Source: www.AsiaticFathers.com or www.HarrisMaps.com

Background: Since early 2003, Mrs. Rees, an independent researcher and a graduate of Columbia International University, has diligently studied the possibility of very early arrival of Chinese to America.  In 1972 her father, Dr. Hendon M. Harris, Jr., found in an antique shop in Korea an ancient Asian map which led him to write a book of almost 800 pages. That book contended that by 2200 B.C. Chinese had reached the Americas by sea.

Initially a skeptic of her late father’s theories, Mrs. Rees’ research on this subject was originally to prove for herself whether he could have been right. In 2003 she and her brother took the Harris Map Collection to the Library of Congress where it remained for three years while being studied.  In 2006 she published an abridged version of her father’s, The Asiatic Fathers of America: Chinese Discovery and Colonization of Ancient America.

Dr. Cyclone Covey, History Professor Emeritus, Wake Forest University, who for over 58 years has studied the early history of America and the Chinese connection, has been her research mentor.  Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee has served as an advisor.

Mrs. Rees’ father, Dr. Hendon M. Harris, Jr. was born in 1916 in Kaifeng, China to Baptist missionary parents. As a child Mrs. Rees lived for four years in Taiwan then later for a year in Hong Kong where her parents were missionaries. In recent years she has taken several trips to China. Currently her home is in Virginia in the USA.

Her enthusiastic power point presentations - delivered in layman’s language - bring together many academic studies revealing evidences of very early arrival of Chinese to the Americas. She also includes a brief discussion of her visits to sites in North America which ancient Chinese wrote about. According to Rees, the Chinese descriptions of those areas are too accurate for us to now deny that they had been there. Her web address is www.HarrisMaps.com.

On 3/24,  almost simultaneously, I received  e-mails from Bruno Clementin of France and Steve Hill of the Philippines,  both with the link below to the BBC news article which states that a ship  which broke lose during the tsunami last year has almost reached North America. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17500008

This week this same report is in the news in the US and now it is reported that more unmanned ships are following. This is in line with what my father suggested - that the earliest arrivals to the Americas may not have intended to come at all but after a storm may have been caught in this exact current. It acts like a conveyor belt bringing objects from Asia to North America and then back.

In Secret Maps of the Ancient World (page 90) I mentioned several very small boats in the late 20th century that crossed the Pacific in much shorter time (one in 57 days) on the North Pacific current. The western side of that current is known as the Kuroshio. This warm current is shaped like a race track. Chinese writers more than 2200 years ago wrote about that current and called it “Wei Lu.”

According to a report by the US Government (NOAA) that current is up to 62 miles wide and .6 miles deep – a huge river in the ocean.

Just last week I finished reading China Voyage: Across the Pacific on Bamboo Raft which had been sent to me by Cedric Bell, a fellow researcher in the UK. First that crew traveled north from Vietnam (where the raft was built) to Japan in order to catch the eastward flowing Kuroshio. They knew the minute they hit the current because the water instantly became warmer and faster moving. They were able to go most of the way across the Pacific but about 1000 miles from the US had to abandon the raft because it was disintegrating. (At least one other unrelated group has made it across on a raft on that current.) The China Voyage crew took water, of course, but said it would not have been needed because they were able to capture enough rain water and that they were able to catch fish the whole way across. Some fish seemed to follow the raft.

Recently my husband, Dave, read Unbroken. That is a true account about an American in World War II whose plane crashed in the Pacific. He and his buddy survived for 47 days at sea in a life raft just by collecting rain water and by fishing.  Eventually they were captured by the Japanese. During those 47 days they had traveled almost 2000 miles on a return current to Asia.

All this fits together that even in small boats early people could have crossed the Pacific. In the other disabled ships that are now crossing the Pacific, it will be interesting to see if there are any survivors. Seamen know how to survive.

You can hear a recent interview of me by Kim Greenhouse about my new book, Chinese Sailed to America Before Columbus at the following link

www.itsrainmakingtime.com/2012/charlotteharrisrees2/

Video: Here is something related to the “rivers in the oceans concept”;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD797kNoT2E&feature=youtube_gdata_player