The unanimity with which the most celebrated writers on the Americans during three centuries following the discovery, fixed upon a solution of the problem, will be best illustrated in the following pages: One of the most ingenious and at the same time most calmly expressed opinions on the origin problem is that recorded by Father Duran, a native of Tezcuco in Mexico, in his _History of New Spain_, written in the year 1585.[160] He was convinced that the natives had a foreign origin, and that they performed a long journey of many years duration in their migration to the new world. He arrived at these conclusions on account of several considerations, some of which are as follows: The natives had no definite knowledge of their origin, some claiming to have proceeded from fountains and springs of water, others that they were natives of certain caves, and others that they were created by the gods, while all admit that they had come from other lands. Furthermore, they preserved in their traditions and pictures the memory of a journey in which they had suffered hunger, thirst, nakedness and all manner of afflictions, “with which,” he adds, “my opinion and supposition is confirmed that these natives are of the ten tribes of Israel that Salmanasar, king of the Assyrians, made prisoners and carried to Assyria in the time of Hoshea, king of Israel, and in the time of Hezekiah, king of Jerusalem, as can be seen in the fourth Book of the Kings, seventeenth chapter, where it says that Israel was carried away from their land to Assyria, etc., from whence, says Esdras, in Book Fourth, chapter third, they went to live in a land, remote and separated, which had never been inhabited, to which they had a long and tedious journey of a year and a half, for which reason it is supposed these people are found in all the islands and lands of the ocean constituting the Occident.”[161] The preceding opinion was concurred in by many Spanish writers; but the first English writer to support the theory was Thorowgood, in his work entitled, _Jewes in America_.[162] L’Estrange, who replied to this work, controverted the theory of the lost tribes of Israel, but concluded that Shem was the progenitor of the Americans; that he was ninety-eight years old at the time of the flood, and was not present at the building of Babel.[163] “Thus far,” he quaintly remarks, “have I offered my week conceptions, first, how America may be collected to have bin first planted, not denying the Jewes leave to goe into America, but not admitting them to be the chief or prime planters thereof, for I am of opinion, that the Americans originated before the captivity of the ten tribes, even from Shem’s near progeny.”[164] Garcia presents an argument in favor of the same theory, based upon the presence of Scripture names in Peru and Yucatan. He is positive that the word Peru has the same meaning as Ophir, the name of the grandson of Heber, from whom the Hebrews derive their name.