Nevertheless, another contingent of scholars makes a compelling case for repeated wash-ups by Japanese castaways over the past six thousand years-sometimes with transformative effect on the native cultures of the Americas. And no flood of Asian artifacts has been reported in the Americas to match the European claims. It’s harder to argue that Asian voyagers likewise visited or traded with America, because distances across the Pacific are so much wider. Unfortunately, the native peoples of the Americas did not leave records of any such early contacts, so the epigraphers rely on inscriptions and other artifacts-often controversial, if not outright fraudulent-supposedly left by the ancient visitors. They maintain that Old World peoples-the secretive, sea-mastering Phoenicians in particular-actually sailed to the New World to trade and left their shipwrecked traces off shores as widely scattered as Beverly, Massachusetts, and Rio de Janeiro. Some, such as the British-born zoologist and amateur epigrapher Barry Fell, go further. They maintain that sailors, fishermen, or passengers occasionally survived the drift and settled in the Americas, injecting new cultural and genetic elements into its native societies.
Some scholars and aficionados believe that ancient drifts brought more than just timbers, nails, and other inanimate flotsam to the Americas. Other transoceanic drifters have had much larger effects. These tales have spawned legal battles, comics-page yarns, and endless dinner-table diversion. Storied drifters float forever on the seas of legend and, lately, the Internet, whether or not they ever existed: the drift bottles Aristotle's protégé Theophrastus supposedly tracked across the Mediterranean, Queen Elizabeth I's “royal uncorker,” the ghost ship Octavius and the Sydney’s phantom lifebelt, Daisy Alexander's will in a bottle, and Clyde Pangborn’s ocean-hopping plane wheel.
In this excerpt from his new book with writer Eric Scigliano, Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science, the authors explain how a vicious current has swept sailors from Japan all the way to the Americas many times over many millennia. That flotsam has given oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer insight into marine currents and how they have influenced the course of history. The seas are full of the cast-offs of humanity, from tub toys that have fallen off container ships to boats swept away in storms to bottled messages deliberately set adrift. The Kuroshio, or "Black Current," is the Pacific Ocean's answer to the Atlantic's Gulf Stream.
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