Zheng duly promised, thinking even the wild ocean could never best a man like his father—but Liu Zhi never came home. After a year with no word, the emperor held a lavish funeral in his honor. Zheng was inconsolable, and for days he wept at the feet of his father’s statue. As he grew older, though, Zheng learned things about Liu Zhi that he had been too young to understand while the man was alive, and his opinion of his father slowly changed. Liu Zhi had been a strange man, and he’d grown even stranger near the end of his life. There were rumors he’d gone mad.

“He would go swimming in the sea for hours every day, even in winter,” said Zheng’s eldest brother. “He could hardly stand being on land.”

“He thought he could talk to whales,” said Zheng’s uncle Ai, laughing. “Once I even heard him trying to speak their language!”

“He wanted us to go and live on an island in the middle of nowhere,” said Zheng’s mother. “I said to him, ‘We banquet at the palace! We entertain dukes and viscounts! Why should we give up this life to live like savages in a sandpit?’ He hardly spoke to me after that.”

Liu Zhi had accomplished a great deal early in his life, people said, but then he’d begun chasing fantasies. He led a voyage to discover a land of talking dogs. He spoke of a place in the northernmost reaches of the Roman Empire where there lived shape-shifting women who could stop time.12 He was shunned by polite society, and eventually the nobles stopped funding his expeditions—so he began funding them himself. When he’d exhausted his personal fortune, leaving his wife and children near bankruptcy, he dreamed up a mission to find Cocobolo in order to harvest its riches.

Zheng saw how his father’s eccentricities had led to his downfall and, as he entered manhood, he was careful not to repeat Liu Zhi’s mistakes. There was seawater in Zheng’s blood, too, and like his father he became a mariner—but of a very different sort. He led no expeditions of discovery, no pioneering voyages to claim new lands for the empire. He was a thoroughly practical man, a merchant, and he oversaw a fleet of trading ships. He took no risks. He avoided routes favored by pirates and never strayed from familiar waters. And he was very successful.

His life on land was equally conventional. He banqueted at the palace and maintained friendships with all the right people. He never uttered a shocking word or held a controversial opinion. He was rewarded with social position and an advantageous marriage to the emperor’s pampered grandniece, which put him within a hairbreadth of the nobility class.

To protect all he’d accumulated, he took pains to disassociate himself from his father. He never mentioned Liu Zhi. He changed his surname and pretended they weren’t related. But the older Zheng got, the harder it became to push away his father’s memory. Elderly relatives often made comments about how similar Zheng’s mannerisms were to Liu Zhi’s.