The Chinese discovered America!

Menzies muses over what language it might be, then faxes a copy not to a linguist or other specialist in the field, but to the Bank of India, where an unnamed source helpfully and easily does what so many historians have failed to do:

"'It looks like Malayalam,' they replied. It was a language I had never even heard of. I faxed again. 'Where was this language spoken?' 'It was the language of Kerala.' 'Was it in use in the 15th century?' 'Yes, it had been in common use since the 9th century. It has largely ceased to be spoken today, though it is still used in a few outlying coastal districts on the Malabar coast.'"

Menzies, overjoyed at the news from this mysteriously erudite teller, asserts that the Portuguese were not the first explorers to reach the Cape Verde Islands. From there, in the author's mind, it's a short hop to the conclusion that the Indian ship recorded as arriving in Matadi Falls in the Congo -- where there is a similar stone -- "around the year 1420" was actually Chinese, and the interpreters who traveled with the Chinese fleet inscribed both stones in a foreign language.

Most readers will wonder why Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, didn't question these unorthodox research methods or the veracity of the statements Menzies has built on them. Sadly, many observers concur that accuracy matters little to publishing houses, especially when fudged facts are almost guaranteed to generate controversy, and therefore sales. "The publishing industry's gullibility is boundless and its devotion to the bottom line endless, so if they can maintain their fealty to P.T. Barnum and put one over on the public, they'll do so without losing a wink's worth of sleep," commented Steve Wasserman, literary editor of the Los Angeles Times, who formerly worked on the editorial side of the publishing industry.

To my questions about how his finds had been vetted, Menzies responded vaguely, "The evidence is just so overwhelming that it's impossible to argue against." For her part, executive editor Claire Wachtel defended Menzies by insisting, "He's not a crazy loony." Wachtel theorized that skeptics are threatened by Menzies' attack on the status quo: "People don't like the basis of their fundamental knowledge to be challenged, and we all know that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue."

As further proof, Menzies reported that after his March presentation and the surrounding publicity, corroborating evidence arrived at his doorstep. He recalled, "A walnut farmer north of Sacramento called up and said, 'We've always known there's a Chinese junk underneath our land.' I thought, this chap's clearly a nutter, but now it looks as if it's true."

When asked for the exact location of the walnut farm, Menzies declined to answer, saying, "Pearson Broadband has spent quite a bit of money assembling experts to survey the junk in Sacramento. They understandably want to keep control of publicity surrounding it." Likewise, the British edition of the book grandiosely promises that "three-quarters of the evidence has had to be omitted for lack of space."

Menzies certainly isn't the first author backed by a major publisher to refuse to reveal crucial information. In 1997, Little, Brown was prepared to publish "The City of Light," the purported diary of Jacob d'Ancona, a Jewish merchant who wrote about reaching China in 1271, four years before Marco Polo. The house had published the book in the U.K. when word spread that China scholar Jonathan Spence, the Sterling professor of history at Yale, had written a review for the New York Times Book Review that questioned the book's provenance. Despite growing pressure, David Selbourne, the Englishman residing in Italy who translated the diary, refused to make the original manuscript available for public scrutiny. At the last minute, an embarrassed Little, Brown pulled the diary from U.S. publication (although the Kensington imprint Citadel published "The City of Light," its origins still unverified, in 2000).

For his part, Pearson Broadband executive producer John Steele backpedaled somewhat when asked about the Menzies connection. "We're doing a documentary of the Ming fleet's exploration of the world using Gavin's book as a source," he explained. "The first two parts deal with the well-documented exploits of the Ming fleet in India, Africa, etc. In Parts 3 and 4 we're going to put the viewer on a boat and take it through Gavin's theory. We're saying, 'Gavin has opened an incredible door that could rewrite history. Let's go through it.'"

Other documentarians have responded to Menzies' book with even more doubts. Evan Hadingham, senior science editor for "Nova" at WGBH, was approached about filming a program based on Menzies' initial presentation but declined. "The limited information provided so far raises concerns about the journalistic soundness and historical accuracy of Menzies' approach, and for that reason we decided not to commission a show," he said.

Perhaps an amused but skeptical article by Jack Hitt in the Jan. 5 issue of the New York Times Magazine, referring to the "gossamer strength of Menzies' evidence," will further bolster resistance to the author's theories, and "1421" (to be published in the U.S. with the slightly altered subtitle "The Year China Discovered America") will not be accepted at face value here. On the other hand, Hitt seems less troubled by the book's numerous inaccuracies than he is entertained by their author's panache.

Menzies' theory might just turn out to be one of those stories we love too much to kill. "The Education of Little Tree" is a documented fake -- not a memoir of a Cherokee boyhood, as claimed when it was first published in 1976, but the fictional work of a segregationist and Ku Klux Klan member. Yet it still appears on high school and college reading lists, and the University of New Mexico Press published a 25th anniversary edition in 2001. Sometimes an emperor parades naked down the middle of the street, and a crowd not only gathers to applaud, but willingly shells out the ticket price as well.

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