Jan 7, 2003 | On March 15, 2002, Gavin Menzies, a retired Royal Navy submarine commanding officer, made a speech at the Royal Geographical Society in London that tipped a number of sacred cows. Menzies declared that the Chinese -- traveling on a fleet of ships under the auspices of Emperor Zhu Di -- had reached America 70 years before Columbus. They had also, he posited, seen Australia 350 years before Captain Cook and explored the Magellan Straits 60 years before Magellan was born. In fact, our long-mythologized European explorers, Menzies said, relied on maps provided by the Chinese. In other words, the heroes of the West were slowpokes and copycats.

Publishers came knocking. U.K. publisher Bantam/Transworld eagerly paid him a 500,000 pound advance for a manuscript that Menzies had previously been unable to sell, to be titled "1421: The Year China Discovered the World." Rights were sold to William Morrow in the U.S. as well as to publishers in Japan, Germany, Italy, Taiwan and eight other countries. Forty-seven television production companies bid for the rights, with Pearson Broadband winning out for an undisclosed amount.

The emperor, however, has no clothes -- and I don't mean Zhu Di. Menzies' book is fractured history, a mishmash of off-base conclusions drawn from amateurish research and wide-eyed "discovery" of well-known facts. That hasn't hurt U.K. sales, though, and while Morrow first planned to publish "1421" stateside in May 2003, the swell of publicity beginning after that March presentation and leading up to the Nov. 4 publication in the U.K. led the publisher to rethink its timing. It will publish 100,000 copies of "1421" on Jan. 7.

That publicity included coverage of Menzies' presentation by news outlets like ABC World News Tonight and the New York Times, which lent legitimacy to his claims. Of course, just because the major media report something, that doesn't necessarily make it so. In 1983 Newsweek and the New York Times rushed to cover the discovery of the so-called Hitler diaries. The pages were revealed to be an unconvincing forgery soon afterward, but not before the German magazine Stern had paid 9.9 million marks for the rights to publish excerpts.

1421: The Year China Discovered the World