to discover America, well, maybe. For awhile, the Chinese did a heck of a lot of exploring, and it is known that they made it to southern Africa and travelled all over the seas around southeast Asia. In particular, an explorer named Zheng He (I was told this is pronounced Zeng Houh by a Chinese classmate) underwent several massive voyages. I shall now quote from a history text:

From Traditions & Encounters, Vol. 1, 2nd Ed, Bentley&Ziegle, p.594

Yet suddenly, in the mid-1430s, the Ming emperors decided to end the expeditions. Confucian ministers, who mistrusted Zheng He and the eunuchs who supported the voyages, argued that resources committed to the expensive expeditions would go to better uses if devoted to agriculture. Moreover, during the 1420s and 1430s the Mongols mounted a new military threat from the northwest, and land forces urgently needed financial support.

Thus in 1433, after Zheng He's seventh voyage, the expeditions ended. Chinese merchants continued to trade in Japan and southeast Asia, but imperial officials destroyed most of the nautical charts that Zheng He had carefully prepared and gave up any plans to maintain a Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean. The decommissioned treasure ships sat in harbors until they rotted away...

So the Chinese might have made it to America; they certainly could have, but whether or not they did is another matter. Until we find some sort of evidence, like centuries-old Chinese artifacts on the West coast, or old maps with explored locations on them, we can't say for sure. The technological capability was certainly there, though; the Chinese had a pretty amazing civilization going, technologically. It was their politics that so often seems to get in their way in history.

On a slightly off-topic note, I read a set of fiction books by John Christopher which dealt with an alternate history in which, amongst other changes, the Chinese settled the west coast of America. It was pretty cool, but geared more towards teenagers than adults, if I remember correctly. Still an excellent read, though.
www.fantasticfiction.co.uk...

In any event, Columbus certainly wasn't the 'discoverer' of America. Vikings visited centuries earlier, and native Americans have been there even longer. I've heard (I don't have evidence for this, sorry) that Columbus 'found' America by looking at some old maps and then following them.

[edit on 4-5-2005 by DragonsDemesne]

America was already discovered, and populated tens of thousands of years before the chinese and vikings. The discovery which is used nowadays is when europe "discovered" America. Since those europeans later colonized america, and this colonized land led to what the americas are now, the european discovery is used. It is a political term, jaja

Originally posted by LadyV
It always amazes me this..."discovered" anyplace....how can something be discovered that was inhabited.....if there were already humans living here.....how can it be "discovered"?

Your bang on LadyV. That was my point in starting this thread. I "discovered" a new park a few blocks from my house the other day. I immediatly planted a flag and killed all the heathen savages that were just sitting on the ground eating out of large wicker baskets.

The chinese arrived 71 years before Columbus?!?!?!

Welsh explorers apparently landed in North America as early as 1169.

www.bbc.co.uk...

But I'm sure there were probably other explorers who were there before that, it is a rather LARGE claim for Columbus to say he discovered America. A load of rubbish in my personal opinion.
The histroy we are fed is just what they want to feed us.

Read the book 1421- The Year China Discovered the World.

It raises some interesting points and suggests that a series of Chinese colonies were established along both coasts of the Americas.

Originally posted by anxietydisorder
I immediatly planted a flag and killed all the heathen savages that were just sitting on the ground

Are you calling us NA "heathen savages!? Just kidding, I know what you mean. This has always been a contention of mine.....one can not discover something that is inhabited! It's absurd and pointless!

[edit on 5/5/05 by LadyV]

Of course china didn't discover it first, it was The Knights Templar that did how the bloody hell do you think America got started.

They also created the Money system of today why do you think we are not told about the Templars in schools.

www.templarhistory.com...
The Knights Templar were a monastic military order formed at the end of the First Crusade with the mandate of protecting Christian pilgrims on route to the Holy Land. Never before had a group of secular knights banded together and taken the monastic vows. In this sense they were the first of the Warrior Monks. The Templars fought along side King Richard I (Richard The Lion Hearted) and other Crusaders in the battles for the Holy Lands.

From humble beginnings of poverty when the order relied on alms from the traveling pilgrims, the Order would go on to have the backing of the Holy See and the collective European monarchies.

Within two centuries they had become powerful enough to defy all but the Papal throne. Feared as warriors, respected for their charity and sought out for their wealth, there is no doubt that the Templar knights were the key players of the monastic fighting Orders. Due to their vast wealth and surplus of materials the Templars essentially invented banking, as we know it. The church forbade the lending of money for interest, which they called usury. The Templars, being the clever sort they were, changed the manner in which loans were paid and were able to skirt the issue and finance even kings.

They were destroyed, perhaps because of this wealth or fear of their seemingly limitless powers. In either case, the Order met with a rather untimely demise at the hands of the Pope and the King of France in 1307 and by 1314, "The Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon" ceased to exist, at least officially.

www.beliefnet.com...
A new book called Templars in America tells the story of a European noble family that explored America nearly 100 years before Columbus. In their study, authors Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins write that the medieval warrior monks of the Knights Templar had trading links with Native Americans in Nova Scotia and New England, and that the European families—who were members of the Templars and claimed to be descended from Jesus—passed their beliefs through Masonic teaching into the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Nice little piece of American history kept from both the English and American people. Stuff the government and the banks for there wicked ways will be gone soon.

Could you explain the voyage?

This is where the fun starts. As Oscar Wilde once famously said, “Many people discovered America before Columbus, dear boy, but most of them had the good sense to keep quiet about it.” He was probably being sarcastic, but in actual fact, he was telling a great truth because the Romans and the Egyptians had been there repeatedly and they kept quiet about it for reasons of protecting their sources of trade.

[edit on 5/5/05 by Hunting Veritas]

Discovered is still the right term because while the inhabitants were fairly sure of their existance, the rest of the world was not.

When Columbus returned he brought knowledge of a new continent to the whole of Europe, the Arab world and Asia.

That is a discovery! Therefore the Americas were discovered.

Technically, the ancestors of the Chinese and other oriental groups DID, indeed, discover America.

While there are sporadic traces of other peoples on these shores, the only ones to come in and successfully inhabit the land are the Native Americans. The First Nations' ancestors came across the Bering Strait (Russia to Alaska.)

Although the exact date is in dispute, it's firmly agreed that the first wave of colonization began at least 12,000 years ago (pre-Clovis culture) and may have been as long ago as 30,000 years.

These groups colonized the land, setting up some pretty impressive civilizations. After the first peoples (the AmerInd language speakers) came the "Na-Dene" group, who arrived about 3,000 BC. These people with their weaving and pottery technology moved away from the previously settled areas into the Great Plains and southward to the deserts of the Southwest, where their farming technology proved very effective.

They built multistoried apartment buildings and had cities whose population was larger than many European civilizations of the time.

About 2,000 years ago came the third group; the Athabaskan speakers (Tlingit, Haida, Salish, Athabascans) and the Eskimos (Inuit, Inupiat, etc) and they settled the whole northern Canada-Alaska area.

These civilizations had trade routes that extended a thousand or more miles.

Sporadic contact was made with European civilization and Oriental civilization but they found little to attract them or exploit until Columbus hit the West Indes. By that time Europe was embroiled in wars and England and Spain were in fiercest competition, buying troops and goods from other countries. So they were trying to get gold... and found some, along with trade goods that by now Europe wanted.

And yes, Columbus enslaved people and brought disease that killed most of the population. The arrival of Columbus was the beginning of a three century long genocide against the people of the Americas.

From there, Cortez arrives in Mexico and finds the Aztecs in control. The leaders were cruel (even to their own people) and it was easy to raise an army of tens of thousands of native allies to attack the Aztecs with.

And, of course, there was gold. Spain was beyond hungry for gold, and these people had stone age technology (good stone age tech along with some Bronze Age tech) while Europe was well into the Iron age.

More than that, they had diseases that the Native Americans never experienced; diseases that killed up to 90% of the people.

...and that's the story.

Originally posted by DragonsDemesne

Originally posted by ulshadow
we change now, many schools does not take a day off on Christopher Columbus day, he kill millions of native Americans i think.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. I think you must be thinking of Cortes.
www.carpenoctem.tv...

Cortes conquered the Aztec empire of five million people with only a couple of hundred people, due to superior weaponry and brilliant planning. He basically recruited the conquered people to fight for him against the next town, until he had conquered all of them.

As for the Chinese being the first to discover America, well, maybe. For awhile, the Chinese did a heck of a lot of exploring, and it is known that they made it to southern Africa and travelled all over the seas around southeast Asia. In particular, an explorer named Zheng He (I was told this is pronounced Zeng Houh by a Chinese classmate) underwent several massive voyages. I shall now quote from a history text:

From Traditions & Encounters, Vol. 1, 2nd Ed, Bentley&Ziegle, p.594

Yet suddenly, in the mid-1430s, the Ming emperors decided to end the expeditions. Confucian ministers, who mistrusted Zheng He and the eunuchs who supported the voyages, argued that resources committed to the expensive expeditions would go to better uses if devoted to agriculture. Moreover, during the 1420s and 1430s the Mongols mounted a new military threat from the northwest, and land forces urgently needed financial support.

Thus in 1433, after Zheng He's seventh voyage, the expeditions ended. Chinese merchants continued to trade in Japan and southeast Asia, but imperial officials destroyed most of the nautical charts that Zheng He had carefully prepared and gave up any plans to maintain a Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean. The decommissioned treasure ships sat in harbors until they rotted away...

So the Chinese might have made it to America; they certainly could have, but whether or not they did is another matter. Until we find some sort of evidence, like centuries-old Chinese artifacts on the West coast, or old maps with explored locations on them, we can't say for sure. The technological capability was certainly there, though; the Chinese had a pretty amazing civilization going, technologically. It was their politics that so often seems to get in their way in history.

On a slightly off-topic note, I read a set of fiction books by John Christopher which dealt with an alternate history in which, amongst other changes, the Chinese settled the west coast of America. It was pretty cool, but geared more towards teenagers than adults, if I remember correctly. Still an excellent read, though.
www.fantasticfiction.co.uk...

In any event, Columbus certainly wasn't the 'discoverer' of America. Vikings visited centuries earlier, and native Americans have been there even longer. I've heard (I don't have evidence for this, sorry) that Columbus 'found' America by looking at some old maps and then following them.

[edit on 4-5-2005 by DragonsDemesne]

Actually, that is not correct. Cortes did not defeat the Aztec's because of "superior weaponry". Do you know what guns were like in the 16th century? They were slow to load and innacurate, and not really an effective weapon.

Why did Cortes win? Three reasons:

1). Historians today estimate that about 90% of the native population was wiped out by disease brought by European settlers. There are first hand accounts, by both the Spanish and the natives, that talk about mass disease in Tenochtitlan.

2). Aztecs viewed war in a much different way than Europeans. While the European goal of war was to totally conquer and/or wipe out an opposing force, the Aztec way of fighting was much more formal and ritualistic. They were not accustomed to a war of annihilation.

3). Many of the subject peoples of the Aztecs hated them, and Cortes was able to gain the aid of these people.

The best Aztec weapon remained a thrown spear. Guns were far better for warfare.

Also the terror factor of guns has to be taken into account. A man points a stick and there is a huge bang and cloud of smoke. For a group of people who have never experiance such weapons before the effect is devastating.

Cortez was lucky to turn up in the middle of a civil war.

Actually, trans-atlantic contact might have been going on long before the days of Columbus, the supposed Chinese explorers, and the Vikings. There's the Olmec heads in Central America which seem to portray people with African features. There's also sculptures of men with huge beards, something you don't see in native american populations very often.

I also remember a show on the Discovery Channel a few years ago called "The Cocaine Mummies". It was all about the discovery of traces of coca and tobacco in ancient Egyptian mummies. Since those plants are native to North and South America and there was supposedly no contact with those contients until the 1500's, this is quite strange. The show also went into the problems scientists who made these discoveries encountered. They were basically ostracized and thrown out of the scientific communities.

Makes me wonder how many times someone has dug up something then immediately put it back in the ground and buried it, just because it doesn't fit into the worldview of the scientific establishment....

Makes me wonder how many times someone has dug up something then immediately put it back in the ground and buried it, just because it doesn't fit into the worldview of the scientific establishment....

Why would scientists do that? What do they stand to gain from suppressing the truth?

Originally posted by anxietydisorder
www.reuters.com... It seems that the Chinese planted their flag about 71 years before Columbus. I also know that the Vikings had a settlement for some time in eastern Canada long before that. And as far as I can tell, the place was already populated long before any of these groups "discovered" America...

Ask a Native American who discovered it and you'll get a more truthful response. They beat everyone else by thousands of years.

These theories have been brought forth by a guy named Gavin Menzies, who is a retired submarine commander in the UK Royal Navy. He wrote a book called 1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered the World a few years ago.

This theory is considered innacurate by the vast majority of historians today. The main idea of his theory is that a large fleet led by Zheng He (a Muslim Chinese admiral / trader) landed in North America. His "evidence" is based on a few ideas:

1). The "Bimini Road" underwater structure near Bimini island and the "Newport Tower" in Rhode Island. These are two sophisticated structures of unknown orgins. (However - radiocarbon dating tests done on the Newport Tower have indicated that it was constructed in the 17th century).

2). He believes some old Chinese maps show North America.

3). He has looked at the patterns of Chinese shipwrecks.

There is a web site that the book's author or publisher has set up at www.1421.tv... ....

Personally, as a historian, I find the claims to be interesting but not very well supported by the data. It's certainly possible that Zheng He made it to North America, but not very likely. The goal of his expeditions was to trade, not to explore. It's highly unlikely that he would have sailed over vast tracts of ocean on an exploratory mission.