THE FIRST GLOBAL SUPERPOWER? Not the United States. In The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David Landes writes about China's large fourteenth-century sailing ships, and speculates.

Suppose the Chinese had not given up on trade and exploration, suppose the Portuguese had arrived in the Indian Ocean to find those huge Chinese ships ruling the seas? Or even more, suppose the Chinese had not stopped somewhere around the Mozambique channel but had gone around the Cape [of Good Hope] into the Atlantic, thereby opening maritime links to West Africa and Europe?

The thesis of Gavin Menzies's 1421: The Year China Discovered America is that the Chinese rounded Good Hope and Horn, accurately mapped the coasts of the Americas, Australia, and Antarctica, and left settlements behind from which the descendants later intermarried with native peoples. I have previously promised a review of this book, and here it is, as this year's Book Review No. 5. Mr Menzies has a site that summarizes many of his hypotheses. There is also a debunking site.

What do we have? On the one hand, there do appear to be Chinese maps that antedate the Iberian expeditions of the late fifteenth century, and, as Mr Menzies notes, a terrestrial attribution to those maps is more parsimonious than an attribution to ancient astronauts. He makes reference to what might be Chinese survey benchmarks in eastern Massachusetts, structures in Rock Lake, Wisconsin, the lake in Lake Mills, that might be connected to the Aztlan site just east of there (curiously, the Mexican revanchists who covet California and other Sun Belt locations have not pursued claims to Wisconsin or the Copper Country) and to obscure logs of conquistadores that suggest Chinese influence on the cities that may or may not have been the lost Seven Cities of Cibola. Lake Mills is not far from here, and I have a trip to eastern Massachusetts laid on for the summer. I'll observe and decide, then report.

On the other hand, if all of Mr Menzies's allegations of Chinese chicken DNA in North American chickens are as reliable as his assertion that the Rhode Island Red is a Chinese chicken, there's a problem. It's not too hard to cross-breed a Chinese chicken brought back in a Yankee Clipper with an American chicken, circa 1840, which is apparently what one Captain Richard Wheatland did. Then there's his invocation of the Ming clans (Ming-ho, Wyo Ming, and Lyco Ming, scroll down to point 5) that migrated to the Americas. That passage didn't ring true to me. Model railroaders are notorious for inventing corny place names, and those names sounded very much like they'd be on an obscure branch of John Armstrong's Canandaigua Southern that went via Gasmeterszag across the Alleghanies at Aikenbach thence by way of Llan Mawr and a connection with the Pennsy at Mingo Junction, ultimately fading into the sunset as it serves the coal mine at the Sino-Cornish hamlet of Glo Ming. I submit my Google search.