Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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The Fusang described by Shen has been variously posited to be the Americas, Sakhalin island, the Kamchatka peninsula or the Kuril islands. Some 18th-century European maps locate Fusang north of the State of California, in the area of British Columbia.

 

 

 

 

 

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However, most likely Fusang refers to Japan. There was an ancient province of Japan called Fusa-no kuni (Country of Fusa) in eastern Honshū, encompassing all of modern Chiba Prefecture as well as the southwestern part of modern Ibaraki Prefecture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Several warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy were named Fusō (the ironclad Fusō, or the World War II battleship Fusō).

 

 

 

 

 

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Several companies, such as Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation also bear the name.

 

 

 

 

 

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Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies (born 14 August 1937) is a British author and retired submarine lieutenant-commander.

 

 

 

 

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He is 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

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In his third book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, Menzies claims that Atlantis did exist, in the form of the Minoan Civilization...

 

 

 

 

 

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...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.

 

 

 

 

 

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A map supporting his claims in 1421: The Year China Discovered the World was sensationally unearthed in a Shanghai second hand bookstore in 2001.

 

 

 

 

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Zheng He was a master navigator, and a pioneer in Chinese history.

 

 

 

 

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He made seven recorded voyages to nations in Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Arab world, and even East Africa.

 

 

 

 

 

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His first voyage consisted of a massive fleet which included 317 ships. And 28,000 crew.

 

 

 

 

 

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But experts have dismissed the map as a fake.

 

They say the map resembles a French 17th-century world map with its depiction of California as an island.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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That China is not shown in the center also suggests the Chinese did not make the map, one expert says. Historical records show that from 1405 to 1433, Zheng led China's imperial Star Fleet on seven epic voyages, but he only reached as far as the southern coast of Africa.

 

 

 

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"If this is a 1418 map, it's a whole style very much different than any 1418 map that I've seen," said John Hébert, the chief of the Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

 

"His book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, is a work of sheer fiction presented as revisionist history. Not a single document or artifact has been found to support his new claims on the supposed Ming naval expeditions beyond Africa...Menzies' numerous claims and the hundreds of pieces of "evidence" he has assembled have been thoroughly and entirely discredited by historians, maritime experts and oceanographers from China, the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.

 

"Unfortunately, this reckless manner of dealing with evidence is typical of 1421, vitiating all its extraordinary claims: the voyages it describes never took place, Chinese information never reached Prince Henry and Columbus, and there is no evidence of the Ming fleets in newly discovered lands. The fundamental assumption of the book—that Zhu Di dispatched the Ming fleets because he had a "grand plan", a vision of charting the world and creating a maritime empire spanning the oceans—is simply asserted by Menzies without a shred of proof ... The reasoning of 1421 is inexorably circular, its evidence spurious, its research derisory, its borrowings unacknowledged, its citations slipshod, and its assertions preposterous ... Examination of the book's central claims reveals they are uniformly without substance."

Robert Finlay

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Dr William Sullivan appears completely sincere in his belief that ocean going traders disseminated universal myths around the world before recorded history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Unfortunately, at this point his ideas cannot be verified.

 

And this is the abiding problem with the notion of a prehistoric civilization. If such a race existed, if they spanned the globe, why did they leave no trace?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Bosnian Pyramids

 

 

 

 

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Houston anthropologist, Dr. Semir Osmanagich, founder of the Bosnian Archaeology Park, the most active archaeology site in the world, declares that irrefutable scientific evidence exists of ancient civilizations with advanced technology that leaves us no choice but to change our recorded history.