While researching the Chinese and Polynesian voyages to America, I found some references that mentioned junks on the Northwestern coast of America that came from Japan, blown eastwards by typhoons, or dragged away from Japan by the Kuroshio Current (or "Black Current") that in a similar way to the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic, heads with a SW to NE direction along the eastern shores of Taiwan and Japan, towards Bering and the Aleutian Islands. (Kuroshio means "black") or Japan Current, is a powerful, warm ocean current flowing north along the eastern coast of Taiwan.
These wrecks and potential castaways suggest that rafts from Asia could have been dragged across the North Pacific Ocean to the coast of western Canada, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, and even further south, to Mexico and South America.
The evidence: shipwrecked junks and castaways
Julian Ralph in his work On Canada's Frontier (1892), recalls that when the first European traders visited the mouth of the Columbia River, they found in the sand a shipwreck and 12,000 pounds (5.4 MT) of beeswax in it, they surmised it was a Japanese junk that had been dragged by the oceanic currents acorss the Pacific. He also mentions a "local legend" about a junk that capsized by Cape Flattery in 1834, with a pottery cargo, and three men on it.
The junk with three men is also mentioned in a book published in 1861: "...in 1833 a junk was cast ashore on the American coast at Cape Flattery opposite Vancouver Island, three men being still alive out of an original crew of seventeen."
Much more detail on both the beeswax wreck and the 1833 junk can be found in the account by Samuel Parker in A Journey Beyond the Rocky Mountains in 1835, 1836, and 1837 (1841):
"Abouth thirty miles south of the river there are the remains of a ship sunk not far from the shore. It is not known by whom she was owned nor from what part of the world she came nor when cast away. The Indians frequently get bees wax from her It is not improbable that she was from some part of Asia.
A Japanese junk was cast away fifteen miles south of Cape Flattery in March 1833. Out of seventeen men only three were saved. In the following May Captain M Neil of the Lama brought the three survivors to Fort Vancouver where they were kindly treated by the gentlemen of the Hudson's Bay Company and in the following October they were sent in one of their ships to England to be forwarded to their own country and home. This junk was laden with rich Chinaware cotton cloths and rice. In the same year eleven Japanese in distress were drifted in a junk to Oahu Sandwich Islands [Note by AW: Now known as Hawaii] It is not very un common for junks and other craft to be found by whale ships in the great Pacific Ocean their crews in a state of starvation without the nautical instruments and skill necessary to enable them to find their way to any port of safety. Undoubtedly many are entirely lost while others drift to unknown shores. May not the above facts throw light upon the original peopling of America which has engaged the attention of men for a long period..."
One of the three men, was Manjiro Nakahama (1827-1898), a 14-year-old boy. Later he was known as John Manjiro and John Mung, by 1846 he had found work on a whaler and visited his former crewmates who remained in Hawaii (unable to return to Japan). John became wealthy in the 1849 California gold rush, and managed to return to Japan, where he became a translator, samurai, and government official; he helped Japan "Westernize" its navy.
The repatriation of the Sandwich Island castaways is described in detail in the January 1838 issue of the Army and Navy Chronicle. The men were sent to Canton, China (now Guangzhou) and were to be sent to Japan with a group of Christian Missionaries who were aiming at opening up Japan to foreigners (they failed, Japan only opened up in 1854 when a fleet of U.S. naval ships intimidated them into doing so. It was commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry).
The "closed country" policy known as shakoku that had been adopted by Japan in the 1600s was designed to keep foreigners out of their country (they had had bad experiences with Portuguese, the Christian missionaries and they had seen the negative consequences of Spanish and Portuguese influence in Asia). It also kept Japanese inside of Japan, a kind of "bamboo curtain" of the XVIth century. Deep sea sailing was restricted. Japanese vessels would only sail in their coastal waters. This led to less sophisticated designs. Below is a one-mast junk of the type that Perry encountered during his visits to Japan.
Unfortunately, the "opening up" of Japan, led to a period of rapid modernization and "Europeanization" (Westernization) known as the Meiji Restoration, where they excelled at being "Western", and by 1904 defeated Russia in a War, and in 1937, with fascist and nationalist ideals (allied with Italy and Germany in an Axis), invaded China, Korea, and on December 7, 1941 attacked Peral Harbor, Hawaii, drawing the United States into World War II. But, let's focus on the transpacific contacts.
There is an excellent book published in 1876 by Charles Wolcott Brooks (Japanese Wrecks stranded and picked up adrift in the North Pacific Ocean, Ethnologically considered). It documents different stray ships, starting with one found in Acapulco, Mexico in 1617. It also mentions the 1833 Cape Flattery castaways. In total, it lists sixty events involving junks. The ones who managed to reach America, had an influence on the local natives:
"Small parties of male Japanese have repeatedly reached the American continent by sea, cast upon its shores after floating helplessly for months. Until recently, the survivors must have remained permanently near where they landed, and naturally uniting with women of the native races, have left descendents more or less impressed with their physical peculiarities. Such a slow, limited, but constant infusion of Japanese blood, almost entirely from male seamen, was undoubtedly sufficient to modify the original stock of all coast tribes along our north-western shore. No marks exist of any immigration en masse, neither is there any present record of any Japanese woman saved from such a wreck, although cases may formerly have occurred, but must have been very rare. These unfortunate seamen, often illiterate, and separated from their sources of learning, necessarily lost their own language; but in doing so, doubtless contributed many isolated words to the Indian dialects of this coast."
Prior to the 1600s, the Japanese junks must have been largr and better equipped for deep-sea navigation. They could have reached America and returned to Japan. The Japanese followed the design of the large Chinese junks, with sails, despite an initial period of isolation (900-1300 AD). They then advanced their knowhow with ships that resembled caravels in the 1300s and 1400s. Civil war led to the design of warships. (Source).
My next post will look into the Japanese and ancient transpacific contact with South America.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
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