EARLY NAVIGATION BY CHINESE

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21084, 8 February 1934, Page 8

EARLY NAVIGATION BY CHINESE

PACIFIC THEOKY DISCOUNTED "The Chinese were certainly not the first navigators in the Pacific. They were not a sea-faring people and never came south into that ocean as explorers or conquerors," declared Professor J. Macmillan Brown, an authority on the peoples of the Pacific, when asked by "The Press" yesterday to comment on the report that Mr A. J. Vogan, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, had discovered what appeared to be a Chinese inscription about 2000 years old in the Yasawa Group, Fiji. Professor Macmillan Brown believes that the only possibility of the inscription being of the age claimed for it is that it was placed there by Chinese who had journeyed down the chain of islands that used to extend from Japan to Easter Island. This chain of islands had been sinking and rising for thousands of years, and it was an interesting fact that the centre of the Hawke's Bay earthquake was actually situated on this Pacific line of fault. The Chinese were not navigators or adventurers, but no great maritime skill would be necessary for them to follow down this line of islands.

The professor said that another argument against the theory of early Chinese exploration was that the Polynesians had come into the Pacific before pottery was in use by the peoples of Europe and Asia, which would place the time as about the old Stone Age. The lack of pottery among the Polynesians could not be explained by the theory that they had no clay or that they had forgotten this extremely useful art. The Chinese had been making pottery for 5000 years. Professor Macmillan Brown inclined to the view that the inscription had been placed on the altar some time after the Polynesians had settled in the islands. The possibility of traders of the Chinese Empire thousands of years ago working down through the chain of Pacific islands, each separated from the other by comparatively small stretches of water, nevertheless might afford a profitable line of research and an explanation for the early Chinese inscription in the Yasawa group.