And is it possible the Clovis people came to America far earlier than Columbus or the Vikings? Sure it is! And that's my point: if we knew all the different peoples who came here and when, it would render the official history meaningless.
We can't know the extent of this tapestry of visitors--many of whom stayed. If we look at modern parallels, we can see why. Do you know who is the first Japanese documented as setting foot on US soil? It was a guy named Manjiro. Where did this happen? Must have been the West Coast, right? Seattle or San Francisco or some place like that. Wrong! It was New Bedford, Massachusetts around 1843. He was part of a fishing party from Japan blown off course by a storm. They lived on an island for a few months until they were picked up by a whaling ship called the John Howland out of New Bedford. They stayed onboard and worked as crewman (the desertion rate was high in the Yankee whaling fleet so they took anybody aboard who was interested including whalermen who had deserted from other ships--no questions asked--Melville deserted his first ship).
When they put into Honolulu at the end of the whaling season, four of the fishermen disembarked but Manjiro begged the captain, William Whitfield, to keep him on and teach him to be a navigator. Manjiro was 14 and Whitfield told him he should go home to his family who would be worried. Manjiro told him that this was impossible because Japan was so isolationist that contact with foreigners was forbidden upon pain of death. He could never go home again. Whitfield was saddened to hear this and so agreed to grant Manjiro his wish and took him back to Massachusetts. And that's how the first documented Japanese came to America. It flies in the face of logic but it really happened--you can check it out for yourself if you doubt.
Moreover, Manjiro did become a very capable navigator and rose to first mate on a voyage that circumnavigated the globe. It was believed that he would captain his own ship one day but instead Manjiro left New Bedford and sailed to Nantucket. From there he caught a ship to San Francisco and mined for gold for a few months. Then he signed onto a whaling ship heading to the Pacific. From there, he left the ship amd disembarked on an island near Japan. He had his books and charts with him. He went back to Japan and was arrested but he knew they wouldn't execute him--he had knowledge that made him far too valuable. The authorities questioned him intensely and he answered everything truthfully. He told them he know all about the barbarians and could teach others and could also teach them how to build ships like the barbarian countries and how to sail them. He was made a teacher and he taught as he promised. He was allowed to see his mother again--the reason he went home in the first place. When Admiral Perry's ships arrived in Tokyo Bay on 1853, he stepped onto Japan and was greeted in perfect English by none other than Manjiro.
How many times over the centuries did similar stories happen that changed the course of history that we will never know about?
By the way, Manjiro did return to the US by navigating a Japanese crew to the West Coast in the 1890s. He met William Whitfield again and each man had a family by then. To this day, the descendants of each man still meet every few years--sometimes in Japan and sometimes in Massachusetts. I learned this story when I vacationed in New Bedford and visited the Millicent Library in nearby Fairhaven where this story was posted on the wall. The library is the location where the two families meet in America. I named my eldest daughter Millicent for that reason. We just call her Mill.
Believe it or not.
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