Mike Carrell writes, > Anyone with a new awareness of China should get a copy of "1421 The Year China Discovered America" and also dig into the 1421 website,
There is local (SF Bay area) connection to this story : http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/7792971.htm?1c Supposedly one of the pre-Colombian Chinese Junks was found way up river from the San Francisco, but I doubt that this particular piece of evidence will pan out. It is way too far up the river for an ocean-going vessel to navigate, but who knows. According to my sailing friends, the winds and currents would make it very easy to sail to California in junk-type boats from China but extremely difficult to return. They would have to return by Hawaii, across the widest part of the Pacific - but not impossible by any means. Coincidentally the junk was found near "gold country" which makes one think it arrived in the gold rush era, but the boat appears much older. It is said that even before the first Chinese came over to work the mines and build the railway, that this area was already going by the name of "gold mountain" in China, so maybe they did beat the 49ers by 400 years and already knew where the gold was. If this relic does turn out to be one of those junks, there will be a lot of experts "eating crow." But, then again, we are living in "interesting times," curse or no, and many experts in other fields will be dining thusly. Funny how with a slightly different socio-political backdrop, the world as we know it could be completely different.
