O The Cantino Map and the Discovery of America by the Chinese

Abstract

The objective of this article is to contest the interpretative version on the “discovery” of the Americas by the Chinese purported in the book 1421: The year China discovered the world, written by Gavin Menzies an officer of the British Navy. The focus of contention will be on the interpretation of Cantino’s Map, made by an anonymous Portuguese cartographer in 1502. In which it is clearly demonstrated the command over the use of longitude even though the Portuguese in that century were only capable of calculating latitude. Moreover the article challenges the notion put forward by Menzies that the Longitudes found in that said map were calculated by the Chinese astronomers that would have been preset in the fleet led by the admiral Zheng He. In the voyage that extended from Africa to the Americas.