Having recovered from that Constipation Nation analogy, I came back to recover my senses. Like 25 million other Americans, I am paid in full and waiting for my 1619 Project book to arrive. January 2022 was too long to wait so I read everything the internet had to offer.
Throughout the reading, I was reminded of Gavin Menzies’s 1421: The Year China Discovered America. Do not mistake me, I am NOT comparing the authors or their scholarship. Menzies never compared himself, or his work to a scholar like Hannah-Jones. Nonetheless, Menzies presented enough evidence to upset the historians. As Shakespeare once observed, “thou doth protest too much.”
The titled historians roared at Menzies’s suggestion that the Chinese had circumnavigated the globe and discovered America before Europeans. Nonetheless, the high and mighty keepers of history could not explain away DNA evidence of Chinese genetics in Native American peoples on both, the west and northern eastern coasts of the American continent – several generations before Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas.
Can you guess what upset the historians most? There were two reasons. Menzies describes the Chinese motivation for their ocean voyages was trade. The Chinese did not come to conquer, they came to trade. Much like today’s Belts & Roads Initiative, the Chinese wanted to build trade routes and trading relationships with people in foreign lands. Of course, white skinned historians who’ve spent their lives insisting that war, conquering, colonizing and brutality was the ONLY way humanly possible to civilize the planet - objected. The idea that human beings might have actually civilized themselves peacefully – through a simple exchange of goods, languages, cultures and knowledge – is to turn white history keepers into liars and the champions of death and destruction.
And the second reason historians got so upset? Well, Menzies describes Chinese technology so advanced and so superior to Europeans, it boggles the mind. David, remember the stories in history class about European sailors who suffered horrific and painful deaths from scurvy? At Disneyland, the grin of toothless Pirates of the Caribbean tell the tale. Scurvy is the name for a vitamin C deficiency caused by a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. Its symptoms include anemia, debility, exhaustion, spontaneous bleeding, pain in the limbs, swelling in some parts of the body, and ulceration of the gums and loss of teeth – then death.
The Chinese ships were so large, so sea worthy and so fine, they carried astrologers, interpreters, historians, women, etc. with them. To feed all their passengers and sailors, they carried massive quantities of soy beans in the hull as ballast. During their voyages, those soy beans kept sprouting, providing a supply of vitamin C and fresh food.
What excites and inspires me, in both Menzies work and Hannah-Jones’s work is the extraordinary possibility that there always was, and still is another way, even a better way to civilize ourselves.
For someone afflicted by a visual brain, the possibilities those ideas unleash is stunning. In my mind, we stand at the crossroads of history, with an unimaginably beautiful world waiting for us to – just dream again.
If you have not read 1421; The Year China Discovered America – I highly recommend it. It is entertaining and inspiring.
