Task: Sentiment Analysis
Input (English): Interesting at first, but... . ...upon actual research it is clearly false. Many others have delved into the finer points of Menzies' poor methodology and often deliberate exaggeration or falsities, so I won't bother. I'll only list four points that I think stand out even without deep fact checking:    1)Niccolo di Conti, the venetian explorer and crucial link in the book who supposedly sailed with the Chinese treasure fleet in 1421, failed to mention in his memoirs anything about Chinese junks or going to the four corners of the world. This seems strange.    2)The Fleet sailed to virtually every coastline in the world but missed Europe entirely, the one place sure to mark their passing for posterity. This is neither evidence nor disproof, merely a sketchy coincidence.    3)Native Americans are given startlingly short shrift, both in the book and in many of the reviews. Virtually every time something sophisticated is presented in the ancient new world it is attributed to the Chinese, reminding me of the Easter Island "mystery" of who carved those giant heads. For the record, Native populations weren't childish savages; prior to European contact they had very sophisticated civilizations, fully capable of jewelery work, cloth garments, and carving statues.    4)Lastly, Given the vast numbers of Chinese sailors involved(roughly 25-30,000), the presence of domesticated animals such as horses and pigs, and the inevitable presence of huge numbers of stow-away rats, doesn't it strike anyone as odd that there were apparently no diseases passed on to the various native populations in the Americas? It only took a very small amount of European contact to spark the largest, and deadliest pandemic in history that raged for nearly two centuries killing unknown millions of Native Americans. Chinese contact of the scale claimed would certainly have had a similar, if not worse, effect.    Ultimately Menzies' book is entertaining, leaving the reader hoping it is true merely for the fantastic nature of the thesis. In the end, however, the evidence and analysis simply are not there.
Output (English): NEG