Diary of Deception

1. In early 2003, the book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, under the claimed authorship of Gavin Menzies, was published by Transworld in Great Britain, and William Morrow in the United States (the latter under the title 1421: The Year China Discovered America. The book was dismissed as a sham by all reviewers. Despite the dismissals, the publicity machines of both publishers and Mr. Menzies continued to promote the book around the world as revisionist history.
    
2. Even prior to publication, in order to promote sales and feigned respectability, Mr. Menzies hired a room at the Royal Geographic Society in London, to announce his forthcoming book. On this basis, he deceptively claimed that he had been invited to lecture on '1421' to the Royal Geographical Society.
    
3. In response, in late 2004, Captain Phil Rivers published his ‘1421’ Voyages: Fact and Fantasy (Perak Academy, Malaysia) which demonstrated the complete navigational and physical impossibility of the voyages as proposed in 1421.
    
4. By March 2005, a number of interested members of the public in Malaysia, Singapore, Portugal and the United States had come together electronically through their concern over the growing campaign of public deception being waged by Mr. Menzies and his publishers Transworld/Bantam/William Morrow. They were particularly concerned that the Menzies’ machine had managed to convince the Asia Division of the Library of Congress to provide Mr. Menzies and his supporters with a venue to promote their fabrications in May 2005.
    
5. In June 2005, an Exhibition based on the book 1421 and promoted by Mr. Menzies was launched in Singapore with the support of the Singapore Tourism Board. Following criticism of the deceptive nature of the Exhibition, it was closed down.
    
6. In late 2005, the Mr. Menzies began suggesting that he had in his possession a map which would prove the claims made in 1421. This map, owned by Beijing lawyer Mr. Liu Gang, was subsequently made public during a press conference in Beijing in January 2006 and through an article Mr. Menzies’ team arranged to have printed in The Economist magazine. The map has been subsequently shown to be a 20th-century fake.
    
7. In response to the continuing and deepening deception being waged by Mr Menzies and his group and the complete failure of the publishers to address their culpability in promoting faction as history, in February 2006, this website (www.1421exposed.com) was established by an international group of academics and researchers from New Zealand, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, the United States, Hong Kong and Canada. The website is aimed at providing a focus for publicly disseminating information on the deceit and deficiencies in the book 1421: the Year China Discovered the World, and demonstrating that the publishers (all under the Bertelsmann AG stable) were engaged in a concerted campaign of public deception.
    
8. In 2006, St Martin’s Press in New York published Mr Paul Chiasson’s book The Island of Seven Cities, a work which posits a Ming Chinese settlement of Cape Dauphin, Nova Scotia, Canada. The work was promoted and lauded by Mr Menzies (who had invited Mr Chiasson to present at the Library of Congress event) as great support for his theory. Investigations by members of the www.1421exposed group showed that every single claim of pre-1900 human activity on the peninsula as suggested in the book was false and can be seen as an attempt to deceive the public through unfounded assertions and exaggerated claims.
    
9. The publicity generated by www.1421exposed.com’s efforts was such that it attracted the attention of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s premier investigative journalism programme Four Corners. The Four Corners team went on to produce an incisive documentary on the 1421 phenomenon, demonstrating that the book was published by Transworld through a ghost writer, and without any fact-checking.
    
10. Details of the Four Corners programme, broadcast in July 2006 can be found here and a full transcript of the programme can be read here. Mr. Menzies subsequently threatened to sue the producers and the ABC.
     
11. What is apparent from these continuing and diverse episodes is that Mr. Menzies, his acolytes, and his publishers are bent on a campaign of disinformation for purposes which extend not far beyond the pocketbook. That they are willing to intentionally deceive huge numbers of people through producing and publishing fiction as non-fiction demands some form of public sanction.
     
12. Mr. Menzies has now produced or at least appended his name to a new book, in much the same mould as earlier efforts. 1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance was published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd (owned by News Corporation) in July 2007.
     
13. In response to this, the researchers who brought you www.1421exposed.com have established a new section of their website to again provide a public domain for comments and critiques of the contents of 1434, the author and the publishers.
     
14. Much of the new work is drawn from material already published on Mr Menzies website:

http://www.1421.tv/pages/evidence/content.asp?EvidenceID=403
http://www.1421.tv/pages/evidence/content.asp?EvidenceID=463

All material (c) Copyright the author, publisher, or 1421exposed.com, 2006