Message #34793

[Bianca]

We have already noted the early Japanese contact with Ecuador's coastal peoples. Dr. Gordon includes references also of Chinese expeditions to North and Central America that took place in the twenty-third century B.C., if not before, and again in the fifth century A.D. The earlier account is contained in The Classic of Mountains and Seas, a record of world features said to have been compiled at the request of the Emperor Shun about 2250 B.C.

Both of these Chinese voyages to America have been expertly reconstructed by Henriette Mertz, (Pale Ink.) who shows the areas in North and Central America through which the Oriental visitors traveled, such as the Sand Dunes of Colorado (now a National Park) and that state's Black Gorge (Black Canyon of the Gunnison). They saw the great desert, and wrote of the Grand Canyon of Arizona in glowing, poetic terms. They admired the aspen forests and the redwoods, the unusual rivers and numerous animals, and described the bird resembling a large domestic fowl "with ratlike legs and claws like a tiger," having dark feathers but a white head -- obviously the bald eagle. The widespread use of corn and the prevalence in certain areas of the mulberry tree impressed them, but so did the La Brea Tar Pits in what is now the Los Angeles area, which they called the 'Sea of Varnish,' and the giant horse effigy at Sacaton in Arizona. All these and other features of this strange land were set down in some detail.

In the Mahabharata, one of the two Sanskrit epics of ancient India, mention is made of the visit of Arjuna, a prince of the Bharatas, to Patala, the "antipodes," and of his marriage there to the princess Ulupi, a daughter of one Kauravya, the king of the Nagas.

Commenting on this, H. P. Blavatsky wrote that Pundit Dayanand Saraswati, then the greatest Sanskrit and Puranic authority in India, had personally confirmed her view that Patala was America, and that the visit of Arjuna to that land from what was then India took place 5,000 years ago. (The Secret Doctrine, II, 214.)