38 
THE TWO RACES WHICH PEOPLED POLYNESIA. 
but that they have likewise brought away some of the pro- 
ducts and customs of that continent. 
The Chinese state that tobacco, and the use of it, came 
from the Mantchoos ; that they were much surprised when 
they first saw their conquerors inhale fire through long tubes 
and eating smoke. This plant in the Mantchoo language 
is called Tambakou , but the Chinese designate it by the 
word meaning smoke ; they say they cultivate in their fields 
the smoke leaf, and name the pipe the smoke funnel. To- 
bacco is now universally used amongst them.* 
It is not improbable that the Chinese obtained their 
maize in the same way, and had it centuries before America 
was discovered by the Europeans. f 
The Japanese in former times were celebrated for their 
long voyages and plundering expeditions : that they visited 
New Zealand is highly probable ; their junks may have been 
cast away on its shores, and if so, as marauders and con- 
siderable in number, would be able to maintain their inde- 
pendence and form alliances. The remarkable similarity of 
dressing the hair by tying it up into a top-knot, favours this 
supposition. 
In 1845 three Japanese were carried to Ningpo, in China, 
by the American frigate, St. Louis ; they had been blown 
or drifted right across the Atlantic in a little junk from the 
coast of Japan all the way to Mexico, where they had re- 
sided two years. Dr. Pickering shows how naturally and 
almost inevitably a bark carried away from Japan in a 
storm would drift to the coast of Mexico or California. 
The same gentleman states that a Japanese vessel some 
few years ago was fallen in with by a whaler in the North 
Pacific, another was wrecked on the Sandwich Isles, and a 
* Hue's Chinese Empire , p. 130. 
t Fifteen miles north of Lambajique lies the Indian village of Iting (repose), 
with 5,000 inhabitants, whose language is totally different from the Quichua 
dialect, usually spoken in the provinces. One Peruvian, on his return from 
his travels, even went so far as to say that the idiom of the Iting Indians 
strongly resembled that of the Chinese. — Voyage of the Novara , vol. iii. p. 
419. 
