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Why didn't people from Asia colonise North america before the Europeans?

• Message 1. 

  Posted by JeffreyofNorthumbria (U14022752) on Sunday, 11th October 2009

  I was looking at a map the other day and it struck me that it was surprising that North America had not been colonised by people from Russia, China or Japan in relatively recent times, i.e before the Europeans landed in America in the late 15th century.
  
  The Bering Strait does not look as though it would be that wide and people in eastern Russia must surely have been aware that there was this big land mass across the sea. Even Japan and China surely weren't that far away either and shared an ocean with North America.
  
  I know that it is considered pretty much fact now that people from Asia were the first Americans around the time of the last ice age and that being so, it does seem odd that there wasn't more communication between the New World and the old homeland, so to speak.

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Sunday, 11th October 2009

  Good question. So the question goes I guess for the 16th to 19th centuries...let me take 3 nations, Russians, Chinese and Japanese...
  
  1) Case of Russians
  Russians had relatively recently (if I remember well late 18th early 19th century) conquered applying effective control over the vastness of Siberia lands (most of the landmass of the earth) and they practically had not even started the colonisation of these huge lands with Russian populations, let alone build shipyards in Vladivostok and transfer populations to the Americas...! Lets not forget that already their expansion was the main headache for all western european politics since the time of the French revolution and there was a constant "death theat" pronounced against Russians in order not to go go further, east west or south. Napoleon's epic campaign, British's campaign to Crima (first modern war), even the 1st World War were all efforts to contain Russia and limit its power that normally without these events would had been much more superceding with relative ease the US.
  
  Nontheless Russian Cozaks, the equivalent of the US Texan cowboys, indeed jumped from Kamtchatka to the islands and then from island to island went to Alaska, being probably the first Europeans to arrive there, winning with east against the resisting local tribes, few and scarcely populated, and started moving south coast by coast to a rate that alarmed the British (Canada) and the US (one and the same thing in terms of interests even if both do not want to see it that way). Eventually, Russians had just started to populate Siberia building the railway to move people from coast (Baltic Sea) to coast (Pacific) in 2 weeks (previously that would be more than 1 year!!!!) and were not really up to the task of managing also distant lands in another continent without having the necessary infrastructure on the east coast. In Alaska there were no Russian populations other than Cozaks. That fact, combined with the fact that up to these times Alaska was seen as a frozen land very difficult to exploit - note that technical advantages back then did not permit people to imagine any exploitation of such lands - and of course combined also with the fact that US and British were pressing them to step out of the continent and have the lands like the current "Eurasia yours, America ours", made Russians take the bad-according-to-Sun-Tzu decision to seel Alaska to Americans. Sun Tzu was right of course.
  
  2) Case of Chinese
  
  The Chinese were actually the culture that had started the sea-faring adventure 5 decades earlier than the Portuguese and the Spanish. Around 1420s they had a huge navy with large and technically advanced ships of no comparison to the smaller quite rudimentary european ones and they were out to explore the world. They had explored all the southern Asian coastline, obviously went to several islands of Philipinnes and Indonesia (a place they must had known since ealier ages), they reached the Arabic peninsula where they got whatever info they could get from the relatively reluctant Arabs (earlier great mariners but already in deep demise under the Ottomans) that saw a commercial danger there, then Chinese reached the coasts of East Africa. Now people by guess say that in some of these explorations the Chinese might had reached eastwards up to the Pacific coast of Americas. Nothing is proved of course, but it is a possible guess nontheless, we just do not know as Chinese did not anything like that explicitly. What is very interesting is that all these explorations were paid by the Empire itself (just as in the case of the Spanish) and the goal was to find "gold", then other usefull products to trade back to the country (just as in the case of the Spanish!).
  
  So, since they had done it why didn't they follow? Well that was the tragedy of China: right after those explorations, back in the palace there was a succession, new consultants rose hating the naval admirals since they were considered a different class to the land-based aristocracy, they finally prevailed ordering the destruction of the navy under the pretext of "waste of Imperial money" (since they had not brought yet the money they had promised)... and ... the worst... the making of a harsh law that prohibited ship construction even of average sized ships!!! All that roughly 2-3 decades before the Portuguese voyages and 4 decades before Columbus... it couldn't had been worse!!! The discovery of a new continent became known to Chinese at a phase difference of some decades but by then not only the shipyard construction industry was dead but also after 2-3 generations of absence of seafarring there were no more expert mariners to re-take it to the sea. That was visible that soon Europeans were trading in their cities but they could not build anything to do the same themselves in European ports. The land-based ruling class of partly-mongolian ancestry just did not comprehend anything from the importance of sea and did not do anything just like Ottomans did not revive the marine traditions of Arabs (they could not even trade with Indonesia - only managed a brief "baroq" expendition and that was it...). Chinese simply ended up like Byzantines leaving all their navy industry to the others which caused of course their demise, becoming effectevely a British colony (whatever you see it).
  
  3) Case of Japanese
  
  Japanese despite being an island nation were not so much into serious seafaring like the Chinese had been. They had navies but not as large as the Chinese and with no particular ocean capabilities. Of course they could had built the capability but they were too much absorbed into their internal warfare, afterall the 15th-17th centuries were the height of the shogun wars and too much isolated to have seen what was going on outside. The mere fact that they resisted external interference is already admirable, but certainly they were not yet ready to colonise lands outside Japan, not even neighbouring Philippines, let alone a continent like the Americas.
  
  

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  Posted by henvell (U1781664) on Monday, 12th October 2009

  There are stories of a Chinese monks visiting North America ca the 6-7 century ad and of junks in San Francisco harbour,when the first Iberians arrived.
  Validity??

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• Message 4

  , in reply to message 2.

  Posted by JeffreyofNorthumbria (U14022752) on Monday, 12th October 2009

  Thanks for your post. I must say my knowledge of medieval China and Japan is very limited. What I was thinking though is that as the eastern side of Russia and Alaska is so close, it seems to be logical that there must have been a regular level of movement between the two countries, for example in the centuries after Christ and leading up to the Spanish invasion of America.
  
  Maybe, people did move from Russia to North America, but as you put it, Alaska was a cold and uninviting country and maybe people from Russia thought that there was no point travelling much further inland as it would be more of the same.
  
  I have always wondered why the American continent was, if we are to believe what we are often told, unknown to other peoples until Columbus' voyage in 1492. Presumably, some other nations did know of its existence. I understand that voyagers from Denmark (?) travelled to what is now Canada a few hundred years before Columbus. Or is this mythology? I will have to read up more about it.
  
  Was America really as unknown at the end of the 15th century as most of us were told at school and probably still believe? I would be interested to hear what others have to say about this.

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  Posted by on your toes (U11274411) on Tuesday, 13th October 2009

  There is book 1421, the Year the Chinese Discovered America by Gavin Menzies. His findings are hotly disputed by scholars of various nationalities.
  
  

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  Posted by henvell (U1781664) on Tuesday, 13th October 2009

  The Norse had a settlement in Newfoundland,Canada,
  which dates to ca 1000AD.It has been excavated by archaeologists.So the Norse,not Columbus discovered America.There may have been earlier accidental visits to America,when ships from the eastern Atlantic were swept westward by storms.Aristole wrote about the Sarigasso [SP??] Sea.

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Tuesday, 13th October 2009

  Well America was certainly visited several times by many, it is just that no frequent contact had been established till Colombus times. Most of those mariners would probably imagine that the place they were going would be simply a large island. Local Indian tribes would not aid them a lot in the sense they had no maps so even if they told them the land was "endless" the mariners would not take that literally. Those that would take up to exploration would obviously get lost in the absence of friendly basis nearby, afterall they would be 1-2 random boats... lets not forget that Spanish and Portuguese had to set bases prior to their explotion of the continent, it was a formal state policy.
  
  We have even reference to America in Plato's text on Atlantis... if we take out the Atlantis disputed island, the text speaks of western group of islands and behind them to the west a huge continent... Carribean and America, it can't be more explicit...

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• Message 8

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  Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Wednesday, 14th October 2009

  There is book 1421, the Year the Chinese Discovered America by Gavin Menzies. His findings are hotly disputed by scholars of various nationalities. 
  
  Very disputed. Some of his "experts" have been laughed out of court, and some of his Chinese monuments erected in parts of the world are anything but. It doesn't help the guy's cause that he never seems to draw on current Chinese scholarship

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• Message 9

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  Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Wednesday, 14th October 2009

  Having said that, it is not disputed that the Chinese had a large presence in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans in the 14th and early 15th centuries.

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• Message 10

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  Posted by TonyG (U1830405) on Tuesday, 20th October 2009

  Just a wild guess but as I understand it the eastern seaboard of Asia that lies close to North America, i.e. across the Bering Strait has never been highly populated and was not an easy place to scrape a living. Equally, Alaska probably appeared to be the same. If there was no pressure on population to move, why should they bother?

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Wednesday, 21st October 2009

  Interesting point TonyG. It is true that people got their info on a domino way thus people would not go to another place just by jumping and randomly but on a step by step approach. Chinese were very business minded. As the north was sparsely populated and difficult to be exploited in terms of its natural ressources with the pre-19th century technologies, they were simply not interested. Personally I would not be surprised if some Chinese ship arrived in Ameica at some point, albeit we have no knowledge of that so if it happened it was a one-off of rarely repeated feat.
  
  However what people do not realise is that there was indeed a continuous motion of Siberian people to Alaska and I am not talking about the first Amerindians that crossed the channel some 18,000 or so years back but about much later, in historic times. There is a series of islands in a bow-like arragement and it is these islands that the tribes were using to jump from the one continent to the other, of course, these were the same islands that the Russian Kozaks also used to explore Alaska on the other side, much to the detriment of local tribes (Kozaks and Alaska tribes was an identical repetition of cowboys and US natives).

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