What was the first event that led to the discovery of America? In most old history books, the line goes, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue . . .” But it was a whole century before that a book by Marco Polo was published, one that Columbus himself referenced as his travel guide.
Polo and his brothers had gone to China and spent two decades as an emissary of the pope. They returned from that journey with stories of wealth, intellectual knowledge, on and on. The Chinese had the most advanced civilization in the history of mankind at that time.
Indeed, there was a time in the 1400s that the Chinese ruled the earth. Of course, we’re never told that because the populace has spent the last five centuries in isolation.
In 1421, the largest fleet that had ever sailed the seas left from China, commissioned by the emperor Zhu Di to take Confucian harmony to the world. Over a hundred large vessels--beautiful vessels made of teak wood harvested from Vietnam--sailed out.
A little over two years later, when the last of these vessels finally returned home they had sailed over a 100,000 miles. They had mapped North American coast, South American coast, Australia, New Zealand and Africa.
In the 1420s, there’s a Venetian map that shows the island of the Caribbean in exactly the right position and the coast of Florida. Columbus saw that map before he left. He even references it in his diaries.
Magellan, when he was going through the Straits of Magellan, talks about seeing a map of the passageway. Where did he get that? Well, in 1434, a Chinese fleet sailed into the Mediterranean to Italy and landed at Tuscany.
Pope Eugene IV met with Admiral Zheng He of the fleet at Florence and the Chinese admiral gave to the pope as a diplomatic gift (the Chinese always bring gifts and try to give more than they’re given so that the other always feels in their debt) great stores of knowledge.
They gave him information about geography. They gave him world maps that map the coast and the perimeters of all the continents. Antarctica, Australia, New Zealand, Greenland, north and South America, Africa.
The Chinese gave the pope information about navigation. They had developed the longitudinal navigation system. The markings on those ancient maps today turn out to be exactly precise in scientific calculation. They gave the pope information about astronomy, the stars, about math, art, printing.
At that time printing was a common everyday occurrence in China. They had information about architecture, about steel-manufacturing, about civil engineering, about military weaponry (a lot more than gunpowder), about surveying, genetics, etc., all given along with the silk and tea and all those other things Marco Polo brought back.
So when that fleet left Europe and went back home what they found was China in mass disarray. The emperor had died, and if you know anything about the history, he had this humongous big palace that was struck by lightning and burned, and the people took that as a bad omen and that led to the fall of the emperor.
His son took over and his idea was the reason the gods were mad at them was because they’d reached out to Europe and what they need to do was pull back and withdraw and that’s where their isolationism came from.
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