A century later, arguments erupted as to a) the actual authenticity of the account (many believed it was nothing more than an elaborate story made to amuse the royal court) but if so then b) the identity of the country Hui-Shen landed in. Some insisted it was not America but Japan, but those who discounted that theory and maintained the monk had made it to America calculated that he might have landed in Mexico, possibly at Acapulco. Chinese researchers, of course, think it’s a grand idea; the chance to upstage the Americans with the embarrassing evidence that their country was actually discovered by a communist one! Or at least, visited by them long before they themselves got there. But politics and points-scoring aside, there does seem to be a lot of evidence to support this theory.
And here again we say hello to Henriette Mertz.
Remember her? She was the one to support the journey of the Great Yu a little earlier above. She weighed in on this one too, and began trying to retrace the path of Hui-Shen using information given in his account. And once again she was able to verify, as far as possible, the journey of the Buddhist monk. It’s easiest if I just paste this bit. Easier for me, anyway, than trying to explain it in my fumbling way.
She assumed that the Buddhists had begun their journey in the south of China, the place where Hui-Shen returned to tell the story, and that it ended up in southern California, the place they called Fu-Sang. She believed the monks landed on the coast in the vicinity of Los Angeles—Point Hueneme, to be precise. They then went east 350 miles and arrived on the Mogollon Mesa of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico, the area Mertz identified as the “Kingdom of Women.” She found that some three hundred miles north, as per Hui-Shen’s account, lay the noted black canyon in western Colorado called “The Black Canyon of the Gunnison.” North of this canyon stands majestic Mount Gunnison and still farther north
is the snowcapped mountain Hui-Shen mentioned, Snowmass.
To the south of the Mogollon Mesa in Mexico are two wellknown smoking mountains, according to Mertz, Popocatepetl, whose name means smoking mountain, and the Volcán de Colima. Mertz thinks Hui-Shen’s “smoking mountain” in the Kingdom of Women was Volcán, which is located near the coast. West from the Kingdom, noted Mertz, are innumerable springs, including Warner Hot Springs and Palm Springs. And right in the heart of Los Angeles are the La Brea Tar Pits, which sounds suspiciously like Hui-Shen’s sea of varnish. Mertz could not pin down which California lake Hui-Shen called a “sea the color of milk,” as many California lakes have dried up over time and all that now remains of them is the salt solution on their bottoms. These beds of salt and borax glisten snow white under the desert sun. Mertz believed that Hui-Shen’s Fu-Sang plant was ancient com, which was sometimes pear-shaped and reddish and could be kept for a year without spoilage.
Other researchers have suggested that the Fu-Sang plant might be a reference to the prickly pear or the cactus apple. Still others viewed it as a reference to the century plant, which is known as maguey in Mexico. The sprouts of the century plant do resemble bamboo and are eaten, and cloth and paper are made from its fibers. The plant also resembles a tree, as its tall branching and flowering candelabralike stalk often reaches as much as thirty feet in height. But it does not bear red pearshaped fruit. When it came to the circular living quarters of Hui-Shen’s Kingdom of Women, Mertz found an answer for this as well. She thought they resembled the adobe houses found among the Indians of central Arizona. Their burrowlike entrances were just as he had described. She also thought that the dog’s heads on their men might be a reference to the kachina ceremonial masks, which were made of wood, feathers, furs, and skin and looked like cows, eagles, snakes, and dogs. They were worn by the men when praying for rain and during other spiritual occasions.
While some have interpreted Hui-Shen’s Kingdom of Women with its hairy ladies and precocious children as a reference to Central American monkeys, Mertz saw a reference to a matrilineal people such as the Pueblos of the southwest. Among the matrilineal Hopi, for instance, houses were owned by women, and their clans were related through the females. A child was bom into his mother’s clan and was named by his mother’s sister. Such a matriarchal system in which the women exercised control over persons or property would certainly have seemed quite odd to the Chinese. Mertz also found a reasonable explanation for Hui-Shen’s outrageous notion of snakes as husbands. Hopi men belonged to a Snake Clan and considered themselves one with the snake. The Hopi legend of the Spider Woman tells how the Snake Clan came to be.
One day the son of a chief and the Spider Woman encountered a group of men and women who, after dressing themselves in snakeskins, turned into snakes. The Spider Woman helped the son’s chief catch a beautiful young girl who had been turned into a yellow rattler. He eventually married her, but the children she bore him were all snakes. Not happy with this situation, the tribe sent them away to another pueblo. The couple then had more children, but this time their offspring were human. This made the male children blood brothers of the snakes and explains how the Snake Clan came to be. Mertz even came to understand the odd nursing behavior HuiShen had observed. The monk said that the papooses carried on the backs of their mothers were fed by a white substance that came from the hair at the nape of the mother’s neck. But Indian women customarily gathered their long hair at the nape of the neck and tied it with white ribbons. What could be more natural, said Mertz, than for a baby strapped to his mother’s back to be attracted to this white ribbon? The baby with the ribbon in its mouth would look to a naïve observer from a distance as though the baby was feeding.
Mertz also found a myth held by the Pima Indians of Arizona to explain why Hui-Shen said that children became adults by the age of three or four. The legend of Hâ-âk says that the daughter of a chief gave birth to a strange-looking female creature who grew to maturity in three or four years. But because she ate everything in sight, she was eventually killed. This event was celebrated with a great feast, and the Pima eventually built a shrine in honor of this day five miles north of Sacaton, Arizona. Mertz speculates that HuiShen might even have passed by this shrine and been told of this legend. And the salt plant these people ate, Mertz has identified as Anemonopsis californica, a plant with a large root and a strong medicinal scent that grows in salt-bed depressions in southern California.
So that’s all nice and explained then. Glad we had someone like Mertz to suss it all out, because it had me bamboozled. As usual though, there are a large portion of scientists who just simply don’t believe her. There’s no way to know for sure if she is right, but her unravelling of the rather fantastic account does make a certain amount of sense. Whether she was fitting her theory to the facts or vice versa is hard to say, but then, it seems all the skeptics keep doing this anyway, so why not her?
Further evidence comes in the shape of the wheel, or to be more precise, the unearthing of small toy animals on wheels from sites in Mexico in the 1940s, dated from the third century. So what, say you? So buttons, say I: the wheel was not even known, never mind invented, in South America at this time, so how did these people not only know of it, but construct toys that ran on wheels? The only possible answer is that they had learned of these things from the Chinese who had visited them, or that the artifacts were made by Chinese craftsmen living there.
Which came first? The chicken or… the chicken?
How such a humble thing as the main ingredient in your Sunday dinner could come to have such an important bearing on who was first to discover America is a long and interesting story. And here it is. History teaches us that the Spanish, those well-known conquerors of native civilisations and plunderers of gold and silver (the mythical city isn’t named El Dorado by accident) brought chickens to America, that the natives had never seen, heard of and certainly never tasted the flesh of these fowl most common in the West. But as usual, history is telling us if not lies, then at least half-truths.
The evidence (that pesky evidence again!) seems to support the presence of chickens in at least South America (or Mesoamerica, as they call it) long before the Spaniards got there. They already had names for them, not based on the European ones of
gallo and
gallina but as
Takara and
karaka, names known to originate in the Hindu language. Even los hombres themselves, arriving in Brazil from about 1519, differentiate between the two types in their accounts. Some of the chickens they encountered there had black skin, feathers more like hair, small pea combs as opposed to the large coxcombs of the European chicken, and were sixteen feet tall. Nah just kidding. They were only fourteen. Sorry. I go a bit funny sometimes.
No, but these chickens, believed to have come from Asia, possibly India or Indonesia, also had no tails, so there’s no way they could have been from Europe. Naturally, these events were glossed over in the official history, and everyone led to believe that the servants of their Most Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella had graciously introduced the savage natives to the Spanish chicken. The Inca - soon to regret ever bumping into the servants of their Most Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella, who would very quickly do the Catholic thing and destroy their very race - had an emperor who was called Atahualpa, due to the Inca word for chicken being
gualpa (presumably pronounced with a “h” sound) and so every time the cock crowed it would seem like it was calling the emperor’s name, and he would be remembered for eternity. Sadly, this did not work out, and nobody remembered him because the servants of their Most Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella made pretty damn sure there was nobody left to remember him. Sources do not indicate what happened to the chickens.