The First Landing on Wrangel Island | Page 7

up the
side of the cliff at East cape, on the Asiatic side of the straits. This bold,
rocky cliff, rising sheer from the sea to the height of 2,100 feet, consists
of granite, with lava here and there, and the indications point to the
overflow of a vast ice 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 Cæsar 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