The history of the Age of Discovery has long been questioned by scholars and laypersons. The era erupted onto history suddenly. What spurred Europeans on to go to sea? How did Columbus obtain his inspiration to sail west to reach China or India? Indeed, even experts cannot agree on where he was going. Was it really India or China, or was it Japan-Cipangu? We're told that he carried with him a letter for the "Great Khan," who had not existed for 100 years, and a translator who spoke Arabic. Why Arabic; did the Indians, Chinese, or Japanese speak Arabic? Then, as if by miracle, while it took the Portuguese 80 years to struggle down the western African coast to reach the Cape of Good Hope, it took Columbus merely a few months to "discover" the Caribbean. It is all too fantastic, yet we accept it as history. Do you know how hard it is to sail the world's oceans? Today we have all kinds of devices to help us navigate the treacherous waters. We have satellite guidance for navigation, and sonar to detect hazards, for instance. Then, as all sailboat owners know, you must take sailing classes in order to obtain a sailing permit. To tell us that in the 15th century Europeans explorers went to sea en masse and discovered all sorts of lands hitherto unknown to them at a time when many people thought the earth was flat and that the Atlantic Ocean, called the Sea of Darkness, was not to be ventured in is a hard sell. Yet the Europeans did go to sea, and they did reach these lands. So the question remains: Why did they do it, and how did they do it? What made them suddenly want to explore, and how did they know how to sail the oceans? We're in the 21st century. We can now sail to the outer edges of the solar system and beyond. Divine inspiration as an explanation no longer cuts it. As it were, the answer is simple. The conundrum is only the result of our historians refusing to look beyond their own culture. If we turn the history book page and look at that of other peoples in this world besides Europeans, we see the other parts of the picture. There were others that sailed the oceans too, and they had been doing it a lot earlier than Europeans! They braved the trails and passed on to the Europeans their maritime knowledge. In early 15th century the Chinese launched an epic maritime program. Headed by the legendary Admiral Zheng He, a magnificent Chinese fleet consisting of some 200 ocean-going ships built using the most advanced naval technologies the world had seen braved the world's oceans for almost 30 years. Most Western scholars are unaware of this grand event. However, the European intelligentsia and mapmakers of the Age of Discovery knew about it. They did not know who these ancient Argonauts were, but they had records of their enterprise. It is these documents that incited and enabled the European explorers to go to sea. Nah! Nonsense! But it's not nonsense. It is not even speculation. The records are there, IN EUROPEAN HANDS! This book is the research into those records; that evidence. Through diligent and meticulous analyses a lost history is reconstructed. The hundreds years old records are deciphered and the real history has emerged. It tells of a glorious and intriguing story, and the whole saga reads like a whodunit. If ever there is a page-turner, this is one. The history reconstruction effort is not merely to explain what made Columbus do what he did. It bears on history itself. It is intimately tied to the explosion of Western science and technologies, and the blossoming of the Renaissance, ultimately the rise of the West and its domination of the world. Putting it succinctly, this book is simply a must read for all historians and knowledge seekers, regardless of nationality.