Extra bit 5: In the course of googling for this, I also learned that prevailing winds and currents caused wrecked premodern Japanese boats to wash ashore in the Pacific Northwest (these were junks designed for coastal navigation and if they got blown out to sea, the heavy waves of the open ocean tended to cripple the boats quite rapidly). Well before the First Nations of the PNW ever had contact with colonizers, they were salvaging iron from those wrecked junks and using it in tools.
Furthermore, we have records from the post contact era of disabled boats washing ashore in the Pacific Northwest with surviving crew members aboard (after up to a year of drifting across the ocean, surviving on the ship's stores or a cargo of food). These Japanese castaways became captives of the tribes that rescued them, and there's every reason to think that similar castaway survivors had ended up there before colonial contact as well. Speculations on just what kinds of influence those surviving castaways might have had on First Nations culture and technology would make for an interesting novel.
(eta: the article disappointingly adopts a colonialist perspective, saying that aside from iron tools, the cargos of the wrecked ships would have been useless to the peoples that found them - ha ha, no. Not impactful in the long term? sure. Useless? Hell no. Most of the article's page count builds the case that junks were washing ashore in the PNW for as far back as we have records, so they must have been doing so before then as well, plus a short discussion of the remains of iron tools found in one archaeological site where conditions were right to preserve the tools from rusting away).
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Date: 2021-08-04 02:46 pm (UTC)Furthermore, we have records from the post contact era of disabled boats washing ashore in the Pacific Northwest with surviving crew members aboard (after up to a year of drifting across the ocean, surviving on the ship's stores or a cargo of food). These Japanese castaways became captives of the tribes that rescued them, and there's every reason to think that similar castaway survivors had ended up there before colonial contact as well. Speculations on just what kinds of influence those surviving castaways might have had on First Nations culture and technology would make for an interesting novel.
For those whose library subscribes to the right digital resources, there's an article here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40316086
(eta: the article disappointingly adopts a colonialist perspective, saying that aside from iron tools, the cargos of the wrecked ships would have been useless to the peoples that found them - ha ha, no. Not impactful in the long term? sure. Useless? Hell no. Most of the article's page count builds the case that junks were washing ashore in the PNW for as far back as we have records, so they must have been doing so before then as well, plus a short discussion of the remains of iron tools found in one archaeological site where conditions were right to preserve the tools from rusting away).