Written in the Ruins: Cape Breton Island’s Second Pre-Columbian Chinese Settlement by Paul Chiasson is ostensibly about a Chinese settlement dating to the early 1400’s in present-day Saint Peters, Nova Scotia. I found this story fascinating and I sped through the book, but by the second half Chiasson had taken an about-face and dove down a rabbit hole, completely ignoring the topic of this alleged Chinese settlement until the epilogue. Chiasson relied on a discredited map and document known as the Zeno Narrative to push the possibility that Nicolò Zeno arrived in North America, namely Nova Scotia, a century before Columbus. This takes up the entire second half of the book, when what I was really interested in was the claim in the title–why I picked up the book in the first place–that Chinese explorers visited the area first.
Evidence for a Chinese landing falls on the discovery of a cannon at the site, which was made of a superior quality iron and known to be of a design similar to the ones used in China in the fourteenth century. The most intriguing claim was that the Mi’kmaq language, purported to be the sole indigenous language of Canada or the United States with a written form which predates the arrival of Columbus, resembled the pictogram language of Chinese. I wish Chiasson had investigated this further and written about it, instead of making me take the lead to find out more. Granted, I would have looked further into this claim regardless but Chiasson dropped this “revelation” on the reader and then left it without any further explanation. He didn’t even provide examples of Mi’kmaq text and the Chinese forms used at the time to show a comparison. A claim like this would also require a study of how modern Mi’kmaq may resemble Chinese phonetically (whether or not it resembles any Chinese idiom spoken today).
Written in the Ruins takes the form of two stories: Chinese exploration in the first half and the examination of the Zeno Narrative in the second. Saint Peters does show the remains of two fortifications which may very well have been there before the French arrived. Mi’kmaq oral tradition mentions the presence of white men before the French, and they could, I suppose, have been Nicolò Zeno and his crew or the Chinese. Such a claim demands irrefutable evidence and Chiasson reviewed Chinese naval history and exploration. The route these Chinese “treasure fleets” took was not across the Pacific but westward, across two oceans and around the continent of Africa. Could such a lengthy journey even be possible? Chiasson discusses why this mysterious truth has been suppressed, but his reasoning is not convincing: historians just “don’t want to know” because it will upset centuries of established, though false, history is not a reason.
Chiasson did provide plenty of maps and plans of the site, as well as drawings of cannons, yet I would have liked to see a comparison of the Mi’kmaq and Chinese written languages, especially since the main title itself hints at it. I didn’t even see, in the long run, why an examination into the Zeno Narrative was even necessary. If Nicolò Zeno arrived in Nova Scotia in 1398 then so what–this book is supposed to be about the Chinese settlement. If the Chinese fleets rounded the Cape of Good Hope and proceeded north along the west coast of Africa, then there should be evidence of these trips. I am presuming the Chinese fleets didn’t crisscross the Atlantic from the southeast to the northwest (which would have been a long trip at sea) and kept to the coast of Africa, and then along the west coast of Europe for as long as possible until making it across the ocean.