A few months back I wrote a story about the unveiling of an early 15th-century map that, some historians claim, seems to support the notion that the Chinese were the first explorers to reach the New World. Many experts wrote the map off as a fraud and the theory’s main supporter, Gavin Menzies, as a bit of a kook. Regardless of the ideas he presented in his book “1421: The Year China Discovered America”, a lot of the criticism lobbed at Menzies had to do with his less-than-impressive credentials as an amateur historian.

Enter Paul Chiasson, a one time professor of historical architecture at Yale and real, live academic. Looks like Menzies has at least one friend in high places.

Currently milling on some bestseller lists, Chiasson’s recent book entitled “The Island of Seven Cities” describes his discovery of a wall and road remnants on his native Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Chiasson claims the ruins predate John Cabot’s 1497 “discovery” of the island and were, in fact, leftovers from a once-thriving Chinese settlement.

Are these the first murmurs of a historical movement, I wonder, or is thinking the Chinese got here first just the latest “trend” that will eventually trickle away into oblivion (see: New World, Italian discovery of; New World, Polynesian discovery of…etc.)??