[Theoria]

NW Coast is full of opportunities for drift and landings. There have been many sites found of chinese porcelain and other artifacts up and down the coast. Even suspected ancient Roman artifacts and other ancient possibilities out there.

Some castaways and travelers who lived some crazy lives:

Otokichi

Tanaka Shōsuke

Metallurgy in pre-Columbian America

[Theoria]

travel, ping.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Bookmark

[marktwain]

Kind of silly talking about a few “Asian” sailors on Spanish vessels, when the whole two continents were settled by Asians who crossed over from Siberia thousands of years earlier.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Thanks for posting these great articles. I’ve lived in California for 50 years (now splitting time in North Idaho) and never knew about the Portuguese “recruiting” Philippino sailors to sail across the Pacific to North America.

The use of “drift iron” by the Tlingit and Chinookan peoples is fascinating. Imagine you are in a primitive tribe without any exposure to people and technology from other parts of the world and parts of ships float onto your beach with iron straps, bolts, nails and other iron parts. What would you make of this miraculous new material arriving from the sea?

[beef]

“I winced rather predictably as I read ‘discovery’.”

I get so tired of this. Europeans are said to discover things because they were in the habit of making a record of it and then sharing that record with the rest of the world. Discovery means nothing if you don’t spread the knowledge.

[Vaduz]

Settled in colonies from Mexico to Peru

So noodles didn’t catch on or did they bring the taco to the land?.

[rfreedom4u]

According to the book 1421, Zheng He was the first to come to the Americas.

[bunkerhill7]

A Chinese stone anchor was discovered in Los Angeles harbor a few years back. It was in the newspapers

[zeestephen]

Thanks, Theoria. Very interesting post.

Curiously, the author seems to have ignored the fact that indigenous North Americans started coming here from Asia at least 16,000 years ago.

They crossed the temporary glacial era land bridge from Russia to Alaska, and walked, or sailed, down the Pacific coast line to Oregon and the southern California islands.

Almost all their camp sites and villages have been washed away by several miles of ocean, which grew and grew as warmer weather melted the glaciers.

[Grimmy]

I suspect it goes a lot earlier than this.

Most folks just don’t understand how brutal the Han conquest of China was.

We see it still in play in western China where the adult males are rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps (often to await donor match for their organs, then vivisection to fill the order), while the women are assigned proper Han husbands to produce Han children.

The culture and language suppressed with the goal of obliteration.

This is how the Han have done it since they began their expansion.

Seems to me there would have been several fleets of people trying to escape. And with tides and storms, some of those fleets may well have ended up on the western coasts of the Americas.

[Verginius Rufus]

No mention of the first Spanish exploration of what is now the California coast in 1542-43 by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo. Cabrillo may have made it as far north as Oregon. Cabrillo died of an injury but the rest of the expedition made it back to Mexico. Viscaino later replaced Cabrillo's names with the ones which are used now.

When I was a college student I knew a Mexican-American student whose surname was Chino. Perhaps he was descended from one of those Asians.

[SteveH]

verbose and thin on facts, with a tendency to become fixated on contemporary distractions.