On Aug 27, 3:20?am, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:
On Sun, 26 Aug 2007 22:00:26 -0700, Chuck Gould

wrote:
Of course there are two schools of thought on the author's theory.

More like four or five.

The Chinese were pretty nifty sailors. Whether they did or didn't do
what they said they did is subject to interpretation, but the devil is
in the details and the details tell a very interesting story.

While a lot of the early Dynasty's maps don't exist, there is a
written record of some of the earliest voyages and it's evident that
5th/6th Century Chinese sailors visited places like India, Siri Lanka
and Madagascar. The written record shows details of shore and harbors
that couldn't be made up.

So it's possible they very well could have visited places in the
Pacific, including the West Coast of the Americas - when you are
talking ships large enough to house and 1,000 people, anything is
possible.

However the point is moot. The Vikings were there first.

The Vinland expeditions predated the Chinese. However, the Chinese
circumnavigted and the Vikings did not. I don't know that there is any
real evidence for Viking presence in the Pacific at all. The Chinese
also
traded with native populations and mapped the coastlines of N and S
America. The Vikings abandoned Vinland, but there is some evidence
that the Chinese left behind either survivors of shipwrecks or
colonists that eventually blended into native society. One interesting
claim (see website) is that the Tartar dialect of Chinese and the
Apache tongue are virutally the same language- so close that speakers
of Tartar and speakers of Apache can converse easily without ever
formally studying the other language. The mathmatical odds that two
societies that had never interacted would independently assign the
same meanings to sounds and structures comprising a language are
pretty remote.