As, however, the authenticity and consequent authority of the document have been called in doubt, the reader will allow us, before we make any use of it, a short digression, to show upon what grounds we may confidently admit that narrative. Let it be stated at once that, while the story was already believed by Maltebrun, it obtained a strong advocate in R. U. Major, of the Map Department of the British Museum, who gave it an English dress. The most exhaustive examination of the Zeno report has come from a practical navigator, Baron A. E. Nordenskjöld, who, in working up the results of his own Arctic exploration, was led into the intricacies of the Zeno controversy. The results which he reaches are that the Zeno narratives are substantially true; that in the year 1558, when the Zeno letters were issued, there was no printed material which could have furnished the publisher with an account so nearly accurate of the actual condition of those northern waters.2

The compiler, a nephew of the Zeni, who published it first in the year 1558,3 manifests all honest simplicity and candor when he explains why his literary work must necessarily be deficient and perhaps incorrect in some details. "All the letters," he says, "written by Messer Antonio to his brother Carlo, together with many more writings regarding the same subject, were most unfortunately damaged. They fell into my hands

1 Hakluyt Soc., 1873.

' Winsor, vol. i. p. 111, seq. In looking up this subject we have found the following authors to consider the Zeno narrative as apocryphal,-namely, Arngrim, Torfæus, Belknap, Zahrtmann, Peschel; and as admitting its authenticity and general authority, Pontanus, Card. Zurla, Maltebrun, Walkenaer, von

Humboldt, Lelewel, Major, Forster, Eggers, Bredsdorf, Amat, Beauvois, Gravier, Nordenskjöld.

Under the title, "Dello scoprimento dell' isole Frislanda, Estlanda, Engronelanda, Estotilanda et Icaria, fatto sotto il Polo Artico, da due fratelli Zeni, M. Nicolò il K. e M. Antonio, Libro uno;" together with a map; Venezia.

when I was yet a child, and, not knowing their value, I, as children are liable to do, tore them all up and destroyed the greater portion. I cannot think of this but with the deepest sorrow until this day. Yet, that such a beautiful record of events might not be lost altogether, I have, with the aid of Antonio's nautical chart, reduced to this narrative whatever has been left of those papers, in order to procure some satisfaction to the present generation, which profits so much by the transatlantic discoveries and is eager to hear of those made by our ancestors." 1

To gratify the public spirit of the time, the author very wisely produced some of his classical lore, and thus mentioned the island Icaria and King Dedalus. This was a pardonable fault, as was also the excessive praise bestowed upon his glorious kinsmen for their daring piracies. Nor shall we deny that he may have drawn upon his imagination for a few incidents to adorn his narration; but we see no reason to disbelieve him when he says that, in the main, he has faithfully told the facts as he best could know them from his scraps of authentic letters.2

That both the writers and the recipient of the alleged correspondence were no mythical persons is well known from the studies of Cardinal Zurla,3 and from the History of Venice by Daru, stating that the victorious captain, Carlo Zeno, was in A.D. 1397-1406 unjustly condemned in that city.

Some of the descriptions of the Zeno narrative, as, for instance, of the Greenland fishing-boats and dwellings, are so uncommon, and yet so concordant with actual truth, that none but an eye-witness could ever have

1 See Document LIV., 8, t.

2 Ibid., m.

3 Dissertazione intorno ai viaggi

e scoperte settentrionali di Nicolò ed Antonio fratelli Zeni.

T. ii. liv. xi. p. 321.

made them. The whole story, moreover, agrees so precisely, in almost every important particular, with the Icelandic sagas and the scanty Faroese literature, that these historical sources, so widely different in every respect, form a mutual support and confirmation of each other.

The map which accompanies the Zeno relation affords another intrinsic argument for its authenticity, being universally recognized as more correct than any of the fifteenth century, or of the first half of the sixteenth; thus showing that it must have been drawn from actual observation. The Dane, Eggers, does not hesitate to declare it, in regard to the outlines of Denmark and Norway, more accurate than any ancient map made in these countries themselves. The same might be said of the shape of Greenland.'

Still, on the other hand, this same nautical chart has given occasion, both through its accuracy and through its errors, to objections of quite a different nature; while it is said that, as the narrative itself, it was made according to information received in Italy about the middle of the sixteenth century; and, again, that its outlines and its names are so directly in conflict with actual geography as to prove that it is a work of sheer imagination, a forgery.

To the former objection may be answered that the original Zeno map, as its copyist testifies, was in existence before any information could be received from the French explorers of the northeastern parts of our continent. De Costa contends that Benedetto Bordone, writing his "Isole del Mondo" in the year 1521, and printing it in 1528, had access to the Zeno map thirty years and more before its publication. This, he thinks,

1 Amat, p. 42.

2 See Document LIV., b.

3

3 Verrazano, the Explorer, pp. 47, 63, ap. Winsor, vol. i. p. 73.

is evident from the way in which he made and filled up his outline, and from his drawing of "Islanda,” even to a like way of engraving the name, which is in a style of letter used by Bordone nowhere else. It is also improbable that Nicolò Zeno, the writer of the narrative, obtained his particular knowledge of Greenland and of his western islands through intercourse with the Scandinavian countries; because, at that time, the American continent was not thought of any more, and the route to Greenland itself was not known any longer in the northern kingdom, as we shall notice farther on.

A more plausible objection is, that "Frisland," the very head-quarters of all the Zeni expeditions, is nothing but an imaginary, fabulous country. It is admitted by all that, if it were a reality,' it must have corresponded to the actual Faroe group; from which, however, it differs altogether in name and conformation.

Von Humboldt has remarked it as singular2 that the name "Frislanda," which, as he supposed, was not known on the maps before the Zeni publication in 1558, should have been applied by Columbus to an island southerly from Iceland, called "Tile" by Ptolemy. But we find the name of " Frisland" among the islands of the northwest European coast, on the fourteenth-century map of Ranulf Hyggeden. Juan de la Cosa, in A.D. 1500, notices the islands "Tille, Estilanda," and "Frislanda," north and northwest of Ireland. Jaime Olives of Majorca, in the year 1514, places "Frixlanda" to the West, so as to form an almost equilateral triangle with Ireland and Iceland; and Matthew

1 See Gravier, p. 194.

3 Tratado de las cinco zonas habi

2 Kosmos, Bd. ii., and Examen tables, ap. Winsor, vol. i. p. 73. Critique, t. ii. p. 105.

Prunes, in 1553, locates his "Fixlanda" at about the same place. The Faroe Islands are also designated under the name of "Frislandia," and the Shetlands as "Estilanda" on Bianco's (A.D. 1436) and Fra Mauro's (A.D. 1459) maps of the world, as well as on charts posterior to the Zeno narrative, and in particular on those of Ruscelli (A.D. 1561), of Mercator (A.D. 1569, 1634,) of Sigurd Stephanius (A.D. 1570), of Michael Lok (A.D. 1582), of Gudbrand Thorlak (A.D. 1606).

The appellation, therefore, of "Frislanda" would rather seem to be in favor of the authenticity under consideration than against it. How the Norse Faroe Islands came to be named Frisland is thus a secondary question, and of no very difficult solution. Isles were often called "Land" by the Scandinavians themselves, as, for instance, Iceland and Shetland or Hijaltland. So they may have said "Faroe'sland" or Land of the Sheep Islands; and this name was readily understood as, or changed into, Frisland by scholars better acquainted with the continental country thus called.

2

Pastor Schroeter relates a Faroese tradition, which not only affords another probable explanation of the name Frisland, but also a fitting key to, if not a parallel account of, the greater part of the Zeno narrative. When the Northmen, he says, already occupied the Faroe group, a fleet of pirates from Frisland succeeded in gaining a foothold on a hill of "Sudheroe" or Southern Island, called it Akraberg, and made it their nest and the head-quarters of their depredations on the northern seas. The viking, "il Principe," of this colony of searovers was dreaded all around. When at one time the Faroese of the southern islands had rebelled against

1 See Kretschmer, Die Entdeckung Amerika's, Atlas, Tafel iii. no. 4; Tafel iv. no. 3, no. 5; Tafel vii.

2

Antiquar. Tidsskrift, 1849-51, S. 145, ap. Beauvois, La Découverte, p. 90.