The Dawn of Canadian History | Page 7

Balboa had crossed the isthmus
of Panama and looked out upon the endless waters of the Pacific, and
after Magellan and his Spanish comrades had sailed round the foot of
the continent, and then pressed on across the Pacific to the real Indies.
It was now clear that America was a different region from Asia. Even
then the old error died hard. Long after the Europeans realized that, at
the south, America and Asia were separated by a great sea, they
imagined that these continents were joined together at the north. The
European ideas of distance and of the form of the globe were still
confused and inexact. A party of early explorers in Virginia carried a
letter of introduction with them from the King of England to the Khan
of Tartary: they expected to find him at the head waters of the
Chickahominy. Jacques Cartier, nearly half a century after Columbus,
was expecting that the Gulf of St Lawrence would open out into a
passage leading to China. But after the discovery of the North Pacific
ocean and Bering Strait the idea that America was part of Asia, that the
natives were 'Indians' in the old sense, was seen to be absurd. It was
clear that America was, in a large sense, an island, an island cut off
from every other continent. It then became necessary to find some
explanation for the seemingly isolated position of a portion of mankind
separated from their fellows by boundless oceans.
The earlier theories were certainly naive enough. Since no known
human agency could have transported the Indians across the Atlantic or
the Pacific, their presence in America was accounted for by certain of
the old writers as a particular work of the devil. Thus Cotton Mather,
the famous Puritan clergyman of early New England, maintained in all
seriousness that the devil had inveigled the Indians to America to get
them 'beyond the tinkle of the gospel bells.' Others thought that they
were a washed-up remnant of the great flood. Roger Williams, the

founder of Rhode Island, wrote: 'From Adam and Noah that they spring,
it is granted on all hands.' Even more fantastic views were advanced.
As late as in 1828 a London clergyman wrote a book which he called
'A View of the American Indians,' which was intended to 'show them to
be the descendants of the ten tribes of Israel.'
Even when such ideas as these were set aside, historians endeavoured
to find evidence, or at least probability, of a migration of the Indians
from the known continents across one or the other of the oceans. It
must be admitted that, even if we supposed the form and extent of the
continents to have been always the same as they are now, such a
migration would have been entirely possible. It is quite likely that
under the influence of exceptional weather--winds blowing week after
week from the same point of the compass--even a primitive craft of
prehistoric times might have been driven across the Atlantic or the
Pacific, and might have landed its occupants still alive and well on the
shores of America. To prove this we need only remember that history
records many such voyages. It has often happened that Japanese junks
have been blown clear across the Pacific. In 1833 a ship of this sort was
driven in a great storm from Japan to the shores of the Queen Charlotte
Islands off the coast of British Columbia. In the same way a fishing
smack from Formosa, which lies off the east coast of China, was once
carried in safety across the ocean to the Sandwich Islands. Similar long
voyages have been made by the natives of the South Seas against their
will, under the influence of strong and continuous winds, and in craft
no better than their open canoes. Captain Beechey of the Royal Navy
relates that in one of his voyages in the Pacific he picked up a canoe
filled with natives from Tahiti who had been driven by a gale of
westerly wind six hundred miles from their own island. It has happened,
too, from time to time, since the discovery of America, that ships have
been forcibly carried all the way across the Atlantic. A glance at the
map of the world shows us that the eastern coast of Brazil juts out into
the South Atlantic so far that it is only fifteen hundred miles distant
from the similar projection of Africa towards the west. The direction of
the trade winds in the South Atlantic is such that it has often been the
practice of sailing vessels bound from England to South Africa to run
clear across the ocean on a long stretch till within sight of the coast of

Brazil before turning towards the Cape of