There's a scene in an early episode of "The Sopranos" that sums up Christopher Columbus' increasingly tenuous historical situation. Paulie Walnuts and "Big Pussy" Bompensiero, two North Jersey gangsters, are miffed by what they consider the wholesale exploitation of traditional Italian delicacies by an upscale coffee shop.
After muttering several expletives about the cost of espresso, Paulie reminds his partner that Italians "invented cappuccino" but everyone in the world except their people have figured out how to make money from it.
"It's a pride thing," Paulie grouses, reciting the litany of Italian cuisine including pizza, calzone and olive oil he feels are unjustly exploited by non-Italians.
Noticeably absent from Paulie's tirade is any mention of spaghetti, a food that is synonymous with Italian cuisine all over the world. Despite his xenophobic rage, even Paulie Walnuts knows that the Chinese "invented" noodles centuries before Marco Polo had his first plate of linguini.
If amateur British historian Gavin Menzies has his way, Paulie Walnuts will have to add the "discovery" of America to the list of Chinese firsts.
Last Friday in London, Menzies unveiled his controversial theory that Chinese admiral Zheng He circumnavigated the world between 1421 and 1423, a century before Portugal's Ferdinand Magellan and 71 years before Columbus set foot in the West Indies.
I know, I know -- Viking marauders made it to Newfoundland several centuries before that, but that's another "anti-Columbus" story that will have to wait. One heresy at a time, please.
Zheng He -- pronounced "jung huh" -- commanded an armada of 100 ships that sailed west across the China Sea to the far places of the world, initially using only the stars to navigate.
Most of Zheng's ships dwarfed the much smaller and less sophisticated ships of the European naval powers. The Ming Dynasty's largest ships were 400 feet long and 150 feet wide. Columbus' famed Santa Maria, the largest of his ships, measured 90 feet by 30 feet by comparison.
Along with trading routes to Vietnam and Ceylon, Zheng mapped routes to Somalia and Pate, an island off the coast of Kenya. Historians have known of Zheng's travels to Africa for decades. Zheng's celebrated return visits to the court of the Ming Dynasty with giraffes, zebras and ostriches in tow have been exhaustively documented. African museums are filled with remnants of Chinese pottery that hint at the rich and mutually respectful trading relationship that flourished briefly.
Seven times between 1405 and 1433, Zheng led multiyear voyages into dark oceans the world's other naval powers assumed were filled with sea monsters. Even with increasingly detailed maps in hand, Zheng's armada suffered losses at sea, including major wrecks in the Caribbean and the South Pacific.
Still, it was Zheng's map of the world that Columbus and other European explorers allegedly used to make their way to our hemisphere, according to Menzies. Relatively accurate maps showing the Americas, Australia and Europe appeared in Portugal as early as 1428, nearly a century before Magellan circumnavigated the world. Where did they come from, Menzies asks. Who made them?
Instead of hooting Menzies off stage, the historians of the Royal Geographical Society reacted calmly as the equivalent of a Copernican revolution threatened to submerge their assumptions about Europe's "Age of Discovery" in a swirl of circumstantial evidence running against Columbus.
For his part, Menzies is still playing many of his cards close to his vest. In the meantime, he's working on a book that fleshes out his theories in full. A retired naval submariner, Menzies plans to reveal the location of Chinese wrecks in the Caribbean closer to the book's publication date.
Through it all, Menzies refuses to denigrate the accumulated orthodoxy of centuries. He understands the hold that various Columbus myths have on the Western imagination. Until recently, he, too, was under their sway. But the only way to go forward in honest scholarship is to risk the unknown and the unfamiliar by exploring it, just as the Chinese and the Europeans did centuries earlier.
Given enough time, even Paulie Walnuts would agree.
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