While the Atlantic thus formed a long north-and-south rift across the inhabited world at the period of the great discoveries, the Pacific, strewn with islands and land-rimmed at its northern extremity by the peninsulas of Alaska and eastern Siberia, spread a nebula of population from the dense centers of Asia across to the outskirts of America.  The general Mongoloid character of the American Indians as a race, the stronger Asiatic stamp of the Western Eskimo, the unmistakeable ethnic and cultural affinities of the Northwest Coast tribes both with southern Polynesians and Asiatics,[759] all point to America as the great eastern wing of the Mongoloid or Asiatic area, and therefore as the true Orient of the world.

Geographic conditions have made this possible or even probable.  The winds and currents of the North Pacific set from Japan straight toward the American coast.  Junks blown out to sea from China or Japan have been carried by the Kuro Siwo and the prevailing westerlies across the Pacific to our continent.  There is record of a hundred instances of this occurrence.[760]

[Sidenote:  Pacific affinities of North American Indians.]

The broken bridge across Bering Strait formed by East Cape, Cape Prince of Wales and the Diomede Islands between, and further south the natural causeway of the Commander and Aleutian Islands leading from the peninsula of Kamchatka to that of Unalaska, have facilitated intercourse between Asia and America.[761] Justin Winsor says, “There is hardly a stronger demonstration of such connection between the two continents than the physical resemblances of the peoples now living on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean in these upper latitudes."[762] This resemblance is by no means confined to the Eskimo and Chukches, who have exchanged colonists across Bering Sea.  Recent investigations have revealed a wider kinship.  The population of northern Siberia speaks in general Ural-Altaic languages, but it includes a few scattered tribes whose singular speech excludes them from this linguistic group, and who have therefore been placed by ethnologists in a distinct class called “paleasiatics” or “hyperboreans.”  This class is composed of the Ostyak and Kot on the Yenisei River, the Gilyak and Ainos at the mouth of the Amur and on the Kurile, Sakhalin and Yezo islands, the Kamchadal and Koryak of Kamchatka, and the Chukches and Yukaghir of extreme northeastern Siberia.  As far back as 1850, the eminent philologist Robert Latham noted a marked linguistic agreement, both in structure and verbal affinity, between our Northwest Coast tribes and the peoples of the islands and peninsulas fringing northeastern Asia.  “Koriak is notably American,” he said.[763] The recent Jesup Expedition to the Northwest Coast of America and the nearby coast of Asia investigated the Koryak, to determine whether in the past there had been any connection between the cultures and ethnic types of the Old and New World.  These investigations have proved beyond doubt a kinship of culture, attributable either to a remote common origin or to former contact, long and close, between these isolated Siberian tribes and the American aborigines.  They show that the Koryak are one of the Asiatic tribes standing nearest to the northwestern American Indian.[764] [See map page 103.]