Another source on Zheng He is mentioned in Howard K French's Everything Under the Heavens where he quotes Edward K Dreyer's Zheng he:China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty 1405-1433. He states that whereas Lord Nelson's flagship Victory only measured 186 feet by 51 feet, the largest of Zheng He's ships were 440 feet by 180 feet. Indeed a ship of equivalent size was not built in the West until Isambard Kingdom Brunel's SS Great Britain in 1839, which measured 320 feet.

French asks us to consider what effect a fleet of two hundred immense ships appearing on the horizon would have caused. When thousands of troops marched off the junks and built fortified warehouses, it surely inclined their hosts to consider that a client relationship with the Ming emperor was an offer they could not refuse.