Page:Historia Verdadera del Mexico profundo.djvu/190

in 1400 CE the total Chinese fleet included 3,500 ships, of which 400 were warships, 400 merchants and 2700 Coast Guard.^[1]

"Probably, the safest ships in the world, and also the largest were Chinese, and from the Sung times, Chinese merchants traveled to points far from their own shores. Ibn Battuta, who visited India and China in the 14th century, wrote that at their times all trade between Malabar and South China was made in Chinese ships....Arab sailors were familiar with the long ocean voyages, and had safe ships. It is interesting to note that the Arabs who had contact with the Vasco da Gama people were not impressed by European ships; they admired their sturdy construction, but they judged them little slow and manageable.... Altogether, it is likely that the Arabs should be placed next to the Chinese among the peoples of the seas that in the 15th century could have been able to circumnavigate Africa and perhaps crossing the Pacific if they had tried it." (J.H. Parry. 1989)^[2]

This way, it is interesting to understand that Asian peoples had a technology far superior to the European and that when it was appropriated by the Europeans, it was used for commercial, military and expansion purposes. Technologies copied by Europe from Asia and which later served them to invade and take over the entire planet, Asians despite having invented them, despite having the military and maritime power, never attempted to take over and subjugate the planet.

The conceptions of life, the world, war and power, between the Europeans and the rest of the world have been totally different. So the "heroic" feat of "discovering the new world", was not more than a warfare and commercial adventure, funded by greedy merchants and carried out by the poorest and most ignorant spaniards of the dark middle ages, at any price and without any scruples.

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1. Source: When China Ruled the Seas: Treasure Fleets of the Dragon Throne by Louise Levathes. 1994. A Treasure ship (Chinese: 宝船; pinyin: bǎochuán) is the name for a type of large wooden vessel commanded by the Chinese admiral Zheng He on seven voyages in the early 15th century in Ming Dynasty. Scholars disagree about the factual accuracy and correct interpretation of accounts of the treasure ships. The purported dimensions of these ships at 137 m (450 ft) long and 55 m (180 ft wide) are at least twice as long as the largest European ships at the end of the sixteenth century and 40% longer and 65% wider than the largest wooden ships known to have been built at any time anywhere else.
2. John Horace Parry (born in Handsworth, Birmingham, England, on 26 April 1914 - died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 1982) was a distinguished maritime historian, who served as Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University.