uninfluenced by it. The
contact between the two worlds practically begins in 1492.

[Sidenote: The Chinese.]

[Sidenote: The Irish.]

[Sidenote: Cousin, of Dieppe.]

By this statement it is not meant to deny that occasional visitors may
have come and did come before that famous date from the Old World to the
New. On the contrary I am inclined to suspect that there may have been
more such occasional visits than we have been wont to suppose. For the
most part, however, the subject is shrouded in the mists of obscure
narrative and fantastic conjecture. When it is argued that in the fifth
century of the Christian era certain Buddhist missionary priests came
from China by way of Kamtchatka and the Aleutian islands, and kept on
till they got to a country which they called Fusang, and which was
really Mexico, one cannot reply that such a thing was necessarily and
absolutely impossible; but when other critics assure us that, after all,
Fusang was really Japan, perhaps one feels a slight sense of
relief.[160] So of the dim whispers of voyages to America undertaken by
the Irish, in the days when the cloisters of sweet Innisfallen were a
centre of piety and culture for northwestern Europe,[161] we may say
that this sort of thing has not much to do with history, or history with
it. Irish anchorites certainly went to Iceland in the seventh
century,[162] and in the course of this book we shall have frequent
occasion to observe that first and last there has been on all seas a
good deal of blowing and drifting done. It is credibly reported that
Japanese junks have been driven ashore on the coasts of Oregon and
California;[163] and there is a story that in 1488 a certain Jean
Cousin, of Dieppe, while sailing down the west coast of Africa, was
caught in a storm and blown across to Brazil.[164] This was certainly
quite possible, for it was not so very unlike what happened in 1500 to
Pedro Alvarez de Cabral, as we shall hereafter see;[165] nevertheless,
the evidence adduced in support of the story will hardly bear a critical
examination.[166]

[Footnote 160: This notion of the Chinese visiting Mexico was
set forth by the celebrated Deguignes in 1761, in the _Memoires
de l'Academie des Inscriptions_, tom. xxviii. pp. 506-525. Its
absurdity was shown by Klaproth, "Recherches sur le pays de Fou
Sang," _Nouvelles annales des voyages_, Paris, 1831, 2e serie,
tom. xxi. pp. 58-68; see al