"… The Chinese fleets had charted the world, they could determine longitude by means of lunar eclipses, and by comparing charts they were able to resolve any remaining longitudinal differences and complete the first map of the world as we know it today. But that knowledge was bought at a terrible cost. Only four of Hong Bao's ships and just one of Zhou Man's returned to China - a loss of at least fifty ships in those two fleets alone. The human toll was equally high: a mere nine hundred of the nine thousand men in Zhou Man's fleet were still with their admiral come October 1423. Up to three-quarters of the fleets' original complement must have died or been abandoned in the scattered settlements around the globe.

Twenty-four wrecks have already been located around the world; many more, carrying thousands of tons of treasure, remain to be found. The oceans will inevitably release more and more evidence as time goes by. The costs in both human and financial terms remain unparalleled - even the mightiest empire the world had ever seen was unable to sustain them - but the tasks Zhu Di had set his admirals had been achieved. It was a towering achievement, unequalled in the annals of mankind.

Zhu Di's master plan to discover and chart the entire world, and bring it into Confucian harmony through trade and foreign policy, could have succeeded, for the whole world now lay at China's feet - or so it must have seemed to his admirals when the handful of surviving ships of the treasure fleets limped home during the autumn of 1423, only to find that China, and the world, had changed for ever. Zhu Di was dying, a broken man, and the mandarins were dismantling the apparatus of the worldwide empire he had so nearly created. There would be no more tribute system, no more great scientific experiments, no more epic voyages of trade and discovery. China was entering its long night of isolation from the outside world. The eunuch admirals were dismissed, their ships broken up or left to rot at their moorings, the maps and charts and thousands of precious documents recording their exploits destroyed. Zhu Di's great achievements were disowned, ignored and, in time, forgotten.

One of the fascinating 'what ifs' of history is what would have happened had lightning not struck the Forbidden City on 9 May 1421, had fire not roared down the Imperial Way and turned the emperor's palaces and throne to cinders. Would the emperor's favourite concubine have survived? Would the emperor have kept his nerve? Would he have ordered Admiral Zheng He's squadrons to continue their voyages? Would they have carried on establishing permanent colonies in Africa, the Americas, and Australia? Would New York now be called New Beijing? Would Sydney have an 'English' rather than a 'Chinese' quarter? Would Buddhism rather than Christianity have become the religion of the New World?

Instead of the cultured Chinese, instructed to 'treat distant people with kindness', it was the cruel, almost barbaric Christians who were the colonizers. Francisco Pizarro gained Peru from the Incas by massacring five thousand Indians in cold blood. Today he would be considered a war criminal.

In effect the Portuguese used Chinese cartography to show them the way to the East. Then they stole the spice trade, which the Indians and Chinese had spent centuries building. Anyone who might stop them was mown down. When da Gama reached Calicut he told his men to parade Indian prisoners, then to hack off their hands, ears and noses. All the amputated pieces were piled up in a small boat. The historian Gaspar Correa describes da Gama's next move:

When all the Indians had been thus executed [sic], he ordered their feet to be tied together, as they had no hands with which to untie them: and in order that they should not untie them with their teeth, he ordered them to strike upon their teeth with staves, and they knocked them down their throats…

Then a Brahmin was sent from Calicut to plead for peace. The 'brave' da Gama had his lips and ears cut off and the ears of a dog sewn on instead.

It seems certain that a further voyage by Zheng He's fleets would have included the one section of the globe they had not yet reached and charted - Europe. The upheavals in Beijing ended any possibility of that, but who can say what the subsequent history of the world would have been had the Chinese treasure ships appeared over the European horizon in the 1420's? One thing seems certain: had the emperors who followed Zhu Di not retreated into xenophobia and isolation, China, not Europe, would have become the mistress of the world.

The Forbidden City still stands as a monument to the vision of the great Zhu Di, but what more fitting epitaph could there be to the 'Emperor on Horseback' than the valiant horseman mounted on the tip of Corvo's volcano in the Azores, high above the Atlantic rollers crashing onto the cliffs far below? He pointed dramatically to the west, towards Fusang, the Americas, the land his brave and skilful mariners had discovered. As China began to draw in on itself, abandoning Zhu Di's great ambitions, others, notably the Portuguese and Spanish, began to fill the vacuum they had left. For centuries they have basked in the glory that rightfully belonged to others; it is now time, at last, for us to redress the balance of history and give credit where it is due.

To assert the primacy of the Chinese exploration of the New World and of Australia is not to denigrate the achievements and memories of Dias, Columbus, Magellan and Cook. The exploits of these brave and skilful men will never be forgotten, but it is now time to honour other men who have been allowed to languish in obscurity for too long. These remarkable Chinese admirals rounded the Cape of Good Hope sixty-six years before Dias, passed through the Strait of Magellan ninety-eight years before Magellan, surveyed Australia three centuries before Captain Cook, Antarctica and the Arctic four centuries before the first Europeans. The great admirals Zheng He, Hong Bao, Zhou Man, Zhou Wen and Yang Qing deserve to be remembered and celebrated too, for they were the first, the bravest and the most daring of all. Those who followed them, no matter how great their achievements, were sailing in their wake.

It had taken me years to complete the research into these great Chinese voyages, but finally, by Christmas 2001, my work was finished. I sent it out for comments to experts around the world, and when their corrections were incorporated I was ready to publicize my findings at the lecture I gave at the Royal Geographical Society on 15 March 2002. It was broadcast around the world to thirty-six countries populated by two billion people, and since then a further mass of corroborative evidence has come my way from people carrying out research on every continent. Some has been used in this book, and more continues to arrive every day. Many exciting discoveries such as the Sacramento junk, the sand mounds on Bimini and the tower at Rhode Island have yet to be fully examined and evaluated. The story is only just beginning, and it is one for all of us to share…"

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