1434 by Gavin Menzies Page A

Srebrenica near the Dalmatian coast. It was dated to between 1410 and 1419 and showed the world from Greenland to Australia, including Africa, accurately drawn decades before Europeans knew Africa’s shape and centuries before they knew the shape and relative positions of China, Japan, and Australia. The map had been authenticated by Professor Franz Von Wieser, the leading cartographer of his day. It must have been copied from a non-European map, and in the opinion of Dr. Thompson and me, it could only be a copy of a Chinese map that had been published before 1419. Moreover, Dr. Thompson had found evidence that ships from the Dalmatian coast had sailed to North America in the 1440s and settled near the RoanokeRiver in Virginia—the famous “Croatans.” 6 In my view, Dalmatian ships would not have visited America fifty years before Columbus unless they had maps showing the way—once again pointing to Zheng He’s fleets having visited Dalmatia and leaving maps. By 2005 we had sold Serbo-Croat literary rights to 1421, which I hoped would lead to new evidence of Chinese visits along the coast, but alas, none emerged.
    Then out of the blue on October 21, 2007, I received two e-mails from Dr. A. Z. Lovric, a geneticist whose old family name was Yoshamya (names were forcibly changed after the Ottoman invasions in the sixteenth century). Dr. Lovric told me that his distinguished predecessor Professor Mitjel Yoshamya had published a lengthy paper (of nearly twelve hundred pages) claiming that a Dalmatian admiral, Harvatye Mariakyr, had sailed the world before Ottoman invasions. He had done so having received world maps from a Chinese admiral who had visited the Dalmatian coast. Copies of the e-mails are included on the 1434 website.
    Here is a summary of the points made in Dr. Lovric’s e-mail:
A legend persists among island people off the Adriatic that prior to the Ottoman invasions (prior to 1522) foreign sailing ships manned by “Oblique-eyed yellow Easterners” (in old Dalmatic: pashoglavi zihodane ) visited the Adriatic.
After the oriental naval visits the medieval Dalmatian admiral Harvatye Mariakyr with seven Adriatic ships reciprocated the visit by sailing through the Indian Ocean (Khulap-Yndran) to the Far East to Zihodane in Khitay (Cathay).
On his return from the Far East, Admiral Mariakyr, having learned of a new land in the West, decided to sail there with his fleet to Semeraye (South America); he lost his life in medieval Parané (Patagonia). This voyage was recorded in medieval Glagolitic script.
Recent DNA studies have confirmed that in some Adriatic islands (Hvar, Korcula) and on the adjacent coasts (Makarska) certain families have East Asian genotype.
Up until the twentieth century some of these Adriatic islanders had surnames of non-Slavic and non-European origin, for example, Yoshamya, Yenda, Uresha, Shamana, Sayana, Sarana, and Hayana. In 1918 when the Austro-Hungarians were defeated, the islanders were obliged to Slavicize such foreign surnames, but they persist to this day in nicknames and aliases.
Medieval Dalmatian-colored symbols for maps were the same as those used by the Chinese: black = north, white = west, red = south, blue and green = east.
Adriatic islanders have until recently used a non-European nomenclature for America and the Far East based on translations of Chinese nomenclature.
American cactuses (chiefly Opuntia ) in medieval Dalmatia, at Dubrovnik and elsewhere, were said to have been brought by early ships from the Far East.
    Dr. Lovric’s e-mail referred to Professor Mitjel Yoshamya’s research in Croatian, published in Zagreb in 2004. The lengthy paper covers the spread of old Dalmatian names across the Pacific before the Spanish explorers; Sion-Kulap (Pacific): Skopye-Kulapne (Philippines), Sadritye-Polnebne (Melanesia), Sadritye-Zihodne (Micronesia), Skopye-Zihodne (Japan), Artazihod (Korea), and Velapolneb (New Zealand). Goa was the main