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And the more Keddie looks, the more he believes the proverbial “needle” will soon be found. He pulls out a bunch of old perforated Chinese coins dug in B.C. and dated by him to around AD 1100. But, he says, there’s no proof these coins—like the old Chinese pots found off Vancouver Island—arrived here new.
Traditionally, Native people wore old coins as good-luck charms. Keddie points out that the 550-year-old “Ice Man” found frozen in a B.C. glacier in 1999 was carrying iron tools at a time when iron smelting was well known in East Asia but unknown in the Americas. So where did the iron come from? He repeats B.C. Native myths of people arriving long, long before the appearance of the first Europeans.
These strangers purportedly ate “maggots”. Could that have been rice? He extracts from a drawer a six-centimetre-high figurine—with a topknot, and of apparent Asian origin—found amid potsherds and slate beads in a Native midden on Saturna Island. Could it be proof Asians got here, or is it merely a trade artifact? He says he’d like to get a piece of the wood that fisherman Mike Tyne tossed overboard the day his crew found the Chinese pot off Pachena Bay. Carbon dating could determine the age of the shipwreck. “Discussion is afoot,” Keddie acknowledges. “The paradigm is changing. Scientists are now looking for the evidence to establish China’s role in history.”
A second place to look would be the old office of the former director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum, James Delgado. As an archaeologist and host of the long-running TV series Sea Hunter, he knows that myths and isolated artifacts cannot alone make the case for Chinese mariners coming to the B.C. coast long ago. For that, you need a shipwreck, he said in an interview before he left the museum to take a job in the U.S.
“If you take the accounts of the Chinese at face value, they did get here. The Fu Sang story says so. But there’s been a tendency in the West to dismiss the influence of the East. We’ve pretty much discarded that view now. And that,” he said, pointing dramatically across his desk and downward toward the floor, “that fits our postmodern view. We’re rejecting Eurocentric world history and the idea of American uniqueness and beginning to accept historic Asian ties to the Americas.”
His fingertip aimed at one of the two intact Chinese pots pulled from 1,200 metres of water off Tofino, the location of the latest purported Asian shipwreck. The half-metre-high pot was covered with swirling, white tunicate worm casts atop its beer-brown glaze. Delgado studied the almost calligraphic casts as if trying to read an illegible script. “If we discover an Asian shipwreck off this coast,” he added, “it would be one of the most significant discoveries in North American archaeology.”
A third place to look is the living room of Michelle Morelan’s suburban Steveston home. She’s the daughter of Mike Tyne. On the floor in the corner, covered in white worm casts, is the very Chinese pot her father hauled up off Pachena Bay years ago. Curiously, balanced atop the upright pot’s mouth is a large green glass Japanese fishnet float, identical to those that once inspired Heyerdahl. To hold this giant Chinese pot, to run one’s fingers over the rough, raised worm casts, is to sense the proximity of mystery. “If only the pot could talk,” Morelan says.
More than a century ago, B.C. ethnologists recorded a story from the Loht’a people of Pachena Bay, describing a great flood that had swept away their village long before and had submerged the summit of nearby 1,817-metre Mt. Arrowsmith.
For 100 years, this tale was considered nothing more than a myth. Then a decade ago, a Japanese seismologist, analyzing records of local tsunamis, uncovered reports of a great wave that had inundated the Japanese coast on January 27, 1700. But he could find no accounts—despite a Russian presence in Alaska and a Spanish presence along most of the west coast of the Americas—of a big earthquake.
The only gap in reliable reporting at that time was the still-unconquered Pacific coast of Canada. Archaeologists began digging along coastal B.C. and soon found that a 10-metre tsunami had swept into Pachena Bay that day and had obliterated the village there. The old Loht’a myth had its roots, it is now known, in British Columbia’s last great earthquake.
It is widely believed today—after a century of denial—that evidence of ancient Asian travellers along this coast is out there somewhere, and that the remarkable Chinese myth of Fu Sang and the gathering weight of local artifacts and Native stories are pointing the way to a new understanding of the past. It shouldn’t come as a surprise—considering the likely direction of 21st-century history—that the metaphorical tsunami headed across the Pacific from an ascendant China in the decades ahead may duplicate, in many ways, the cultural tsunami that swept the Pacific coast of the Americas millennia ago. Myths are history’s pale ink. One Chinese shipwreck found, and history changes.
(Original headline: Who were B.C.’s first seafarers? )
