Even in our 21st century of supertankers and cruise ships lit like floating cities, Zheng He's treasure fleet still inspires awe. More than 300 vessels with some 30,000 men sailed in the first imperial expedition in 1405. It was one of the greatest fleets ever assembled, rivaling the Spanish Armada and Japan's Pacific fleet during World War II in its ability to instill fear. Zheng He's own ship was a technological marvel; by some accounts it was more than 130 m long, almost 60 m wide and sailed under the power of nine masts. Nobody had ever built a wooden sailing ship that big before — nor have they since.
Here I must confess a personal interest. In Hong Kong, I live on a Chinese junk. It's about 15 m long, a minnow compared with Zheng He's leviathan, but at least I don't have to share my boat with a full complement of astrologers, navigators, cooks, soldiers (who were brigands working off criminal sentences), hundreds of crew and the odd giraffe that Zheng He brought back for the Emperor. Several times at night I've taken the junk out into the shipping lanes behind Hong Kong Island. This channel is full of supertankers, and I've worried for my junk, my creaky home, as it wove precariously between these great sliding, metal slabs of blackness that could splinter me into oblivion.
As the 10-story supertankers loom by, they seem pretty invincible. They can probably slice through whatever gales and mountainous waves get thrown at them with minimal fuss, the tumult not even disturbing the crew watching a video of The Perfect Storm in the lounge. This technological insouciance bothers me. In man vs. nature, I want nature to exert herself — occasionally, but with ferocious, cosmic might. You wonder who's buying all these summer books on ships sunk by 30-m waves, coastal towns razed by hurricanes and clippers rammed by vengeful whales? I am. Was Zheng He, on the other hand, so engorged by his own hubris, as official envoy of the Emperor, or Son of Heaven, that he treated nature as nonchalantly as today's supertanker captain does?
My own experiences with maritime disasters are fairly tame: a near drowning while bodysurfing and a sinking. A dentist cousin decided to take up sailing as a hobby and dragooned me as his sole crewman. I was a teenager then, and both of us were novice sailors. We were cutting nicely through the water, still within sight of northern California's storm-lashed coastline, when a wave smacked us broadside. We swamped. The sail flopped over into the water, and the two of us spilled out. It felt like I was given an icy injection of seawater that flowed straight into my heart. Shivering, my cousin and I tried clinging to the overturned fiberglass hull, but it was so slick that every crashing wave pulled us off and we had to fight our way back to the boat. Luckily, we were spotted and rescued after an hour or so. My cousin sold the boat and dedicated himself to the safer hobby of winemaking. I developed a God-fearing respect for the Deep.
Did Zheng He imagine that his treasure ship was unsinkable, simply because it was so big? Maybe size matters, even to a eunuch. Or perhaps, despite his ship's heft, the moaning timber and rolling swells made him feel as vulnerable as I sometimes do. What was it like to be a 15th century admiral, setting sail over vast, poorly charted oceans?
My search to find the answer has led to a Hong Kong master shipbuilder, a mystical English computer whiz who recollects sailing into Hong Kong harbor aboard a clipper ship in a past life, and finally to Rex Warner, one of today's foremost maritime explorers — a latter-day Zheng He.
The key, I thought, is to understand Zheng He's personality. But while historians give us embellished descriptions of the admiral as being well over 2 m tall with "glaring eyes, teeth as white and well-shaped as shells and a voice as loud as a huge bell," the four chronicles of his voyages are short on personal details. We don't even know if he suffered from seasickness in the rolling swells he encountered off Vietnam in the autumn of 1405, his first voyage.
Zheng He wasn't born to the sea. He was a devout Muslim from landlocked Kunming, in southern China. He proved his worth to the Emperor on the battlefield and in court intrigues — not on the water. When his initial expedition set off from Nanjing with great fanfare, it was probably the first time that Zheng He had let China's coastline slip from his view. The sound of the waves crashing off the great treasure ship's bow, the wind strumming the rigging, the sparkling blue of phosphorescence churned up by the rudder — all these were new sights and sensations for him.