Venice now controlled the Adriatic. In 1396, six years after she had defeated Genoa and fourteen years after the Cretan revolt, she acquired Corfu. To Venetians, Corfu was of vital importance due to its strategic location. Corfu became the fortified base from which Venetian galleys policed the strait leading to the Adriatic.
Venice built lovely colonial towns on these Adriatic islands. Her ports, modeled in her own image, each with its campanile, cathedral, piazza, and evening promenade, line the Dalmatian coast. From Ulcinj in the south to Piran in the north, the ports of Bar, Dubrovnik, Korcula, Hvar, Split, Zadar, Rab, Krk, Pula, and Porec are sublime legacies of Venetian architecture. By 1433 they were havens for the armadas carrying ceramics, silk, and spices from Alexandria and Cairo to the warehouses of Venice. While the Slavic chants of Orthodox churches resound in the mountains, on the coast Sundays are punctuated by bells summoning Catholics to mass.5 Saint Jacob’s in Sibenik, Saint Mark’s in Piran, Saint Laurence’s in Trogir, and Our Lady’s in Rijeca are superb by any standard. They are among the sights that greeted Zheng He’s ships on their passage from Alexandria to Venice. Even with fifteen men to each oar it would have been a ten-day slog from Alexandria to Crete across an airless sea. Once in the Adriatic they would have picked up a light evening breeze blowing on shore. What a relief that would have been!
I know those islands well following a visit in 1966. In December 1965 I had met Marcella; we became engaged in June and decided to take a holiday traveling through the Dalmatian islands to Montenegro and Serbia. In the four years before meeting Marcella I had been navigating officer of HMS Narwhal, a submarine. It was the eve of the cold war and our patrols were spent in the North. Winters were drab and cold; the sun shone for an only hour or so, at midday; most of the time one looked at ice, sea, and sky in everlasting shades of gray.
In August 1966, Marcella, my uncle Edward, and I boarded a ferry in Venice bound for Dubrovnik, en route wending through the Dalmatian archipelago. We passed Marco Polo’s home on Korcula, Diocletian’s vast palace at Split, and honey-colored Hvar. The searing colors of azure sea and sky emphasized by the brilliant white Karst of the coastline, the red campanile towers, and the russet and gold of drying tobacco are etched on my brain and will remain with me all my life.
We slept on the upper deck under the stars, swam off remote beaches watched only by seagulls, and feasted on local seafish washed down by Dingaz, a rough, full-bodied, almost black wine.
The same idyllic scene would have greeted Zheng He’s sailors and female slaves as his junks rowed slowly up the coast. They would have seen the outlines of these mini “Venices” from miles out to sea, dotted along the coast all the way from Dubrovnik to Trieste to Venice itself. They would have noticed Diocletian’s enormous palace, Hvar’s spectacular harbor, and the glistening white fortress walls of Dubrovnik, and would have surely called at some of those ports.
So in my view we should find evidence of Zheng He’s fleets’ visits in museums along the Dalmatian coast. Over the years, Marcella and I have visited the most likely museums—the old maritime school at Perast, the Matko family museum at Orebic, the Seamans’ Guild (Museum) in the Gulf of Kotor, Ivo Vizin’s Museum at Prcanj, and the Maritime Museum in Kotor itself. We found nothing.
However, my interest was renewed and sharpened in 2004 after meeting Dr. Gunnar Thompson in Seattle. He had brought Albertin di Virga’s world map to my attention. This map had been found in a secondhand bookshop at 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 Roanoke River 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-mails:
1 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.
2 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).
3 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.
4 Recent DNA studies have confirmed that in some Adriatic islands (Hvar, Korcula) and on the adjacent coasts (Makarska) certain families have East Asian genotype.
5 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.
6 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.
7 Adriatic islanders have until recently used a non-European nomenclature for America and the Far East based on translations of Chinese nomenclature.
8 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-mails 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 Dalmatian base for Far East trade. (These old Dalmatian names were used on German maps of the Pacific until Germany was defeated in World War II, after which they were expunged and replaced by Spanish, French, and Portuguese names.) I hope that young scholars will translate the whole of Professor Yoshamya’s manuscript into English, since only excerpts have yet been translated.
As will be seen when we reach Venice, tens of thousands of Asian slave girls and women were brought to Venice. Doubtless many of these would have escaped as the fleets berthed at the islands en route to Venice, and this will be shown up in the mitochondrial DNA.
The first step in setting up a DNA research program for Venetian and Dalmatian people was to see what existing DNA research had already been carried out. Dr. Lovric, who works in the