II
Alphonse and Thierry unknotted the rigging, lowered the sail and the mast, then the four of them together heaved the pirogue up past the high-tide mark of the beach. Thierry found a section of flat sand and fashioned a makeshift tent from the sail and two paddles, just about big enough for them all. Alphonse collected wood and built a fire on which they boiled rice and grilled fish, before sitting in a line looking out over the sea and eating it with their fingers.
‘You never told me what the verdict was,’ said Lucia.
‘Your science presentation. Did the Chinese discover America?’
He gave her a sideways glance; she must have been aware of all the rancour and commotion on the Maritsa last night. Maybe this was her way of angling for the story. ‘I’m never quite sure what people mean by that,’ he answered carefully. ‘It’s always struck me as a little arrogant to say the New World was discovered by Columbus or the Chinese or whoever. What about the tribes-people who crossed the Bering Strait sixteen thousand years ago? Don’t they count? Or the Norsemen of the Vinland sagas? Or the men of Bristol, who fished off the American coast long before Columbus. Discovery’s just a euphemism. What people really mean is conquest. And, no, the Chinese didn’t conquer America.’
‘Nice sidestep,’ she smiled.
Knox laughed and nodded across the fire at Alphonse and Thierry, helping themselves to more mounds of rice. ‘Did you know that these guys sometimes sail their pirogues all the way across this channel to Mozambique? Two hundred miles of treacherous open sea in a fifteenfoot canoe, armed only with food, fresh water and a pack of cigarettes. People do extraordinary things in boats, and they don’t always leave evidence behind. Frankly, I’d be amazed if no Chinese had ever made it to America before Columbus.’
‘Look at a map sometime. Sail north from China, you can have land to your left all the way around Kamchatka to the Bering Sea, then down Alaska to British Columbia and the western United States. Or, if you don’t fancy the cold, you could always island-hop via the Kurils and the Aleutians. Did no fisherman or merchant ever make it there, not even by accident?’
‘Reaching somewhere isn’t the point,’ observed Lucia. ‘It only counts if you report it back.’
‘And maybe they did,’ said Knox. ‘The Chinese certainly believed in a place called Fusang, ten thousand kilometres to their east, pretty much exactly where California is. The third-century emperor Shi Huang despatched a group of settlers there; by all accounts they settled happily enough. A Buddhist monk called Hui Shen followed with a party of missionaries.’ Bizarrely, Hui Shen had had an almostexact Irish counterpart, a sixth-century abbot called Brendan, who’d led a crew of monks west in search of a promised land filled with fruit and meadows and all good things, encountering talking birds and mysterious floating crystal towers on his way. Brendan had existed for sure, and his transatlantic odyssey was certainly plausible. When the Vikings had reached Iceland, they’d found it already settled by Irish Christians. And while Norse longboats had been nothing like as sophisticated as Chinese treasure ships, Leif Eriksson had still managed to sight the North American coast from one, while others had established a settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, the only indisputable evidence of Europeans reaching the New World before Columbus.
Lucia nodded. ‘So Zheng He and his admirals would have expected to find land where America was?’
‘They certainly wouldn’t have been surprised by it. Though that doesn’t mean they got there, of course. Or anywhere close.’ They’d finished their food by now, so they took their plates down to the shallows, rinsed them clean. ‘But you have to remember that Chinese ships were absolute pigs to steer. They could hardly sail into the wind at all, and so were utterly dependent upon the monsoon and the other trade winds.’ He gestured out into the Mozambique Channel. ‘If they’d come this far south, and missed their window, their choice would have been to wait out another whole year or risk sailing wherever the wind blew them.’
‘And if it had blown them to Fusang …?’
‘Exactly,’ smiled Knox.