[Aztlan] African Olmecs

[Charles C. Mann]

> Speaking of Brian Fagan and apropos of the question of migration routes
> into the Americas, Fagan, an avid small-craft sailor with experience in
> crossing the Pacific, has stated that it would have been virtually
> impossible for ancient travelers in small craft to navigate the
> treacherous waters off the Pacific Northwest. He thus discounts that as
> a probable route for migration into the New World, suggesting that the
> archaeologists who propose it probably know very little about the
> realities of sailing. 

I am not a sailor and would never want to discount either the knowledge of either Prof. Fagan or Prof. Diehl. But for what it's worth there's a fairly long record of Japanese fishermen being blown by storms for amazing distances and surviving. According to the historian Andrew Cobbing , 5 Japanese ships are known to have appeared off the West Coast between 1815 and 1844 alone, and another 3 during that time on the islands of Hawaii (The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Britain, 1998). 

The most famous castaway was Nakahama Manjiro, who in 1841 was blown with several companions almost to Hawaii, where he was picked up by a whaling ship. Manjiro ended up living for nearly a decade in the US and playing a big role in US-Japan relations, as recounted in Christopher Benfey's terrific book, The Great Wave (2003). But he was only one of many. In 1850 Hamada Hikozo (Heco) spent two months drifting in the Pacific before being rescued by a San Francisco-bound ship. In 1804 a sailor named Doi Tsudayu was picked up by a Russian ship en route to Alaska and after various adventures deposited on Hawaii. All three wrote accounts of their journey that have been translated into English (actually, I'm not sure whether Tsudayu has been translated).

Most interesting, perhaps, are the 7 castaways aboard the HMS Morrison in 1837. The Morrison was an emissary ship which hoped to use the return of the castaways as lever to induce the Japanese to let a foreign vessel enter the nation. Three of the captives came from a Japanese junk that was dismasted in a storm off the Ise peninsula (a regal area south of Tokyo) in 1832 and eventually ended up on Vancouver Island; the survivors were captured by Indians, sent to the Hudson's Bay Company, and shipped to London. On the boat they were joined by four other captives who had been rescued by U.S. ships, some of them apparently off the West Coast. The ship was fired on by the Japanese and eventually retreated; the castaways ended up in Macau. 

This attempt followed by several decades a similar attempt to use castaways as diplomatic tools by Catherine the Great. These captives had been shipwrecked on the coast of Kamchatka. So many Japanese were wrecked off the Siberian coast that the czar established a Japanese school in Irkutsk.

None of this proves that boats were important in the migration of paleo-Indians, or that indigenous American cultures were visited by Asians, still less that those putative visitors had any impact. But the historical record is broad enough that it would seem to me mistaken to rule out either on the grounds that sea voyages in small boats would be next to impossible.

CCM