The next to discuss the question, and in an affirmative spirit, was Charles Hippolyte de Paravey, in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne (Feb., 1844), whose paper was published separately as L’Amérique sous le nom de pays de Fou-Sang, est elle citée dès le 5e siècle de notre ère, dans les grandes annales de la Chine, etc. Discussion ou dissertation abrégée, où l’affirmative est prouvée (Paris, 1844); and in 1847 he published Nouvelles preuves que le pays du Fousang est l’Amérique.[558]
The controversy as between De Guignes and Klaproth was shared, in 1862, by Gustave d’Eichthal, taking the Frenchman’s side, in the Revue Archéologique (vol. ii.), and finally in his Etudes sur les origines Bouddhiques de la civilisation Américaine (Paris, 1865).[559]
In 1870, E. Bretschneider, in his “Fusang, or who discovered America?” in the Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal (Foochow, Oct., 1870), contended that the whole story was the fabrication of a lying priest.[560]
In 1875 there was new activity in discussing the question. Two French writers of considerable repute in such studies attracted attention: the one, Lucien Adam, in the Congrès des Américanistes at Nancy (Compte Rendu, i. 145); and the other, Léon de Rosny, entered the discussions at the same session (Ibid. i. p. 131).[561]
The most conspicuous study for the English reader was Charles Godfrey Leland’s Fusang, or The discovery of America by Chinese Buddhist priests in the fifth century (London, 1875).[562]
The Marquis d’Hervey de Saint Denis published in the Actes de la Soc. d’Ethnographie (1869), vol. vi., and later in the Comptes Rendus of the French Academy of Inscriptions, a Mémoire sur le pays connu des anciens Chinois sous le nom de Fousang, et sur quelques documents inédits pour servir à l’identifier, which was afterwards published separately in Paris, 1876, in which he assented to the American theory. The student of the subject need hardly go, however, beyond E. P. Vining’s An inglorious Columbus: or, Evidence that Hwui Shăn and a party of Buddhist monks from Afghanistan discovered America in the fifth century a.d. (New York, 1885), since the compiler has made it a repository of all the essential contributions to the question from De Guignes down. He gives the geographical reasons for believing Fusang to be Mexico (ch. 20), comparing the original description of Fusang with the early accounts of aboriginal Mexico, and rehearsing the traditions, as is claimed, of the Buddhists still found by the Spaniards pervading the memories of the natives, and at last (ch. 37) summarizing all the grounds of his belief.[563]
The consideration of the Polynesian route as a possible avenue for peopling America involves the relations of the Malays to the inhabitants of the Oceanic Islands and the capacity of early man to traverse long distances by water.[564]
E. B. Tylor has pointed out the Asiatic relations of the Polynesians in the Journal of the Anthropological Inst., xi. 401. Pickering, in the ethnological chart accompanying the reports of the Wilkes Expedition, makes the original people of Chili and Peru to be Malay, and he connects the Californians with the Polynesians.[565]
The earliest elaboration of this theory was in John Dunmore Lang’s View of the origin and migrations of the Polynesian nations, demonstrating their ancient discovery and progressive settlement of the continent of America (London, 1834; 2d ed., Sydney, 1877). /Francis A. Allen has advanced similar views at the meetings of the Congrès des Américanistes at Luxembourg and at Copenhagen.[566]
The Mongol theory of the occupation of Peru, which John Ranking so enthusiastically pressed in his Historical researches on the conquest of Peru, Mexico, Bogota, Natchez, and Talomeco, in the thirteenth century, by the Mongols, accompanied with elephants; and the local agreement of history and tradition, with the remains of elephants and mastodontes found in the new world [etc.] (London, 1827), implies that in the thirteenth century the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan sent a fleet against Japan, which, being scattered in a storm, finally in part reached the coasts of Peru, where the son of Kublai Khan became the first Inca.[567] The book hardly takes rank as a sensible contribution to ethnology, and Prescott says of it that it embodies “many curious details of Oriental history and manners in support of a whimsical theory.”[568]