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In 2001 as Australians celebrated the centenary of federation, no attention was paid to the role of mystic thinkers and esoteric ideas in Australian history. The vast majority of Australians know nothing of the “inner side” of their country’s political, cultural and religious evolution.

How many people are aware, for example, that the call sign of Sydney’s pioneering radio station 2GB stands for the martyred sixteenth century mage Giordano Bruno (GB)? Or that Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, a major force in the foundation of the Australian Commonwealth, was heavily involved in spiritualism and an enthusiastic student of Madame Blavatsky’s writings? Who knows of Walter Burley Griffin’s use of occult principles in the design of Canberra, the national capital? Who today remembers the Star Amphitheatre built at Sydney’s Balmoral Beach to welcome the “World Teacher, when He Comes”? Or that in the 1920s Sydney was proclaimed a “great theosophical centre”, home of the renowned and controversial occult teacher, the Bishop Charles Webster Leadbeater. A prolific writer on metaphysics and one of the world’s greatest clairvoyants, Leadbeater predicted the “emergence of the new ‘sub-race’ in Australia and New Zealand.”

In Other Temples, Other Gods, Nevill Drury and Gregory Tillett observe that, “despite its relative youth as a modern nation,” Australia, “has had a colourful and active history of occultists and occult movements.”1

Some of the leaders of progressive politics in Australian were also students of esoteric wisdom. In 1892 the labour organiser William Lane’s political novel The Workingman’s Paradise was published in Sydney. In it the working girl Nellie says scornfully, “There is no God. How can there be?” But the mysterious socialist Geisner rebukes her in words straight from Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. There is at least “the imperishable breath of the universe”. For Geisner explains, “the Purpose of Life is self-consciousness…. God seeking to know God. Eternal Force one immeasurable Thought. Humanity the developing consciousness of the little fragment of the universe within our ken.”2

Disillusioned with the socialist movement in Australia, William Lane (1861-1917) established a communalist settlement in South America. A non-smoker and non-drinker, Lane was also a vegetarian who recognised the importance of a healthier attitude to diet. Inspired by Lane’s vision and example, hundreds of Australian workers sailed with him in 1893 to the “New Australia” colony in Paraguay.

The first Gnostic study circle was established in Melbourne in 1886. A year earlier the Reverend Charles Strong led most of his congregation out of Victorian Presbyterianism to found a native, ethical church, the “Australian Church”. Strong’s Australian Church sponsored the Religious Science Club, a forum for all manner of independent thought and spiritual enquiry.

AUSTRALIA & THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

Such was the interest in mysticism and spiritualism at the turn of the century that Australia came to prominence in the largest international occult movement of the day – the Theosophical Society.

“The occult movement which achieved the greatest publicity in Australian history,” explain Drury and Tillett, “and for which Australia was an international focus for many years, was the Theosophical Society.”3

In the early 1890s study circles devoted to Theosophy as presented in the texts of Madame Blavatsky had formed around Australia, leading to the founding of the Australasian Section of the Theosophical Society in 1895.

As Drury and Tillett explain:

The progress of the T.S. [Theosophical Society] was steady; lectures given, meetings held, leaflets and publicity material produced, and journals published. Lodges were established throughout Australia…. But it was the lecture tours of one man which established Theosophy as a movement of public interest in Australia: Charles Webster Leadbeater toured the country in 1905, following a lecture tour of several years in the U.S.A. during which he attracted thousands of enthusiastic listeners, and in 1914 he settled in Sydney, remaining there more or less permanently until his death in 1934.4

By the 1920s there were more paid-up members of the Theosophical Society than members of the Communist Party of Australia. The twenties witnessed a surge of Theosophical activism as Australian Theosophists sort to present a vibrant alternative to the mainstream, including the growing political ideologies of bolshevism and fascism. In addition to the public lectures, lodge meetings, and libraries, there was the Society owned Sydney Radio station 2GB as well as a successful publishing enterprise. Journals with titles like Advance! Australia and Theosophy in Australia, presented the society’s views and analysis of turbulent world events. Writing in Advance! Australia, one of the society’s leaders called for:

purified patriotism, the promotion of a noble type of Australian citizenship, vitally Australian, eagerly conscious of Australia’s specific place and part in the building of the future, no less eagerly conscious of the wider and equally vital citizenship involved in Australia’s membership of the British Commonwealth, and recognising too… there is a World citizenship, the obligations of which may no longer be ignored.5

Walter Burley Griffin wrote of “Building for Nature” and the “outdoor arts in Australia” in the pages of Advance! Australia. Together with Marion Mahoney Griffin, he set up an “organic” community at Castlecrag, Sydney. Griffin hoped for the awakening of “disused powers of the universal mind” and social renewal as people turned inward to reconnect with “the possibilities of co-operation between head and mind in social service and creative effort.”6

Adyar Hall, the Theosophical Society’s impressive Sydney centre, served as the meeting place for many original social, political and spiritual groups, among them “The Australia First Movement”. Founded by P.R. Stephensen, a one time associate of Aleister Crowley, Australia First campaigned against Australian involvement in the Second World War.
A.R. Mills, a Melbourne solicitor active in Australia First, had been on the fringe of the Theosophical Society. During the 1920s and 1930s, Mills formed the world’s first Odinist religion, a mixture of Nordic mythology and occultism.

A persistent notion running through all the organisations and individuals concerned with esoteric wisdom is the conviction Australia has a special role to play in the dawn of a new Golden Age. Although popularised mainly by the Theosophists, the idea of Australia’s secret occult destiny surfaces in various mystical circles. In the early decades of the twentieth century the tireless Veni Cooper-Mathieson who founded – among other orders and institutions – the Home of Truth Esoteric College, the Church Universal, the Universal Truth Publication Company, taught that Australia was the “land of the dawning.”

AUSTRALIA: HOME OF A NEW HUMANITY

Madame Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, is credited with developing the theory that humanity evolves through a sequence of Seven Root Races, “four of which have already lived their day, the fifth still exists, and two are to appear in the future.”7

In a series of lectures delivered in Sydney in August 1915, Bishop Leadbeater proclaimed “Australia and New Zealand as the home of a new sub-race.” He had detected in Australia “children and young people of a distinctly new type.” A new antipodean human type characterised by intuition and the powers of synthesis. Jill Roe in her book on Theosophy in Australia writes:

Leadbeater urged his audience to align themselves with evolutionary law, assuring them that present confusions were merely transitional. He held that, despite distance and a small population, the Antipodes provided a favourable site for inauguration of a new era of brotherhood and cooperation, being neither decadent like Britain nor overblown by capitalist pride like America, and not yet delivered into unworkably democratic systems by ‘too young souls’. There was crudity, and reverse class legislation, but the wholesome environment held promise.8

In Leadbeater’s view, however: “It would be important to purify child-rearing practices, by abstinence from alcohol, meat and tobacco, and to educate the next generation correctly…. The reward would be the coincidence of a new sub-race and the World Teacher in fifteen or twenty years’ time.”9

By embracing techniques of physical and mental purification, Leadbeater believed in a couple of generations the whole of Australia would be controlled by a new people, who would constitute “what in Europe we should call the aristocracy of the country; that is to say, the best types”.10

Of course the Bishop’s message was not taken up by the Australian people and no new “aristocracy” emerged to lead the Antipodes into a new Golden Age. Was there any truth in Leadbeater’s predictions?

Nations, like individuals, have choices that eventually determine outcomes far beyond what can be recognised in the immediate. A collective – a group soul – like the individual soul must decide with which impulses to align. Nations can choose either the forces of materialism leading to decay and atrophy, or the higher influences of the spirit capable of leading to a New Beginning. In the case of Australia and New Zealand, the birth of the ‘new people’ was limited and distorted due to the infection of Mammonism. By concentrating on the search for outer happiness, following the path of the kingdoms of this world, the Australian nation stifled the quest for inner transcendence and the Kingdom of God.

By taking the way of materialism Australians cut themselves off from the subtle influences of the spirit and cosmic destiny. Manning Clark, Australia’s greatest historian, expressed the spiritual crisis of modern Australia when he said:

The decline of faith begat nihilism, and nihilism begat hedonism. It looked as though in the contest between Mammon and ‘millennial Eden’ Mammon had won. The dreams of all those who had migrated to the great south land had evaporated. The Aborigine had been corrupted and debased by contact with the white man. The voices of the Catholic who had spoken of a land dedicated to the Holy Spirit, the Dutch Protestants who had called for the discovery of a land that would yield ‘uncommonly large profit’, and the pleas of the followers of the Enlightenment with their faith in human perfectibility, had all dropped from a roar to a whisper, Mammon had won: Mammon had infected the ancient continent of Australia. The dreams of humanity had ended in an age of ruins.11

Yet in every generation, and in every nation, there is always a remnant of men and women who have not succumbed fully to negative earthly bonds. They are the silent ones who stand among the ruins of the modern era, living testimonies to the higher world of the spirit. The ability of any nation or people to realise their spiritual potential and partake in the dawn of a new Golden Age depends on the vitality of this remnant.

Have Australia and New Zealand forfeited their occult birthright?

Certainly some of the ‘new people’ characterised by intuition and the powers of synthesis are found today in Australia, as well as in many other places throughout the world. The future depends on the ability of this remnant to impact the greater society and become a new Noah’s Ark capable of surviving the coming times of tribulation and transition. True, nearly every nation has a myth promising them a leading role in the dawn of a New Age. The universality of this myth in no way detracts from the responsibility it places on a people with ‘ears to hear’ the message of the times. Every people are called to turn within and align with the New Era. And Australasia is not impervious to this call, to this great Thought.

Over a century ago, in 1892, the Australian socialist and mystic William Lane wrote:

The brute-mother who would not be comforted because her young was taken gave birth in the end to the Christs who have surrendered all because the world sorrows. And we, in our yearning and our aspirations, in our longings and our strugglings and our miseries, may engender even in these later days a Christ whom the world will not crucify….12

The earth still awaits the revelation of the Christ people, the new humanity destined to carry out the great work in which we all have a part to play. At the end of his book, William Lane challenged his readers with words that speak to us today:

Let us not be deceived! It is in ourselves that the weakness is. It is in ourselves that the real fight must take place between the Old and the New. It is because we ourselves value our miserable lives, because we ourselves cling to the old fears and kneel still before the old idols, that the Thought still remains a thought only, that it does not create the New Order which will make of this weary world a Paradise indeed.13

.

Footnotes:

1. Nevill Drury and Gregory Tillet, Other Temples, Other Gods

2. As quoted in Jill Roe, Beyond Belief, Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939

3. Nevill Drury and Gregory Tillett, Other Temples, Other Gods

4. Ibid.

5. As quoted in Jill Roe, Beyond Belief, Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939

6. Ibid.

7. H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine

8. Jill Roe, Beyond Belief, Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939

9. As quoted in Jill Roe, Beyond Belief, Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939

10. As quoted in Gregory Tillett, The Elder Brother: A Biography of Charles Webster Leadbeater

11. Professor Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia

12. ‘John Miller’ (William Lane), The Workingman’s Paradise

13. Ibid.

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MEHMET SABEHEDDIN is a long time contributor to New Dawn magazine. He is conducting research into ancient wisdom traditions.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 3.

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—

Gavin Menzies, the former British submariner, and author of 1421: The Year That China Discovered The World1 is visiting Warrnambool (located in the Australian state of Victoria) in September this year [2005] to test his startling theory against a resolution of the mystery of the Mahogany Ship.

A fascinating contest between maritime mystery theories is now being proposed.

Since he published, Menzies has maintained a website (www.1421.tv) to present evidence he believes confirms his thesis that China discovered and mapped parts of the world long before the Europeans. Worldwide, about 13,000 contributors have assisted him so far.

So what are the prospects that Warrnambool’s Mahogany Ship will turn out to be the remains of a Chinese junk? Is it an artefact of a stupendous effort by an early Chinese Ming dynasty government to map the world under the leadership of the mighty eunuch Admiral Zheng He (also known as Cheng Ho, 1371-1435)?

During 2004, two sets of wood samples possibly from the Warrnambool wreck were sent for examination to China, where interest rises in Zheng He’s career. Test results are not yet known.

If these test samples are from the wreck, four possibilities arise:

1. The wreck was a lighter of odd construction, about 50-100 tons; built for sealing/whaling work;

2. She was of origins yet unguessed (but not a vessel used by escaping convicts);

3. A lost Portuguese caravel, one of Cristovao de Mendonca’s ships of 1521-1522, as suggested by the Australian writer, Gordon McIntyre, in his book The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 200 Years Before Captain Cook (1977);

4. A large Chinese junk, as suggested by Menzies.

Though often searched for, the Mahogany Ship remains a reclusive wreck. It remained unseen for the entire 20th century! The issues will be re-explored by a Mahogany Ship Committee Symposium to be held at Warrnambool Entertainment Centre on 24-25 September this year, with Menzies attending.2

Menzies’s website carries news that a film based on 1421 is soon to be produced. Will Australian waters be shown? Menzies in 1421 is adamant that Chinese shipping made multiple landfalls at Australian locations, long before Europeans.

What happens for Australians when we backdate a mystery that is both Local-In-Its-Own-Right, and part of a controversy now raging worldwide? If we let it, the controversy fuelled by the 1421 website could rage Australia-wide. But it isn’t just Australia, it’s Australasia. New Zealand researchers are remaining defensive and sceptical of Menzies’ claims, partly as he challenges their views on the origins and traditions of the Maoris.

After considerable publicity on these claimed ancient connections between China and Australia, fascinating new perspectives unfold for world mapping history.

Menzies’ 1421 website cites the following Australian locations for claimed Chinese influence (given here in no particular order and not all included):

Visits to the south-western, eastern and northern coasts. To around Warrnambool (a wrecked junk). To the Perth area, about Darwin. Any DNA evidence provided by Aboriginal people from Darwin and Fraser Island, Broome, the Perth area, the Gunditjmara Aboriginals of Southern Victoria/South Australia will prove fascinating. There are claims that maps have been drawn depicting Australian river systems (e.g., the 1474 Map of Toscanelli), derived from Chinese information.

The Chinese mounted observation platforms west of the Blue Mountains, and at Penrith, Gympie, Atherton and along the northern coasts. Erected a stone building at Tin Can Bay, Gympie. The brumby horses of Fraser Island possibly originated in Tajikistan?

Other notes have been made of Chinese pheasants on Rottnest Island, WA. King Island (a wrecked junk). Tasmania’s Storm Bay. Byron Bay (remains of a 40-foot-high Chinese rudder?) An artefact at Wollongong dated about 1410 CE. Along the South Australian coast. The Far West of Central Queensland. Arnhem Land. Lady Elliot Island at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef. Trepang Bay. Palmer River area (goldfields). Menzies asks: are Australia’s feral pigs of Chinese origin?

By now some 8,000+ reviews of Menzies’ book have appeared. The best précis is still the arresting publisher’s blurb to the paperback edition.

On 8 March 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. The ships, some nearly five hundred feet long, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di’s loyal eunuch admirals. Their orders were ‘to proceed all the way to the end of the earth’. The voyage would last for two years and by the time the fleet returned, China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. And so the great ships were left to rot, and the records of their journey destroyed.

And with them, the knowledge that the Chinese had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan, reached America seventy years before Columbus, and Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook.

The result of fifteen years research, 1421 is Gavin Menzies’ enthralling account of this remarkable journey, of his discoveries and the persuasive evidence to support them: ancient maps, precise navigational knowledge, astronomy, surviving accounts of Chinese explorers and later European navigators as well as the traces the fleet left behind.

Revised and updated with new material – including evidence of an entire Chinese fleet wrecked on New Zealand’s South Island – for this paperback edition, 1421 is a brilliant, epoch-making work of historical detection that radically alters our understanding of world exploration and rewrites history itself.

Updates arose for Menzies’ claims in 2004, some lodged on his website. As to mention of “an entire Chinese fleet wrecked on New Zealand’s South Island”, possibly by a tsunami after a comet strike (October 1422), it is so far apparent that New Zealand researchers remain unconvinced by Menzies’ treatment.

When the Chinese premier Hu Jintao spoke to the Australian Parliament on 24 October 2003, he alluded to age-old contacts between China and Australia, coming surprisingly close to dignifying Menzies’ views on Admiral Zheng He’s career. An indication of China’s rising interest in Zheng He.

But there is a downside to the 1421 story. Menzies notes that when the surviving ships of the 1421 fleet returned home having exercised curiosities as they had, a regime change meant the information gathered was suppressed, even destroyed, in the interests of Imperial reclusiveness.

If so, then the Confucian officials responsible, motivated by ideology, can be blamed for one of the single greatest acts of intellectual vandalism in world history, best comparable perhaps to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. But the truth of any such destruction is also not yet fully established.

There is also, says Menzies, the matter of the 1421-1423 fleet being of 107 ships, though only a handful returned home. There is no way to assess the success of Chinese efforts to preserve, collate and interpret newly-gathered information.

If the Warrnambool relic was manned by sailors of the great Chinese fleets of 1421-1423, then they evidently solved millennia-old problems of world navigation and mapping – how to derive both latitude and longitude – and a fascinating Antarctic-Australian scenario unfolds…

Stunning New Chinese Theory

Menzies’ reasons for seeing the Chinese as interested in both the North and South Poles on the same great expedition has much to do with a stupendous, dazzling idea, at the astronomical heart of 1421.

If Menzies is correct, the great Chinese fleets of 1421-1423 were to verify new hypotheses about astronomy and geography. If so, a scintillating set of ideas had begun to fascinate the top levels of Imperial Chinese society, the Heavenly Throne itself.

The heavens are stable, the world is round beneath them, and the world’s circumference is known. The Chinese mariners spoke thus (as it were): We know that Polaris, the Pole Star, the Chinese Celestial Pole, fixes the locality of the North Pole, which our lodestone-compasses point to. Our astronomers can predict both lunar and solar eclipses and draw interesting conclusions.

We (the Chinese mariners) also know from our methods of measuring time how roughly to fix latitude. But we do not know longitude. However, if the world is round, the South Pole should be symmetrically opposite the North Pole. If we can find a useful set of both geographic and astronomical fixing points, with reference to both Polaris and Beijing, plus the South Pole (and the Malacca Straits, actually), then we can more accurately establish where the lands and peoples of the world are!

It’s a brilliant idea, easily enough outlined on paper. Did the Chinese government actually send out great fleets to explore such hypotheses? Importantly, European expansionism would often look to the fabled East, “to Cathay”. But obviously, being themselves “the East”, the Chinese looked west, south, and further east.

As I read 1421, these are Menzies’ reasons for seeing the Chinese as interested in both the North and South poles on the same great expedition. Exploring not just “the world”, but exploring also a dazzling astronomical idea – an idea to which Columbus, looking for “China”, was a latecomer.

1421 tells us that as a maritime-expansionist, the early Ming emperor Zhu Di (d. 1424) had a personal interest in astronomy. His people already had 2,000 years experience with astronomy. Zhu Di renewed the nightly practice of recording the stars, partly as he desired to improve navigation and expand maritime activity to exact tribute for his Imperial coffers.

The Emperor wished his mariners to locate new territories more correctly, and wanted Beijing’s great new observatory to become a major reference point (as the Greenwich Meridian and Mean Time later became for Britain).

Menzies cites the 17th century Wu Pei Chi, “a set of sailing instructions” detailing latitudes, star positions, and bearings. Chinese astronomy calculated latitude by the Pole Star, Polaris, above the North Pole, and also relied on lunar observations. (The Portuguese by 1474 used the Sun and the Equator as their reference points.)

Here is a grand difference, with basic reference points being the North Pole, not the Equator. By their sixth great set of voyages, the Chinese still had few clues on establishing longitude, which for Europeans – firstly the Portuguese – was Equator-based. The Chinese already knew they made great errors in longitude, problems found as they coursed the Indian Ocean as far west as East Africa before 1421.

Zheng He’s fleet sailing from March 1421 split into squadrons under different admirals, each charged with examining a different part of the world. Admiral Hong Bao’s ships supposedly cruised from the Antarctic to south-western Australia (then north for Sumatra/Malacca Straits), and also east along the southern Australian coast (to the Warrnambool area?).

At the South Pole, the only direction to follow is north. This is why some of the 1421 fleet ships were ordered to venture to Antarctica. They first moved south from the tip of South America.

Menzies says the way the South Magnetic Pole varies would have given the Chinese problems with their north-pointing lodestones, However, they had determined to try to get a fix on Canopus, to at least try to get under Crucis Alpha, the leading star of the Southern Cross.

Their intent was to compare latitudes between Polaris (in the North) and Canopus (in the South). If they could measure the elapsing of time and the speed of their own movements, which they could, any findable astronomical fix would at least verify their views on latitude. Then, only the further problems remained of establishing longitude.

Menzies notes there are no necessary connection(s) between Chinese thought, clocks, and calculation of longitude, since longitude can be established without clocks/chronometers (as Cook used).

The Chinese measured time by lengths of the Sun’s shadow, but this varies with latitude. Still, they knew how to predict eclipses solar and lunar, knew that such events had to be visible from everywhere on Earth. Using techniques derived from this knowledge, they could roughly estimate longitude.

Establishing Canopus well enough, Admiral Hong Bao sailing north-east from a cruise near the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica, next sailed for about 52 degrees 40 degrees south, as far as he could go across the landless Southern Ocean, luckily to Heard Island, the Kergeluen Islands. And then if his ships hit the Roaring Forties (which belt the southern latitudes, with which they’d have been unfamiliar) they’d be heading north-east yet again for south-western Australia, but be no longer able to sail further south.

Menzies’ theory suggests that Admiral Hong Bao from south-west Australia sent a ship east to cruise the Southern coast of Australia, which foundered off Warrnambool.

Mapping History & Mysteries in Conflict

Here we have a conflict of mysteries, because Gordon McIntyre in his book The Secret Discovery of Australia claims the Mahogany Ship is a Portuguese relic. Are Australians merely the meat in the sandwich here? It’s a contest between The Chinese versus The Portuguese, as moderated today on Gavin Menzies’ website.

Controversy is not new to Australian maritime history (more than 6500 shipwrecks have littered the long coastlines of Australia).

To explain some mapping history briefly… Until 1770, when Cook used a chronometer as he mapped the east coast of Australia testing “modern methods”, Australia’s general shape was only guessed at, differently, somewhat south-east of the Indonesian archipelago by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and French. The English did the best they could with maps from those countries.

Each European exploring nation might have used a different name and shape for a guessed-at landmass of the Southern Hemisphere: “Terra Australis Incognita”, “Java-la-Grande”, or “the Great Southland”, which might be depicted anything up to 800 miles or so east or west of its actual location. Also unknown were the actual shapes of our neighbours, New Guinea, New Zealand and Antarctica. The Dutch with their “New Holland” were better mapmakers – for Western Australia, that is.

These matters should be stressed since mapping history can quickly become very muddy and complicated. Across centuries, few if any cartographic arguments from any direction at all can remain free of speculation.

Worse, there was an old European belief that from the southern half of western South America there stretched west to an unknown extent an amazing land called “Beach”. Indeed, one old map depicts “Beach” stretching south-east from somewhat south of Darwin.

Facts were so few that a mapmaker could easily have depicted “Beach” (perhaps a giant archipelago?) as stretching from south-east of the Malacca Straits between Malaya and Sumatra (the Spice Islands region), right across the Pacific to near the Straits of Magellan.

Whereas, from today’s satellite photography we know the Pacific region as a yawning absence of landmass. Thus, depending on the nationality of an explorer, “Australia” was visualised differently – often confusingly.

Views that the Mahogany Ship is a Portuguese relic have long circulated via McIntyre’s book, The Secret Discovery of Australia, a book demanding close reading. Ironically, part of McIntyre’s theory relies on “a giant wave” possibly throwing one of Mendonca’s ships onto sand dunes near Warrnambool, say 1521-1522.

The Australian reader of 1421 finds two competing theories about the same mystery relic, both involving “a giant wave” that left behind a wreck.

For Menzies, a comet strike in the Tasman Sea, somewhat west of Stewart Island, south of New Zealand’s south island, produced a tsunami which wrecked yet another squadron of Chinese explorer-ships, October 1422.

As with Menzies’ list of Chinese mysteries, McIntyre’s evidence lists Portuguese artefacts found in Australia, all of which still beggar explanation.

So oddly enough, both Menzies and McIntyre wish to argue that a “huge wave” can be part-explanation for the location of the so-called Mahogany Ship. As well, both argue that ship remains to be found in New Zealand will prove connected to the Warrnambool mystery.

The odds against either “huge wave” proposition being satisfactorily provable seem long.

Yet another major claim made in McIntyre’s book is that Capt. James Cook did not actually discover the eastern Australian coast, he simply verified older Portuguese mapping, and corrected its rather odd projection, after which the real shape of Australia fell naturally into place.

If Menzies’ 1421 theory can be verified regarding Australian locations, then it will suggest the Portuguese used even earlier Chinese mapping as they struggled to understand the geography of Australia. Cook will then owe an extra debt to Chinese mariners.

Of course, this would be widely regarded as heresy in Australasia.

Interest surges. During 2004, fresh attempts were made from Melbourne to establish more facts on the Mahogany Ship. Wood samples have been sent to China for examination, and Chinese media outlets have been enthusiastically reporting.

Unfortunately, Gordon McIntyre died in May 2004, so he will never know how his conundrums are solved. But we will.

Duel Over The Evidence

At Warrnambool, the book 1421 risks gaining or losing a strong plank of evidence. If many people take this over-seriously, what will be the outcome for McIntyre’s theory about Mendonca’s lost Portuguese caravel?

What is occurring is a duel between theories produced by two passionate writers and mariners/astronomers, Menzies and McIntyre. Who will win?

There is, however, nothing new about interest in China’s eunuch Admiral Zheng He, who was a Muslim. Two writers preceding Menzies in print are Louise Levathes and Nicholas Kristof. Levathes once worked for National Geographic magazine; Kristof has been Tokyo bureau chief for the New York Times. (Menzies, incidentally, does not read Chinese, Levathes does.)

Levathes’s book is a sedate, scholarly treatment tracing the routes of Zheng He’s ships to South-East Asia, to India, to Arabian ports, and to the East African coast, but not as far as Menzies’ ships sailed.

For any partisans of China’s maritime extraordinaire, Levathe’s remains a perfectly contenting book.3

Menzies “has not, unfortunately, discovered anything new”, Levathes has been quoted as saying. A former visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Chinese and American Studies in China, Levathes has faulted Menzies for ignoring original sources that detail the voyages of the treasure fleets, but make no mention of the Americas.

The theory behind 1421 is bold, imaginative, daring and arresting. Menzies’ writing does move beyond what scholarship has ever been able to provide (and a third edition is eagerly awaited).

Still, 1421 provides too few clues as to why Europeans, with or without the aid of borrowed Chinese findings, took so long to solve the problem of locating Australia accurately and usefully, from 1521 – Mendonca’s time – to Cook’s in 1770.

Always remaining will be the mundane suggestion that the Mahogany Ship is merely an oddly-constructed lighter built for local sealing/whaling work around Port Fairy.

In the nineteenth century, most mariners who after 1836 saw parts of the wreck agreed she was decidedly oddly-built. No one suggested any remains of a possible Chinese junk. The wreck possibly derives from something built by European men largely ignorant of ship construction, somewhat before 1836.

Kristof’s view is that Zheng He made history, but he did not change history.4Zheng He and his men explored a variety of places, but it is still contentious that all the locations claimed by Menzies were followed up usefully by the Chinese government or large-scale traders.

If we want to discuss the history of exploration in any consistent way, as it relates to Australia, then the present writer thinks the achievements of Zheng He and his men will have to be put into a category built for them alone.

Footnotes:

1. Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered The World, London: Bantam Press 2003, ISBN: 0553815229, paperback edition.
2. The Mahogany Ship Committee will hold a symposium “Silent Seas and Shifting Sands – Evidence for the very early maritime exploration of Australia and New Zealand and examination of recent searches for wrecks in the region”, at the Warrnambool Entertainment Centre on 24-25 September, 2005. Interested parties should contact the Warrnambool Visitor Information Centre on 1800 637 725 or see www.warrnamboolinfo.com.au
3. Louise Levathes, When China Ruled The Seas, The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne,1405-1433, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994
4. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, 1999.

DAN BYRNES is a writer and webmaster based in Armidale, NSW, Australia, where he manages a suite of more than 350 pages on the Internet. He is an internationally published poet and journalist, with some short stories published. Dan has an abiding interest in maritime history and has international email on related topics. His massive treatment of convict transportation from Britain to North America and Australia is located atwww.danbyrnes.com.au/blackheath/. One of his websites, Lost Worlds, maintains an interest in the nexus “between religion and history”. His newest website is on music-in-history. He can be contacted via email at dan@danbyrnes.com.au.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 90 (May-June 2005).

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