30 CRUISE OF STEAMER CORWIN IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN. 
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 drift-wood. 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 Bast Cape almost as he was 
thousands of years ago. Evolution and development, with the exception of fire-arms, 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 cireus 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, and only ends in a wild-goose chase. 
We may, however, venture the assertion that the Eskimo is of autocthonic origin in Asia, but 
is not autoecthonous 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 informa- 
tion 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 merchaut 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 
advanees a further hypothesis, namely, the American we 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 Cesar 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 A gassiz tells us, there appears 
to be some reason for looking toit as the spot where early traces of the human 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; and the Calaveras skull, admitting its authenticity, goes back to the Pliocene epoch, and is 
older than the relics or stone implements from the drift gravel and the European caves. 
It is doubtful, though, whether these sources enable us to make generalizations equal in value 
to those afforded by the study of vocabularies. It is alleged that linguistic affinities exist between 
some of the tribes of the American coast and our Oriental neighbors across the Pacific. Mr, Brooks, 
