Explorer of the Week, vol.3

Zheng He

(Traditional Chinese: 鄭和; Simplified Chinese: 郑和; Hanyu Pinyin: Zhèng Hé; Wade-Giles: Cheng Ho; Birth name: 馬三寶 / 马三宝; pinyin: Mǎ Sānbǎo; Arabic name: حجّي محمود Hajji Mahmud) (1371–1433), is one of the most well-known Chinese mariner and explorer and fleet Admiral, who made the voyages collectively referred to as the travels of "Eunuch Sanbao to the Western Ocean" ("三保太監下西洋") or "Zheng He to the Western Ocean", from 1405 to 1433.

Zheng was born in 1371 of the Hui ethnic group and the Muslim faith in modern-day Yunnan Province, one of the last possessions of the Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty before being conquered by the Ming Dynasty. He served as a close confidant of the Yongle Emperor of China (reigned 1403–1424), the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty.
In 1424, the Yongle Emperor died. His successor, the Hongxi Emperor (reigned 1424–1425), decided to curb the influence at court. Zheng He made one more voyage under the Xuande Emperor (reigned 1426–1435), but after that Chinese treasure ship fleets ended. Zheng He died during the treasure fleet's last voyage. Although he has a tomb in China, it is empty: he was, like many great admirals, buried at sea.
The number of his voyages varies depending on the method of division, but he travelled at least seven times to "The Western Ocean" with his fleet. He brought back to China many trophies and envoys from more than thirty kingdoms -— including King Alagonakkara of Ceylon, who came to China to apologize to the Emperor.

Zheng was known to have visited the “Western Ocean” (i.e. the Indian Ocean) numerous times, including Southeast Asia, Sumatra, Malacca, Java, Ceylon, India, Persia, The Persian Gulf, Arabia, The Red Sea as far north as Egypt, and Africa as far south as the Mozambique Channel, as well as Taiwan seven times.


Speculation

There are speculations that some of Zheng's ships may have travelled beyond the Cape of Good Hope. In particular, the Venetian monk and cartographer Fra Mauro describes in his 1457 Fra Mauro map the travels of a huge "junk from India" 2,000 miles into the Atlantic Ocean in 1420.

Zheng himself wrote of his travels:

"We have traversed more than 100,000 li (50,000 kilometers) of immense waterspaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising in the sky, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course (as rapidly) as a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare…" (Tablet erected by Zhen He, Changle, Fujian, 1432. Louise Levathes)

These hypotheses were given circumstantial evidence in Gavin Menzies’ book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. In it, Menzies, a former submarine captain and amateur historian, describes stories, artifacts, and other proxy evidence that Zheng He had been one of several Chinese explorers that, in the early 15th century, made voyages that encompassed the globe, visiting the Maya in Mesoamerica, the California Coast, Australia, finding the Cape Horn of South America, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Caribbean, all decades or centuries before their European counterparts. Also, these fleets were credited with circumnavigating Greenland, while proclaiming Europe unworthy of meriting a visit. Many of his hypotheses are controversial. If even some of them are proven true, Zheng He might become the most traveled and ground-breaking explorer of all time.