Cita Iniciado por Irmão de Cá Ver mensaje
Devil's advocate? Why? You're just presenting some interesting adds to the topic, and you're always welcome to do so in hispanismo.org.

It's perfectly possible that the Chinese have discovered Australia and other parts of the world before the Portuguese did... before the Chinese, is absolutely certain that the Indonesian and the Polynesian natives have discovered Australia thousands of years ago. The point of this article - and all the others about this topic here in hispanismo.org - is that the Portuguese were the first of what we call the medieval Christianity.
I wasn't implying that the Chinese "discovered" the Western Hemisphere. There's antecdotes in certain Chinese histories of a land called Fu-Shang, which a few fringe commentators say is North America. I'm not sure if it's referenced in 1421 book or not but I do know that the maritime history of the Chinese is one of the oldest in the world; the Chinese were trading by sail all over the Far East since well before any of the modern European nations existed and I was just bringing up the name of Zheng He, arguably China's greatest maritime explorer, as a potential "what-if." The man is hardly known in the west but his explorations were on a scale that dwarfs anything of the time.

If the Chinese "discovered" North America there presence was minute and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.