Note 553 — Chapter II
Reading edition
Gomara makes record of such floating visitors in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Horace Davis published in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc. (Apr., 1872) a record of Japanese vessels driven upon the northwest coast of America and its outlying islands in a paper “On the likelihood of an admixture of Japanese blood on our northwest coast.” Cf. A. W. Bradford’s American Antiquities (N. Y., 1841); Whymper’s Alaska, 250; Bancroft’s Nat. Races, v. 52, with references; Contributions to Amer. Ethnol., i. 97, 238; De Roquefeuil’s Journal du Voyage autour du Monde (1876-79), etc. It is shown that the great Pacific current naturally carries floating objects to the American coast. Davis, in his tract, gives a map of it. Cf. Haven, Archæol. U. S., p. 144; Bull. Amer. Geog. Soc. (1883), xv. p. 101, by Thomas Antisell; and China Review, Mar., Apr., 1888, by J. Edkins.