Zheng He discovers the Americas

I wasn't actually aware of the amount of people it carried, thanks for brining this to my attention.

I'll just carry this matter on in private, I guess. /thread


Here is a summary with some additional links.

7 expeditions between 1405 and 1430. Up to 300+ ships with up to 28.000 crew members.
Large treasury ships, smaller war ships, transport ships (for horses for example), supply ships (with nurseries producing soybean sprouts) and water tankers.

The problem with "blown away to America" is prevailing wind directions.
You can see a simplified model here.

The ships couldn´t sail directly against the wind. So with a position in South East Asia or the Indian Ocean, they normally couldn´t have reached America.
In normal times they would have to sail North (Japan, Kuril islands) to catch a wind carrying them to Alaska.

Maybe with a strong El Nino event? Then the surface winds (Walker circulation) change direction (from West winds to East winds).
But even here you have the problem that the Chinese fleet on all expeditions traveled through the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Visiting Java, Sumatra, India, Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.
Do you see the problem?
Even if you now have winds blowing east your ships would probably first reach (depending on the location) the Philippines, Borneo, Celebes, New Guinea.
A ship would need to be exceptionally unlucky to miss all those "overlapping" islands. It´s almost impossible. And if it really happens then that ship wouldn´t have enough supplies for a Pacific crossing. So the crew either dies or reaches one of the smaller Pacific islands. And in that case why would they sail on? Even farther away from home?
 
Emperor is right. People are being jerks. Yes, the idea that Zheng He gets blown of course to the point he reaches in America is impossibly implausible. However, the guy is 18, he just joined the site three days ago, and wants to get into a topic (alt-history) that we all love, and should encourage on others. We all started with low knowledge at one point, and the way we learn is by asking questions and being informed about how we are wrong.

Laughing at people and insulting them as "clueless" and "newbies" because they don't know as much as you not only curbs the growth of this community. It's just obnoxious.

The thing that bothers me is that recognizing that one's ideas have issues is an important part of not being a "clueless newbie".

And he seems to have taken offense to the idea that his idea could be seen as such.

Also, speaking as someone who has been reading history since before puberty, being 18 is irrelevant.

Detlief posted an elaboration of the kind of issues I'd point to as the biggest obstacles to accidental discovery, or even purposeful discovery (besides lack of motive for the latter), so I'm just posting this as my reason for not greeting him warmly.
 
Even assuming that miraculously Zheng He is able to end up on the Pacific shoreline of the Americas and then even more miraculously able to get back, it won't matter for a number of reasons.

1) The Pacific is still too big and difficult to cross to make voyages even remotely profitable.

2) There's nothing in the Americas that the Chinese would be interested in. The west coast was populated by hunter-gatherer tribes and didn't have easy access to profitable resources.

3) The Chinese already were colonizing places - Indonesia, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia. These efforts varied in intensity from time to time but eliminated any incentive to go elsewhere.

A magically successful voyage of Zheng He would be a minor historical footnote, nothing more.
 
Lets get the past bullies of the forum..

If you ever the read the years of Rice and Salt (if you havent read you should) in the third story a Chinese Fleet headed to attack Japan an attack that never occurred in reality dose in fact get winded out into the doldrums of the North Pacific finally reaching OTL California 180 days after leaving port but keep in mind that is just a story...

To be honest if you are going to have Chinese in America I doubt Zeng He will be the one to do it, perhaps if the mongols are not as strong as they were in the mid 15th century are we have a different emperor expeditions will continue primarily into the indian ocean dominating trade, we could see the Chinese play a bigger role in the Philippines and Indonesia. Perhaps we could see the growth of private expeditions that would require wealthy companies. If it this goes on long enough the Chinese are bound to reach the Americas. And if not they may play a role if they learn it from European Sailors (but I still think the Chinese would make there first)

That being say the Chinese will as others said before I doubt they will actually care about the Americas, unless they get involved in a war with Spain or Portugal, or a more implausible situation maybe to quash political dissidents but that is unlikely


Or

You could take a look at this thread
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=247904
 
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The thing that bothers me is that recognizing that one's ideas have issues is an important part of not being a "clueless newbie".

And he seems to have taken offense to the idea that his idea could be seen as such.

Also, speaking as someone who has been reading history since before puberty, being 18 is irrelevant.

Detlief posted an elaboration of the kind of issues I'd point to as the biggest obstacles to accidental discovery, or even purposeful discovery (besides lack of motive for the latter), so I'm just posting this as my reason for not greeting him warmly.

I was reading history since before puberty yay me.
Cut the guy some slack people know so little about history these days maybe we should something else besides scaring him off...
 
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