Flashback: tales from ages past

Australia: Eight Days

Fu Shai and Lu Yundi argued all the way back to the coast. "Why did you have to insult our guide?" Shai asked when they found their path cut off by a steep ravine.

"Don't need a guide," Yundi said, backtracking. "Have a lodestone. North is all that matters."

"It's taking too long this way. The native would have taken us--"

"We'll get there eventually," Yundi interrupted.

"Eventually will do us no good if we arrive too late."

"I've kept track of the days. We have plenty of time."

"Kept track, have you? As accurate with the days as with that map you drew?"

"It was accurate until that over-sized grub ate a pathway through the paper. Hardly my fault."

"Admiral Zheng He will not be pleased. What good is a rich copper deposit if the Emperor's miners cannot find it?"

"It wasn't all that rich. The Emperor won't want to waste time on a middling mine so far from Mother China, wait and see."

"So what good our trek across the blazing hot savanna, tracking that ore? We could have stayed in comfort on the coast."

"The crocodile-infested coast? Not for me! No pests inland but these cute little wallabies. I've slept easy this whole journey."

Shai snorted.

"Look, a seabird! We can't be far now." Yundi grinned. "By my reckoning we still have eight days until sailing."

The scouts picked up their pace, winding ever north between eucalyptus stands and vine-thickets. The land took a lazy time slumping down to mangrove swamps at sea level. The shore at last came into sight, an unfamiliar stretch of beach.

Shai pointed west. "Let's try that direction."

"No, I think we should go east."

They bickered until Shai spotted a dugout heading their way. He ran out into the surf, waving, calling to the wiry nut-brown man at the paddle. Pidgin trading language brought an answer. "Go west to big ship village."

The sun sailed low and bright ahead as they slogged along, but behind them in the east rose banks of clouds as dark as mud.

"I hope the astronomers have finished their star-charts," Yundi said as they hurried. "It will not be a clear night."

"Star-charting, the least of our worries," Shai said, glancing over his shoulder. "Monsoon coming."

"Nonsense. Too early in the season."

"If you counted right."

When the harbor came into view, Shai stumbled to a halt. Sixty-two massive ocean-going junks in Admiral Zheng's fleet -- and not one at anchor. Not a single ship in sight.

"No, no, no!" Shai howled. He burst into a run, hurtled along the beach and up the shore to the colony huts.

Abandoned, all abandoned -- except for the shrine to Tianfei. One old monk sat there beside the statue of the Celestial Spouse, the guardian of mariners. The hermit cackled. "Company! Lucky me. Won't have to sit vigil all alone. It's two years until they return, you know."

In the east, like a great violet and indigo dragon, the monsoon crawled up the sky, spitting lightning, spreading wide its wings of unending rain.

* * *

In 1405 the Yongle Emperor sent Admiral Zheng He on a series of voyages to the Western Ocean (Indian Ocean) to visit countries near and far, flexing the muscles of the Chinese Empire, trying to eradicate a plague of pirates. Accounts say that Zheng, with his huge fleet of massive, nine-masted, ocean-going junks, established colonies on the southern land of Chui Hiao (Australia) for mining gold, silver, copper and tin. Astronomers accompanied the Admiral and studied the southern skies.

Detailed records remain of Zheng's first five voyages, but the accounts and maps made during the sixth and seventh voyages were destroyed by the Ming dynasty. Old tales, though, say that in 1432 his fleet sailed all around the coast of Australia. Reasonably accurate maps of Australia, laid out in porcelain, date from 1477.

At one site on Australia's coast, sand dunes swallowed a statue of the Taoist goddess Tianfei -- to emerge centuries later, a tantalizing enigma from the past.

In his homeland, Admiral Zheng He erected a tablet that told of his travels:

"We have traversed more than 100,000 li (50,000 kilometers) of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising in the sky, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course [as rapidly] as a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare..."