The most obvious 'mistake', showing California as an island, is clearly borrowed from mistakes made in 17th-century European maps. They pointed out last week that the cartographic portrayal of the Earth as two circles on a flat sheet is European.

It shows Australia and the land mass of Antarctica beneath it, and New Zealand as two islands.Įven normally chauvinistic Chinese scholars have rubbished the find. It accurately depicts Alaska, the curve of central America and the Yucatan peninsula, not to mention the Mississippi and St Lawrence rivers.

It not only shows North and South America as massive continents, which no sailor could possibly have known. As for Zheng He's dubious British cheerleader, the author Gavin Menzies, how can he explain a detailed Chinese map of America appearing three years before his hero discovered the place, as he claims, in 1421? They would have left more than a kung fu parlour in downtown LA. Zheng's giant ships - some 400ft long, five times the size of Columbus's - would surely have left a chopstick or two in Manhattan. Sailors tend to chat, and nothing obsesses them so much as maps. It is amazing that all these chaps never bumped into each other.

The only blot on this glory is that everyone knows America got its name from Glamorgan's Richard ap Meurig (Amerik), a wealthy sponsor of John Cabot's search for the north-west passage in the 1490s. Sinclair's masonic star, or 'la merika', duly gave its name to the continent and merits a Da Vinci saga all of its own. He and his freemasons escaped with assorted treasures and holy grails to settle in Nova Scotia with the Micmac Indians (clearly a tribe of Hiberno-Scots ancestry). Brendan and Madoc were followed by a Scottish knight templar, Henry Sinclair, seeking refuge from the suppression of his order in 1398. The survivors of this trip remain pickled in a downtown Boston saloon to this day. He sailed to America in a leather-bound coracle, as Tim Severin proved in 1977. Unfortunately Madoc's arrival had been forestalled by St Brendan in the seventh century. Making his way across country, he settled west of the Mississippi, where the Mandan tribe were encountered in the 18th century, fair-skinned and speaking a dialect of Welsh. He landed at Mobile, Alabama, on the orders of the family druid and asserted Wales's claim to King Arthur's North Atlantic empire. This comes as a surprise to those of us who know for a fact that America was discovered by Prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd in 1170.

1421 china discovered america