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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: REPORT JAPANESE VESSELS WRECKED IN THE NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN FROM THE EARLIEST RECORDS TO THE PRESENT TIME. Every junk found adrift or stranded on the coast of North America, or on the Hawaiian or adjacent islands, has on examination proved to be Japanese, and no single instance of any Chinese vessel has ever been reported, nor is any believed to have existed. This may be explained by the existence of the Kuro Shiwo, literally " black stream," a gulf stream of warm water, which sweeps northeasterly past Japan toward the Kurile and Aleutian Islands, thence curving around and passing south along the coast of Alaska, Oregon and California. This stream, it is found, has swept these junks toward America at an average rate of fully ten miles a day. There also exists an ocean stream of cold water, emerging from the Arctic Ocean, which sets south close in along the eastern coast of Asia. This fully accounts for the absence of Chinese junks on the Pacific, as vessels disabled off their coast would naturally drift southward. . A noticeable feature is the large number of disasters on the coast of Japan in the month of January, during which season the strong northeast monsoons blow the wrecks directly off shore into the Kuro Shiwo. The climate of Japan is temperate, with the exception of the extreme northern provinces, where intense cold prevails and where snow is abundant; and the extreme southern provinces, whose climate is very warm. About the year 1639 the Japanese Government ordered all junks to be built with open sterns, and large square rudders, unfit for ocean navigation, hopingthereby to keep their people isolated within their own islands. Once forced from the coast by stress of weather, these rudders are soon washed away, when the vessels naturally fall o...