Zheng He's Eastern Voyage continued

Presumably he may come into contact with the Americas. That is, if he sails far enough (didn't his fleet consist of something like a thousand ships?) Then Menzies' 1421 hypothesis really would have something to talk about.
 
Wow, I saw the link but it did not appear in my mind as a link.

Read it? Maybe later; do it in the morning or some time.
 

Hendryk

Banned
One of my favorite ATLs from when I first started reading AH is Zheng He's Eastern Voyage by David K. Tormsen.
I wasn't aware of that ATL back in August 2004 when I started working on my own version. But one think that's fairly obvious is that the author didn't do enough research beforehand:

Zheng He's fleet reaches the Hawaiian Islands in good condition. He takes the opportunity to restock the larders and to partake of some of the native women, and then sails away, leaving a minor epidemic ravaging the population.

1441-45: Zheng He dies of natural causes while visiting the Papal States in Italy. His son, Zheng He Lee, who has been travelling with his father for many years, is given virtual admiralty over the 'Mediterranian Fleet' (which is basically a whole lot of Egyptian and Byzantine ships adapted to Chinese designs) until it arrives back in China.
Zheng He, a eunuch, sleeps around and has a son? :rolleyes:

Conversely, he gets the eunuch courtiers and the bureaucrats confused, when in reality they spent most of the dynasty at loggerheads which each other:

The Emperor considers. He was thinking of expanding outward, into Mongolia. But this new information.... Too many Emperors had forced China in on itself. And those eunuchs at the Chinese Civil Service too, how he hated them! Eunuchs, bah!
 
I had previously thought the colonization of the Americas from Asia to be economically unfeasible given the great logistical hurdle it presented. I changed my mind recently after coming across the Kelp Highway Theory of Native American migration.

The idea is some of the ancestors of Native Americans didn't cross the Bering Strait, rather they went by sea and fed themselves off a stretch of kelp forrest that is nearly continous from Japan to Alaska, and down the California cost to Mexico. The kelp itself is edible but it also contained an ecosystem of fish, clams, sea otters, and bird species which was able to sustain a transpacific human migration.
 
The idea is some of the ancestors of Native Americans didn't cross the Bering Strait, rather they went by sea and fed themselves off a stretch of kelp forrest that is nearly continous from Japan to Alaska, and down the California cost to Mexico. The kelp itself is edible but it also contained an ecosystem of fish, clams, sea otters, and bird species which was able to sustain a transpacific human migration.
Never heard of that. Usually most people suggesting an aquatic route believe that they followed pockets of land in the glaciers and then went along the coast. And China's currents generally go more across the pacific, I think.
 
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