user posted imageCarol Urness stood over the 580-year-old map and pondered an ancient mystery.Spread out before her was one of the prize holdings of a rare map collection at the University of Minnesota: a navigational chart hand-painted on a piece of animal skin in 1424 by Venetian cartographer Zuane Pizzigano. Urness swept her hand from the coastline of Europe westward across the Atlantic to a cluster of mysterious islands on what was then the far side of the world known to European explorers."There's been a lot of scholarship done on these islands," said Urness, curator emeritus at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. "The trouble is we don't know whether they represent actual lands or mythical lands."Now a best-selling book claims to have solved the mystery, and the Pizzigano map has become the most talked-about item in the 25,000-piece collection of the Bell Library.In the book "1421: The Year China Discovered America," British author Gavin Menzies cites the chart as evidence that Chinese explorers reached the Americas 70 years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. The book claims that fleets of Chinese junks commanded by the eunuch admirals of Emperor Zhu Di explored and mapped the globe decades before their European counterparts.Menzies, a retired submarine commander from the Royal Navy, said he began his quest after stumbling upon the Pizzigano chart.

"The wintry plains of Minnesota started me on my research," he wrote. "It was not necessarily the first place you would think of to discover a document with such profound implications, but the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota has a remarkable collection of early maps and charts, and one in particular had attracted my attention."The Pizzigano chart shows a cluster of four islands on the far side of the Atlantic with the names Satanazes, Antilia, Saya and Ymana. Menzies pondered a question that already had perplexed generations of scholars: What were these islands?

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