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WHALERS AT WORK.

It was in these waters of Bering Sea and the Arctic that the Shenandoah played such havoc during the American war. In 1865 she burned thirty American whalers, taking off the officers and crews, and sending them down to San Francisco. The captain of an English whaler, the Robert Tawns, of Sydney, had warned and saved some American vessels, and was in consequence threatened by the pirate captain. The writer was an eye-witness of the results of this wanton destruction of private property. The coasts were strewed with the remains of the burned vessels, while the natives had boats, spars, &c., in numbers.

But Plover Bay has an interest attaching to it of far more importance than anything to be said about whaling or Arctic expeditions. It is more than probable that from or near that bay the wandering Tunguse, or Tchuktchi, crossed Bering Straits, and peopled America. The latter, in canoes holding fifteen or twenty persons, do it now; why not in the “long ago?” The writer has, in common with many who have visited Alaska (formerly Russian-America, before the country was purchased by the United States), remarked the almost Chinese or Japanese cast of features possessed by the coast natives of that country. Their Asiatic origin could not be doubted, and, on the other hand, Aleuts—natives of the Aleutian Islands, which stretch out in a grand chain from Alaska—who had shipped as sailors on the Russo-American Telegraph Expedition, and a Tchuktchi boy brought down to be educated, were constantly taken for Japanese or Chinamen in San Francisco, where there are 40,000 of the former people. Junks have on two occasions been driven across the Pacific Ocean, and have landed their crews.99 These facts occurred in 1832–3; the first on the coast near Cape Flattery, North-west America, and the second in the harbour of Oahu, Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands. In the former case all the crew but two men and a boy were killed by the natives. In the latter case, however, the Sandwich Islanders treated the nine Japanese, forming the crew of the junk, with kindness, and, when they saw the strangers so much resembling them in many respects, said, “It is plain, now, we come from Asia.” How easily, then, could we account for the peopling of any island or coast in the Pacific. Whether, therefore, stress of weather obliged some unfortunate Chinamen or Japanese to people America, or whether they, or, at all events, some Northern Asiatics, took the “short sea route,” viâ Bering Straits, there is a very strong probability in favour of the New World having been peopled from not merely the Old World, but the Oldest World—Asia.