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On July 27th, 1433, the officers of the biggest navy on earth lined up in a palace courtyard in Beijing to receive robes and paper money from Emperor Xuande. They had been gone 2 and a half years, as far as the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Zheng He, the admiral who had led them for 28 years, was not in the line. He had died at Calicut, on the coast of India, that spring.
Sending the fleet back out would have cost the emperor almost nothing. The ships were built, and 2,000 tons of pepper sat in the warehouses at Nanjing. The ministers who wanted the ships broken up had paid for every voyage and got none of the income. Xuande had 2 orders in front of him, one that made the fleet permanent and one that left it to the ministers. He signed the second. Eighteen months later he was dead at 35, and the men governing for his 8-year-old son banned the building of seagoing ships.
What if he had signed the other one?
This week we hit CTRL+Z on the courtyard where the fleet was paid off, and follow the ripple to today: a 78-year-old admiral taking 100 ships out of Fujian, Vasco da Gama carrying 4 cloaks and 6 hats up the beach at Calicut while an agent of the emperor counts his guns, a Spanish captain rounding a bend in the California coast and finding a walled harbor already there, and a Chumash chief on Santa Cruz Island with a Ming customs stamp in his house. The oldest building in Monterey is a Chinese customs house, because in January of 1434 an emperor gave his ministers half the pepper.