I have been reading about the idea that China beat Columbus to America. One often comes across comparison between the size of Zheng He pointing out how much bigger Chinese ships were that European ships. Even among those that reject the stories of Chinese exploration one often hears the assertion that they could have crossed the ocean had they sailed in that direction. But I have also come across the claim that the Chinese ships while huge were utterly unfitted for open ocean travel and they lacked the navigation ability to make voyages like this (possibly they were unaware of the curvature of the earth). Researching it it seems they are contradictory claims on this as well as how European navigation compared to Arab navigation.
Can you guys set me straight. At the eve of the age of exploration how did European shipping and long range navigation compare to the rest of the world. Was it already vastly superior or was it fairly comparable?
For long sea journeys without a definite target, it was both customary and practical to sail on the coastline of land. When Zheng He set sail, he had no idea that he would reach the coast of East Africa, so he very likely had the idea that he would instead follow the coast because that's where people settled. He wasn't out there to chart nautical maps but to meet different nations.
That being said, Chinese ships were definitely seaworthy enough to sail into the souther waters and reach the Philippines and what is now Malaysia without trouble. The dimensions of the Treasure Ships will likely never be solved barring archaeological finds, as Chinese accounts appear to be have very little basis other than previous literature. While bigger ships can reflect a higher degree in construction capability, they are not automatically more seaworthy than small ships. In fact, the measurements as relayed by the accounts suggest that they were likely unseaworthy vessels, if they were intended to navigate in the high seas instead of along the coastline, which is in all probability what they did.
The largest Treasure Ship's measurements aside, there are also smaller Treasure Ships that historians have explored. These arouse far less controversy of a political character, so academic work on them is more expressive. Some theories state that the large ships never sailed out of the ports in Nanking.
Comparison of the sailing technology of two societies on the basis of two expeditions taken for different purposes on different routes is quite impractical.