es. Its islands,
few and far between, were helpless to maintain intercourse between the
opposite shores; this is proven by the fact that all of them from
Greenland to Tristan da Cunha, excepting only the Canaries, were
uninhabited at the time of their discovery. History records when the
first bold voyagers came upon them in that unmarked waste of waters, and
gave them their first occupants. The political upheavals of Norway in
King Harfagr's time (872) sent to the Faroes and Iceland their first
settlers, though these islands were previously known to the Celts of
Ireland. The Norse colonists who went to Greenland in the year 1000 seem
to have been the first regular settlers on those inhospitable coasts.
They found no native inhabitants, but numerous abandoned dwellings,
fragments of boats and stone implements,[757] which doubtless recorded
the intermittent voyages thither of the Eskimo, preliminary to permanent
occupation. The Scandinavians did not encounter natives on the island
till the 12th century, when Greenland probably received its first Eskimo
immigration.[758]

[Sidenote: Geographical character of the Pacific.]

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