Ancient Mariners 71 



and their equipment, the food and the drink for the long journeys 

 and the meaning of the wanderings ; and then gives accounts of 

 a series of actual voyages ranging throughout the length and 

 breadth of the Pacific Ocean. When we consider the vast area 

 of ocean known (by the positive evidence of race, language and 

 culture) to have been traversed by these Polynesian mariners 

 many centuries ago — from Madagascar in the west to Easter 

 Island in the east, from Hawaii in the north to the fringe of the 

 Antarctic in the south — it is wholly incredible that their wander- 

 ings were always confined within the limits. 



To the islanders themselves the story of their voyages was 

 the burden of their history. To the dwellers on the shores of 

 Africa, Asia and America, where they must frequently have 

 touched in their wanderings, sea-exploits could have been known 

 by experience only to a small minority of the population, and 

 actual participation in them to an even smaller number of 

 people. Legends of sea-journeys would thus play a relatively 

 insignificant part in the sagas of these dwellers upon the great 

 continents, and would be lost in the mass of stories concerning 

 other matters that affected their vital interests more nearly. 



In this lecture I have not attempted to present the evidence 

 in substantiation of the reality of the far-reaching influence of the 

 Old World in the development of the Pre-Columbian civilization 

 of America. The earliest inhabitants of the New World made 

 their way there along the route marked G in my map. Not far 

 from the headwaters of the Yenesei (F), their kinsmen still 

 survive in the old homeland, and reveal in their structure the 

 persistent evidence of their affinity with the major element of 

 the aboriginal population of America. The earliest immigrants 

 into the New World naturally brought with them from their home 

 in North-Eastern Asia the customs and beliefs that prevailed 

 there in the days when it was in the Neolithic phase of culture. 



After this first colonization of America peoyjle no doubt 

 continued — as they have done ever since — to drift across the 

 Bering Strait, and in boats along the Aleutian chain of islands (P). 



