Riddle of the Ancient Asian Mariners

[Editor's note: Yesterday's first half of this series cited the Japanese tsunami debris now drifting towards B.C. as just one of many signs that Pacific ocean currents may have helped carry Asian explorers to this region long before Europeans arrived to "discover" the indigenous civilization living here. Today, a collection of curiosities that keep that theory alive.]

Until quite recently, most North American archeologists would get nervous at the suggestion ancient Asian mariners crossed the Pacific in travels to the Americas. Trapped in a scientific orthodoxy -- not so different from the one that dictated early 20th century geologists rejection of the new (and now firmly established) theory of drifting continents -- archeologists have claimed the early cultures of the Americas evolved untainted by any outside influences. This belief had its roots in a sort of uber-nationalism of western scientific thought -- that unlike the mongrel cultures of Asia, Melanesia, and Africa, so the argument went, there was no foreign miscegenation in the Americas. Smug and borderline racist, this isolationist idea held sway for most of the 20th century.

So Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki demonstration of an alternative theory -- that the Pacific was, in fact, a highway of ancient American/Asian diffusion -- was greeted with derision by academia. Then came Gavin Menzies's best-selling book 1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered the World, describing alleged Oriental visits to the New World almost 600 years ago. Historians and archeologists went ballistic. Menzies is a liar, they said. Worse: he's a charlatan. What often got lost in the tirades against Menzies and his mistaken predecessor Heyerdahl -- they did get important things wrong -- was this increasingly accepted premise: early Asian and American peoples had been criss-crossing the Pacific for centuries, perhaps for millennia before Europeans appeared on the scene.

This paradigm shift can be traced, in part, to a series of recent discoveries that demonstrate early mariners had both the capacity for and an interest in trade that regularly propelled them out of Asia and to the New World. When, for example, Victoria archeologist Doug Fedje announce a few years ago that he'd found datable 13,000 year-old human artefacts on the Queen Charlotte Islands, his discovery was part of a growing belief that prehistoric Asian nomads had the boats and skills to utilize the B.C. coast for navigation. Virtually gone today is the scientific concept of the Bering Strait land bridge as the sole entry point for human migrations into Ice Age North America. That theory is now an anachronism -- as dead as the one that once said God set the universe in motion on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 4004 B.C.

Why cross several thousand kilometres of tundra and ice when there's plentiful fish, game, and dry land on ice-free, Pacific coast promontories? When archeologists recently analyzed some buried ship's planks on California's Channel Islands, they discovered the sawn wood had likely had its origins in the Gilbert Islands, 7500 kilometres to the southwest. And the wreck was 1,600 years old. When other researchers reported recently that New Mexico's Zuni native blood types, religion, and language have unmistakeable Japanese links; or that old Mayan had common linguistic roots with old Sino-Tibetan -- and that these Asian influences appear to have arrived abruptly within the past 1,500 years -- it was a sign the iconoclasts of Asian dispersal had overwhelmed the bastion of American uniqueness.

Clue of the 600-year-old chicken

David Burley, chair of SFU's Department of Archeology, finds himself -- like most others in his field -- having to assimilate this new, often discomforting information. It runs counter to a lot of preconceptions. "The evidence clearly shows now," he admits, "people moved from west to east across the Pacific. If the Polynesians hit tiny Easter Island [off Chile] -- and they did -- they had to hit South America. If they got to Hawaii -- and they did -- they got to the Pacific Northwest." There are Ainu totem poles from northern Japan, he adds, that are almost identical to West Coast totem poles. There's old Polynesian bark cloth that's identical to native cedar cloth here. And then there are those strange Bella Coola petroglyphs.

Even more provocative, however, than the petroglyphs that inspired Heyerdahl in 1939, is last year's announcement by one of Burley's own doctoral students, Alice Storey, that DNA in 600 year-old chicken bones found in Chile pinpoint the bird's genetic origins in Samoa, almost 8,000 kilometres across open ocean to the west. It had been assumed by eurocentric archeologists that the Atlantic-crossing Spanish brought this Asian bird -- not Pacific-crossing Polynesians -- to the New World. And to further the early trans-Pacific argument, it's now also understood that these same maritime traders brought back from the Americas the previously unknown sweet potato and the bottle gourd to Polynesia.

But when the issue of early Chinese travellers to the British Columbia came up, the best that Burley can muster on Fu Sang is this: "Anything's possible. Most myths have some kind of root basis in events."

Warped by time

B.C. archeologist George MacDonald, 70 and director-emeritus of the Bill Reid Foundation, is one of the few that didn't succumb to the scientific conceit of the Americas' isolation from Asia. He has believed all along that Asian traders and ideas have come to these shores since... well, forever. "It's harder to explain why they did not come than why they did. The first emperor," he says, referring to a different Chinese myth dating to 210 B.C., "sent his fleet across the Pacific to find 'The Land of Immortality.' Those ships disappeared. Then came Fu Sang. There had to be Chinese ships that came here!"

MacDonald has dug evidence of Bronze Age (3000 B.C.) Japanese-style armour from a site near Prince Rupert. He has seen examples of ancient, folded birch bark boxes from Siberia that are mimicked exactly by the traditional, curve-sided cedar boxes of B.C. coastal natives. He has seen how the raven myth has survived among tribes on both sides of the Pacific. He believes the circum-Pacific peoples have -- despite the distances -- known about each other for millennia, traded and fought regularly, exchanging their ideas, their products, and their genes in a traffic that helped shape the rise of the great cultures of the Americas. He believes it's time to follow the old myths.

"Most legends have some point of historical origin. But the old stories get warped in time. The challenge in archeology is to take the warp out of it. To find the key sites and evidence. And date them. I'd say maybe one-tenth of one per cent of B.C. archeological sites have been dug. Under the ocean... less. The day will come when we search the ocean off B.C. If you were looking for Chinese remains, you'd get results. Of course, it's a needle-in-the-haystack situation. There's a lot of coastline, a lot of water. But if you're not looking," and he points down, "you're not going to find proof."

The resolution to this mystery may well lie in one of several B.C. places today. The first is in the cabinet-filled Archeological Collection Room in Victoria's Royal B.C. Museum. It is presided over by its garrulous, 60 year-old curator, Grant Keddie, who acknowledges he has seen a dramatic shift in his field -- toward seeking connections between Pacific cultures, rather than trying to dismember diffusion theorists and their theories.

The more Keddie looks, the more he believes the proverbial "needle" will soon be found. He pulls out a bunch of old perforated Chinese coins dug in B.C. and dated by him to around 1100 A.D. But, he says, there's no proof these coins -- like the old Chinese pots found off Vancouver Island -- arrived here new. Traditionally, native people wore old coins as good luck charms. Keddie points out the 550 year-old "Ice Man" found frozen in a B.C. glacier in 1999 was carrying iron tools at a time iron smelting was well known in East Asia, and unknown in the Americas. So... where did the iron come from?

Keddie repeats B.C. native myths of people arriving long, long before the appearance of the first Europeans. These strangers purportedly ate "maggots." Could that be rice? He extracts from a drawer a six-centimetre-high figurine -- with a top-knot, and of apparent Asian origin -- found amid potsherds and slate beads in a native midden on Saturna Island. Could it be proof Asians got here; or merely a trade artefact?

Keddie says he'd like to get a piece of the wood fisherman Mike Tyne tossed overboard the day his crew found the Chinese pot off Pachena Bay. Carbon dating could determine the age of the shipwreck. "Discussion is afoot," Keddie acknowledges. "The paradigm is changing. Scientists are now looking for the evidence to establish China's role in history."

'If this pot could talk'

A second place to look would be in the old office of former director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum, James Delgado. As an archeologist and host of the long-running TV series Sea Hunter, he knows myths and isolated artefacts cannot alone make the case for Chinese mariners coming to the B.C. coast long ago. For that, you need a shipwreck. "If you take the accounts of the Chinese at face value, they did get here. The Fu Sang story says so. But there's been a tendency in the West to dismiss the influence of the East. We've pretty much discarded that view now. And that..." he says, pointing dramatically across his desk and downward toward the floor, "that fits our post-modern view. We're rejecting eurocentric world history and the idea of American uniqueness; and beginning to accept historic Asian ties to the Americas."

Delgado's fingertip aims at one of the two intact Chinese pots recently pulled from 1,200-metre-deep water off Tofino, the location of the latest purported Asian shipwreck. The half-metre high pot is covered with swirling, white tunicate worm casts atop its beer-brown glaze. Delgado studies the almost calligraphic casts as if trying to read an illegible script. "If we discover an Asian shipwreck off this coast," he adds, "it would be one of the most significant discoveries in North American archeology."

A third place to look is in the living room of Michelle Morelan's suburban Steveston home. She's the daughter of Mike Tyne. On the floor in the corner, covered in white worm casts, is the very Chinese pot her father hauled up off Pachena Bay years ago. Curiously, balanced atop the upright pot's mouth, is a large green-glass Japanese fishing float, identical to those that once inspired Heyerdahl. To hold this giant Chinese pot, to run one's fingers over the rough, raised worm casts is to sense the proximity of mystery. "If only the pot could talk," Morelan says.

Over a century ago, B.C. ethnologists recorded a story from the Loht'a people of Pachena Bay, describing a great flood that had swept away their village long before, and had submerged the summit of nearby 1,817 metre Mt. Arrowsmith. For 100 years, this tale was considered nothing more than a myth. Then a decade ago, a Japanese seismologist, analyzing records of local tsunamis, uncovered reports of a great wave that had inundated the Japanese coast on Jan. 27, 1700. But he could find no accounts -- despite a Russian presence in Alaska and a Spanish presence along most of the west coast of the Americas -- of a big earthquake. The only gap in reliable reporting at that time was the still-unconquered Pacific coast of Canada. Archeologists began digging along coastal B.C., and soon found that a 10-metre-high tsunami wave had swept into Pachena Bay that day and had obliterated the village there. The old Loht'a myth had its roots, it is now known, in British Columbia's last great earthquake.

It is widely believed today -- after a century of denial -- that evidence of ancient Asian travellers along this coast is out there somewhere, and that the remarkable Chinese myth of Fu Sang, and the gathering weight of local artefacts and native stories are pointing the way to a new understanding of the past. It shouldn't come as a surprise -- considering the likely direction of 21st century history -- that the metaphorical tsunami headed across the Pacific from China in the decades ahead may duplicate, in many ways, the cultural tsunami that swept the Pacific coast of the Americas millennia ago. Myths are history's pale ink. One Chinese shipwreck found, and history changes.