This Father, after having laboured some time in the missions of New France, passed over to those of China. One day as he was travelling in Tartary, he met a Huron woman whom he had formerly known in Canada. He asked her by what adventure she had been carried into a country so distant from her own. She made answer, that having been taken in war, she had been conducted from nation to nation, till she had reached the place at which she then was.
Monsieur Charlevoix says further, that he had been assured, another Jesuit, passing through Nantz in his return from China, had related much such another affair of a Spanish woman from Florida. She also had been taken by certain Indians, and given to those of a more distant country; and by these again to another nation, till having thus been successively passed from country to country, and traveled through regions extremely cold, she at last found herself in Tartary. Here she had married a Tartar, who had attended the conquerors into China, where she was then settled.
He acknowledges as an allay to the probability of these stories, that those who had sailed farthest to the eastward of Asia, by pursuing the Coast of Jesso or Kamtschatka, have pretended that they had perceived the extremity of this continent; and from thence have concluded that there could not possibly be any communication by land. But he adds that Francis Guella, a Spaniard, is said to have asserted, that this separation is no more than a straight, about one hundred miles over, and that some late voyages of the Japonese give grounds to think that this straight is only a bay, above which there is a passage over land.
He goes on to observe, that though there are few wild beasts to be met with in North America, except a kind of tigers without spots, which are found in the country of the Iroquoise, yet towards the tropics there are lions and real tigers, which, notwithstanding, might have come from Hyrcania and Tartary; for as by advancing gradually southward they met with climates more agreeable to their natures, they have in time abandoned the northern countries.
He quotes both Solinus and Pliny to prove that the Scythian Anthropophagi once depopulated a great extent of country, as far as the promontory Tabin; and also an author of later date, Mark Pol, a Venetian, who, he says, tells us, that to the north-east of China and Tartary there are vast uninhabited countries, which might be sufficient to confirm any conjectures concerning the retreat of a great number of Scythians into America.
To this he adds, that we find in the antients the names of some of these nations. Pliny speaks of the Tabians; Solinus mentions the Apuleans, who had for neighbours the Massagetes, whom Pliny since assures us to have entirely disappeared. Ammianus Marcellinus expresly tells us, that the fear of the Anthropophagi obliged several of the inhabitants of those countries to take refuge elsewhere. From all these authorities Mons. Charlevoix concludes, that there is at least room to conjecture that more than one nation in America had a Scythian or Tartarian original.
He finishes his remarks on the authors he has quoted, by the following observations: It appears to me that this controversy may be reduced to the two following articles; first, how the new world might have been peopled; and secondly, by whom, and by what means it has been peopled.
Nothing, he asserts, may be more easily answered than the first. America might have been peopled as the three other parts of the world have been. Many difficulties have been formed on this subject, which have been deemed insolvable, but which are far from being so. The inhabitants of both hemispheres are certainly the descendants of the same father; the common parent of mankind received an express command from heaven to people the whole world, and accordingly it has been peopled.
To bring this about it was necessary to overcome all difficulties that lay in the way, and they have been got over. Were these difficulties greater with respect to peopling the extremities of Asia, Africa, and Europe, or the transporting men into the islands which lie at a considerable distance from those continents, than to pass over into America? certainly not.
Navigation, which has arrived at so great perfection within these three or four centuries, might possibly have been more perfect in those early ages than at this day. Who can believe that Noah and his immediate descendants knew less of this art than we do? That the builder and pilot of the largest ship that ever was, a ship that was formed to traverse an unbounded ocean, and had so many shoals and quicksands to guard against, should be ignorant of, or should not have communicated to those of his descendants who survived him, and by whose means he was to execute the order of the Great Creator; I say, who can believe he should not have communicated to them the art of sailing upon an ocean, which was not only more calm and pacific, but at the same time confined within its ancient limits?