Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies was a British submarine lieutenant-commander who authored books claiming that the Chinese sailed to America before Columbus.
25 Facts About Gavin Menzies
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Gavin Menzies was best known for his controversial book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, in which he asserts that the fleets of Chinese Admiral Zheng Gavin Menzies visited the Americas prior to European explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492, and that the same fleet circumnavigated the globe a century before the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan.
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Gavin Menzies was born in London, and his family moved to China when he was three weeks old.
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Gavin Menzies was educated at Orwell Park Preparatory School in Suffolk, and Charterhouse.
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Gavin Menzies dropped out of school when he was fifteen years old and joined the Royal Navy in 1953.
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Gavin Menzies never attended university and had no formal training in historical studies.
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Gavin Menzies often refers back to his sea-faring days to support claims made in 1421.
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Gavin Menzies claimed that the knowledge of the winds, currents, and sea conditions that he gained on this voyage was essential to reconstructing the 1421 Chinese voyage that he discusses in his first book.
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Gavin Menzies had no academic training and no command of the Chinese language, which his critics argue prevented him from understanding original source material relevant to his thesis.
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Gavin Menzies trained as a barrister, but in 1996 he was declared a vexatious litigant by HM Courts Service which prohibited him from taking legal action in England and Wales without prior judicial permission.
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Gavin Menzies had the idea to write his first book after he and his wife Marcella visited the Forbidden City for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
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Gavin Menzies noticed that they kept encountering the year 1421 and, concluding that it must have been an extraordinary year in world history, decided to write a book about everything that happened in the world in 1421.
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Gavin Menzies spent years working on the book and, by the time it was finished, it was a massive volume spanning 1,500 pages.
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Gavin Menzies sent the manuscript to an agent named Luigi Bonomi, who told him it was unpublishable, but was intrigued by a brief section of the book in which Gavin Menzies speculated about the voyages of Chinese admiral Zheng He and recommended that he rewrite the book, focusing it on Zheng He's voyages.
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Gavin Menzies agreed to rewrite it, but admitted that he was "not a natural writer" and requested Bonomi to rewrite the first three chapters for him.
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The Telegraph article was syndicated worldwide and became a sensation, even though Gavin Menzies had not yet even presented his claims.
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Gavin Menzies is a very English eccentric and people like him often hit on truths.
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At this point, Gavin Menzies's rewritten manuscript was only 190 pages.
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Gavin Menzies's book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, is a work of sheer fiction presented as revisionist history.
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Gavin Menzies created a website for his readers to send him any information they could find that might support his hypothesis.
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Gavin Menzies said that he used information his fans were sending to him to improve his hypotheses.
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Academics have emphatically rejected all of this "evidence" as worthless and have criticized what American history professor Ronald H Fritze calls the "almost cult-like" manner in which Menzies drummed up support for his hypothesis.
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In 2008 Gavin Menzies released a second book entitled 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance.
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Gavin Menzies says two things are almost identical when they are not.
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Gavin Menzies arrived at the conclusion that the solution method does not depend on this text but on the earlier Sunzi Suanjing as does the treatment of a similar problem by Fibonacci which predates the Mathematical Treatise in Nine Sections.