NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Menzies and Zheng He
From: Rob Gendreau
Date: 2002 Mar 17, 19:01 -0800
From: Rob Gendreau
Date: 2002 Mar 17, 19:01 -0800
An amateur historian presented a paper to the Royal Geographic Society recently arguing that Zheng He, a Chinese admiral, circumnavigated the world well before western explorers (see http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/03/17/MN127279.DTL for example). Interesting theory, but what especially caught my eye was that he used the program Starry Night and his knowledge of nav (ex-submariner I believe) to recreate routes. He also argues the Chinese had charts before the Portuguese got ahold of the info and made their own. Anyone know any details about this? Rob
