Volume 21, Number 18 · November 14, 1974
Plain Sailing
By Christopher Hill
The Discovery of the Sea
by J.H. Parry
Dial, 302 pp., $20.00
England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620
by David Beers Quinn
Knopf, 497 pp., $15.00
The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages 1492-1616
by Samuel Eliot Morison
Oxford University Press, 758 pp., $17.50
Undreamed Shores: England's Wasted Empire in America
by Michael Foss
Scribner's, 186 pp., $10.00 (to be published Spring, 1975)
In 1405 a Chinese fleet of sixty-three vessels, carrying 'tens of thousands' of men, showed the flag all over the northern Indian Ocean, including the entrances to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea and the Somali coast. At least six similar expeditions followed in the succeeding twenty-eight years—years in which the first painful and tentative Portuguese exploration of the West African coast began. The Chinese fleets were vastly greater than any commanded by Columbus, Vasco da Gama, or Magellan. 'Probably the most reliable ships in the world, and probably also the biggest were Chinese,' Professor Parry tells us. Chinese sailors were at least the equals of Europeans in technical proficiency. They were using the mariner's compass a century earlier than European navigators. Chinese charts were not inferior to those of Europe in the early fifteenth century, and covered vastly greater areas.
Review, 3682 words
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