Zhou Man


Zhou Man, was a 15th-century Chinese admiral and explorer. He was born into a wealthy merchant family in the year 1378. When he was six years old, his father died on an overseas voyage to Korea. Mourning his father's death, he left his mother and his four younger siblings behind. He worked his way into the emperor's staff by the age of 22. At 32, he was assigned "Grand Leader of All Vessels Commanded by the Emperor's Swift Hand."
Zhou, with the help of three other commanders, explored wide reaches of the Indian Ocean. A stone inscription, dated 1431, at the Palace of the Celestial Spouse in Liujiagang, Jiangsu is translated as:

In fiction

Thomas Seinbeck's "In the Shade of the Cypress" is a historical novel whose main character is Zhou Man.
In his book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, amateur historian Gavin Menzies argues that Zhou Man built a fortess at Bittangabee Bay Australia and that his fleet approached and mapped the Pacific coast of North America and may have been wiped out by a megatsunami resulting from a comet impact creating Mahuika crater. The Australian geographer Professor Victor Prescott states that the structure at Bittangabee is considered by local archaeologists to be early 19th century and that Menzies misinterpreted the Waldseemüller map which he used as evidence for a visit by Zhou Man to the Americas.