The First Landing on Wrangel Island | Page 7

sheet from the north, evidences of which are seen in the trend of the ridges on the top, and the form of the narrow peninsula joining the cliff to the mainland. From the summit of the cape the Diomedes, Fairway Rock, and the American coast are so easily seen that the view once taken would dispel any doubts as to the possibility of the aboriginal denizens of America having crossed over from Asia, and it would require no such statement to corroborate the opinion as that of an officer of the Hudson Bay Company, then resident in Ungava bay, who relates that in 1839 an Eskimo family crossed to Labrador from the northern shore of Hudson's straits on a raft of driftwood. Natives cross and recross Bering straits to-day on the ice and in primitive skin canoes, not unlike Cape Cod dories, which have not been improved in construction since the days of prehistoric man. Indeed, the primitive man may be seen at East cape almost as he was thousands of years ago. Evolution and development, with the exception of firearms, seem to have halted at East cape. The place, with its cave-like dwellings and skin-clad inhabitants, among whom the presence of white men creates the same excitement as the advent of a circus among the colored population of Washington, makes one fancy that he is in some grand prehistoric museum, and that he has gone backward in time several thousand years in order to get there.
While we may do something towards tracing the effects of physical agents on the Eskimo back into the darkness that antedates history, yet his geographical origin and his antiquity are things concerning which we know but little. Being subjects of first-class interest, deserving of grave study and so vast in themselves, they cannot be touched upon here except incidentally. Attempting to study them is like following the labyrinthal ice mazes of the Arctic in quest of the North Pole.
We may, however, venture the assertion that the Eskimo is of autocthonic origin in Asia, but is not autocthonous in America. His arrival there and subsequent migrations are beyond the reach of history or tradition. Others, though, contend from the analogy of some of the western tribes of Brazil, who are identical in feature to the Chinese, that the Eskimo may have come from South America; and the fashion of wearing labrets, which is common to the indigenous population both of Chili and Alaska, has been cited as a further proof.
Touching the subject of early migrations, Mr. Charles Wolcott Brooks, whose sources of information at command have been exceptionally good, reports in a paper to the California Academy of Sciences a record of sixty Japanese junks which were blown off the coast and by the influence of the Kuro-Shiwo were drifted or stranded on the coast of North America, or on the Hawaiian or adjacent islands. As merchant ships and ships of war are known to have been built in Japan prior to the Christian era, a great number of disabled junks containing small parties of Japanese must have been stranded on the Aleutian islands and on the Alaskan coast in past centuries, thereby furnishing evidence of a constant infusion of Japanese blood among the coast tribes.
Leaving aside any attempt to show the ethnical relations of these facts, the question naturally occurs whether any of these waifs ever found their way back from the American coast. On observing the course of the great circle of the Kuro-Shiwo and the course of the trade winds, one inclines to the belief that such a thing is not beyond the range of possibility. Indeed, several well-authenticated instances are mentioned by Mr. Brooks; and in connection with the subject he advances a further hypothesis, namely, the American origin of the Chinese race, and shows in a plausible way that--
The ancestry of China may have embarked in large vessels as emigrants, perhaps from the vicinity of the Chincha Islands, or proceeded with a large fleet, like the early Chinese expedition against Japan, or that of Julius C?sar against Britain, or the Welsh Prince Madog and his party, who sailed from Ireland and landed in America A.D. 1170; and, in like manner, in the dateless antecedure of history, crossed from the neighborhood of Peru to the country now known to us as China.
If America be the oldest continent, paleontologically speaking, as Agassiz tells us, there appears to be some reason for looking to it as the spot where early traces of the race are to be found, and the fact would seem to warrant further study and investigation in connection with the indigenous people of our continent, thereby awakening new sources of inquiry among ethnologists.
LINGUISTIC PECULIARITIES.
The sienite plummet from San Joaquin Valley, California, goes back to the distant age of the Drift;