Note 40 — PETER KALM’s TRAVELS. (continued 3)

This amount seems to be highly probable, for we find in Marco Paolo, that Kublai-Khan, one of the successors of Genghizkhan, after the conquest of the southern part of China, sent ships out, to conquer the kingdom of Japan, or, as they call it, Nipan-gri, but in a terrible storm the whole fleet was cast away, and nothing was ever heard of the men in that fleet. It seems that some of these ships were cast to the shores, opposite the great American lakes, between forty and fifty degrees north latitude, and there probably erected these monuments, and were the ancestors of some nations, who are called Mozemlecks, and have some degree of civilization. Another part of this fleet, it seems, reached the country opposite Mexico, and there founded the Mexican empire, which, according to their own records, as preserved by the Spaniards, and in their painted annals, in Purchas’s Pilgrimage, are very recent; so that they can scarcely remember any more than seven princes before Motezuma II. who was reigning when the Spaniards arrived there, 1519, under Fernando Cortez; consequently the first of these princes, supposing each had a reign of thirty-three years and four months, and adding to it the sixteen years of Motezuma, began to reign in the year 1270, when Kublai-Khan, the conqueror of all China and of Japan, was on the throne, and in whose time happened, I believe, the first abortive expedition to Japan, which I mentioned above, and probably furnished North-America, with civilized inhabitants. There is, if I am not mistaken, a great similarity between the figures of the Mexican idols, and those which are usual among the Tartars, who embrace the doctrines and religion of the Dalaï-Lama, whose religion Kublai-Khan first introduced among the Monguls, or Moguls. The savage Indians of North-America, it seems, have another origin, and are probably descended from the Yukaghiri and Tchucktchi, inhabitants of the most easterly and northerly part of Asia, where, according to the accounts of the Russians, there is but a small traject to America. The ferocity of these nations, similar to that of the Americans, their way of painting, their fondness of inebriating liquors, (which the Yukaghiri prepare from poisonous and inebriating mushrooms, bought of the Russians) and many other things, show them plainly to be of the same origin. The Esquimaux seem to be the same nation with the inhabitants of Greenland, the Samoyedes, and Lapponians. South-America, and especially Peru, is probably peopled from the great unknown south continent, which is very near America, civilized, and full of inhabitants of various colours: who therefore might very easily be cast on the American continent, in boats, or proas. F. ↑