Alternative History

Then your name would be "Little Arrowhead".

Well, at some point after 1600, several huge boatloads of Chinese sailed up the Thames and claimed the locality as part of their worldwide empire, after that it would only be a matter of time for them to defeat the feuding aristocrats of France, Holland and the Prussian duchies. This would have come years after their conquest and settlement of what is now the Western United States and Mexico.
The remaining Aztecs fleeing from the Asian invasion went North and East and united the five million forest dwelling Indians living along the East Coast of North America. Far from staying enemies, by 1750, the Aztec and the Chinese would become powerful trading partners subjecting their minions throughout the European continent to serve them by supplying raw materials for the expanding manufacture of hard goods for sale to all the nations in the Southern Hemisphere.
Over the next 300 years, the area now known as Europe would remain a cold and sullen place, filled with the unwashed and uneducated people of the world. Meanwhile, scholars would write reams concerning the meteoric rise of the United States of Africania and the Confederation of Arabiaca.

As both China and Azteca became complacent with their power, the Africanans and Arabiacans took advantage of their ability to conceive ideas and invent new processes of both manufacture and computer technology. Joining forces in 2020, their third colony on the moon was placed with the sole purpose of serving as a launch pad to Mars and beyond.
About the same time as that colony was celebrating it's fifth year, the last three speakers of English were found living on a small farm in Ireland. Some recordings were made of them but received little other notice.

Joe(except to mention that they were probably also the last members of an odd cult of medieval belief in someone named Christo Jesu.)Nation

So, do you have the copyright on that yet? If not, what would be a good title. Just out of curiosity, ya unnerstan.

Expand that to book-length, Joe, and I promise I'll not only buy it but read it. Good plot summary.

Sorry but you have to somehow explain how with the ship building technology of the time how Europe would not have "discover" the new world and how with an ocean three time larger to cross that the Chinese did so.

I love Turtledove's books but you do need to keep some logic in the plot.

A good first try however<grin>.

Well, jeepers, that's what the book will be all about! You want to be serious, Bill. That ain't fair.

Actually the Chinese were crossing the PAcific because they heard there was a country composed entirely of potential customers and they had the first boatload of chachkies to sell. Thats how the word "chinese Junk" came to signify a flat prowed sail boat filled with goods to sell.
If the Chinese didnt find the New World, where did those pagodas in LA come from? Joe has made a valid point, Bills' protestations not withstanding.

Oh, I don't think it would be difficult to explain European ships failing to cross the Atlantic.

Um. Just making this up now..

In the late 1400s,Isabella of Spain fails to stop the Muslims from completing their conquest of the entire Iberian Peninsula thus putting to an end the voyages of the Portuguese and any Atlantic exploration by the Spanish. (A new version of Goodbye, Columbus. )
In 1488, Henry VII of England in an attempt to make an alliance with the new rulers of Spain, marries his first son, Arthur, to the daughter of Great High Sultan. She is the beautiful Bahiyaa of Aragon. But, things go wrong, Arthur dies soon thereafter. (Does this sound familiar?) Henry VII wants his second son also named Henry to marry Bahiyaa, but the Pope will have none of it (You are not allowed to marry your death brother wife, sorry,) and forbids the marriage. The alliance fails. The Muslims invade England about five years before the Chinese show up.

They show up, by the way, in the same multi-masted ships they have been sailing all around Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Islands since the early days of the 1400's.
This image is from the Fra Mauro map of 1420 . It tells of a Chinese ship in the Indian Ocean far larger than anything produced by the actual Europeans during the time. Large enough to cross the Pacific by sailing the Northen Arc which had been done numerous times by fisherman sized junks.

Luckily for the Chinese in our made-up version, the Dutch, who were the last great shipbuilders left were only too delighted to open trading stations with the Asian conquerors of their rival England. They assisted the Chinese in the complete deforestation of both England and Ireland before moving on to the woods deeper on the continent.

The ships that they built with the Chinese are the ones, loaded with cannons and over 270 feet long, which shelled the cities of Italy and Greece into ruins in the 1600s for continuing to resist against them. The last Pope fled Rome for Moscow in 1649.

Proclaiming the Mediterranean as "our little lake" the Chinese General Zuo Tsa made peace with the Islamic inhabitants of what is now North Africa while keeping those on the northside of the lake in constant bondage.

Joe(history cannot only turn on a dime, it can spin)Nation

Disregarding the (impplausible) probability of someone beating the Europeans in the "discovery" of America, there are still some interesting pieces of alternative history, specially regarding the conquest of Mexico.

Two or three very small "ifs" would have changed history.

If Cortés, who was a rebel, would have been more of a rebel -like some of his men wanted-, if Pedro de Alvarado had died of his wounds in the first battles, and if Diego de Velázquez had taken longer to send Pánfilo de Narváez against Cortés. then it is probable that Cortés would have forged a political alliance not only with the peoples who tributed to the Aztecs but with the Aztecs themselves, and would pretend to make himself Emperor of Mexico, -a sort of mestizo empire, just as the first mestizos were born.
This empire would give tremendous resistance to the forseeable following Crown expeditions, and the conquest would become a much more expensive affair to the already troubled Spanish kingdom. A truce may have come.

I said, "if Diego de Velázquez had taken longer to send Pánfilo de Narváez against Cortés". This also means that it would be less probable that smallpox (brought by the Narváez crew) would arrive so fast to the New World, decimating the indigenous population.
In that context, it is probable that the Empire would have throughly colonized regions that were inhabited by chichimecas ("barbarians", in Aztec language) in what is now North America, and would have made it more difficult for a Spanish reconquista.

The Mexican empire, always at war with Cuba -the one Spanish stronghold in the Americans- would have also plotted to overthrow the Crown governments in the island. If successfull, a mesoamerican invasion of Cuba would ensue.

This would bring the enemies of Spain -the Dutch, in first place- to growing trade with the Mexican empire. Both of goods and slaves. With too many fronts to fight in, Spain would have crumbled, just like the Soviet Union did, many years later, in another warp of history.

interesting stuff fb

I'm with both fbaezer and joe on this. I don't know where BillRM gets the notion that the Chinese didn't have ships that could cross the Pacific. Quite the contrary, their shipbuilding industry was quite superior to anything found in Europe at that time. They just happened to prefer sailing into the Indian Ocean to trade rather than exploring blindly into the Pacific. There are some cockamamie theories which posit that some Chinese and/or Japanese ships might have reached California before 1492 c.e. But there is no evidence to support such speculation.

However, all good stuff, guys. Keep it goin'.

Between 1405 and 1433 admiral Cheng Ho (1371-1433) commanded seven grand voyages from China to southeast Asia, India, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the eastern coast of Africa. To some western scholars, versed in the European voyages of exploration that profoundly affected much of the world's history, the voyages of Cheng Ho appear enigmatic. The voyages of Cheng Ho were significant undertakings that demonstrated China's impressive maritime technology and expertise, yet their impact was only short-lived. Undertaken with the aim of spreading China's imperial majesty to distant lands, these endeavors were to have very different consequences than the early Europeanvoyages of discovery, which took place soon after. Having achieved the aim of opening up trade and the flow of tribute from distant lands, thevoyages suddenly ceased and private overseas trade banned by royal edict as China withdrew into itself.

Cheng Ho was a eunuch and a military commander who had assisted the Yongle emperor, Zhu Di (1360-1424) to overthrow his nephew and become emperor. The fleets he commandedon the sevenvoyages were comprised of up to 317 ships, the largest of which were treasure ships, estimated to have been between 390 and 408 feet (119 and 124 m) long and more than 160 feet (49 m) wide.
Read More
http://geography.about.com/od/historyofgeography/a/chengho.htm

Glad you brought that up, dad. I was thinking of Cheng Ho when I wrote that Chinese shipbuilding far outshone any contemporary European efforts. The thing is, they were interested strictly in trade and/or conquest, not exploration for its own sake.

I don't know where BillRM gets the notion that the Chinese didn't have ships that could cross the Pacific. Quite the contrary, their shipbuilding industry was quite superior to anything found in Europe at that time.
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Come on for one thing you have the little problem of only being able to crew a ship away from land for a month or so before your crew teeth begin to fall out from lack of Vitamin C.

The Pacific Ocean is far more of a challenge to cross then the Atlantic and need far more advance technology in many fields other then ship building and even in the 1700 century crossing the Atlantic was a challenge. Thomas Paine almost dies from doing so as a matter of fact.

Beside the distant being far shorter once discover the winds and current patterns between the new world and the old world also greatly aid sailing ships crossings and that you do not find in the Pacific.

Bill's providing us with his years of experience yo ho hoing on the high seas.

Excellent analysis, fbaezer, I really like your slant on things.

'Tis more like three months before you start getting the spongy gums and that's if your diet is completely deficient of Vitamin C. (the shipwrecked Essex's sailors were in lifeboats for 90 days eating little else than their fellow sailors. They were emaciated when found gnawing on the bones, but, obviously, still had their teeth.)

I'd like to note that the Chinese diet, even in the 1400s, contained far more vegetables than the basic European one, including the use of seaweeds and kelp, both loaded with VitaC.

Further, the Chinese, as noted above, were more interested in trade than in exploration, so they were not likely just to head out for the rising sun and sail to California. They were looking for settlements of people and would have keep fairly close in as they went North past Japan and modern day Korea around Kamchatka
and beyond to the Aleutians then southward.

Sailors, no matter what kind of craft is underneath them, are very sensitive observers of Nature and better than that, excellent record keepers. The great distances and wind differences of the Pacific were charted and solved by the whaling fleets of Nantucket in the space of less than twenty-five years. (Of course, they had been solved, but not written down, by the Polynesians some one thousand years before Magellan and his ships arrived in Guam.) If the Chinese had wanted to trans-navigate the Pacific, they could have done so easily and then sailed around South America to the present Caribbean.

That would have been something. Columbus arrives in Hispaniola to find the Asians he was expecting to find.

"Success!" he cried," I have sailed to Ca-they!"
Joe("Hmmm," say his hosts,"Not so fast."Nation

A big part of the answer...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/0880801484/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books



An argument can be made that you had to have new political and economic systems in place before you could have the technological revolutions wjhich began in the mid to late 1700s and I don't see those changes coming from China, Japan, or Mongolia in the second millenium. There is a further argument that the current revolutions in communications and electronics could not have arisen in a nation whose culture was based on an antediluvian writing system i.e. if any Asian nation were to have brought about the current revolutions in computers and communications, it would have to have been Korea or Mongolia, and not Japan or China.

With gungas new sig line, he is apparently refuting his beloved Creationist viewpoints where "explaining the uninvestigated" is standard protocol.

Don't recall that the Polynesians had much of a problem sailing from places like Tahiti and the Society Islands to Hawaii. I know, I know, that's only half-way to California. But the point is there's nothing very startling about the idea that some Asians could have beaten the Europeans to the shores of the so-called New World.