Some of the well-known mythical or dubious map islands of the North Atlantic make their entry into cartography very early indeed, apparently as the contribution or record of otherwise forgotten voyages, though we cannot say with certainty precisely when or how; others, long afterward, were the products of mirage, ocean-surface phenomena, or mariners’ fancies working under the suggestion of saintly or demoniacal legends amid the hazes and perils of little-known seas, the precise time of their origin remaining uncertain. As a rule the latter class were less persistent on the maps and are geographically rather unimportant.
In two cases, however, Estotiland and Drogio, we know the first appearance of their names before the public, which is very probably the first use of them among men. They derive a special interest from being located in America and from an asserted journey by Europeans to them more than a hundred years before the first voyage of Columbus. The map which first shows them also displays divers other Atlantic islands, either of unusual name or unusual location and area, not conforming at all to the insular tracts of the North Atlantic basin as we know them now. The fantastic exhibition as a whole had an immediate, long-continuing, and considerable—almost revolutionary—effect on the map-making of the world.
In the year 1558 a volume was printed by Marcolino at Venice, purporting to give an account of “The Discovery of the Islands of Frislanda, Eslanda, Engroneland, Estotiland, and Icaria made by two brothers of the Zeno family, Messire Nicolò the Chevalier and Messire Antonio.”215 Some of the islands named in the book are omitted from this title; and the word “Discovery” must have been used with willful inexactness, for Greenland (Engroneland) had been in Norse occupancy for centuries, and Shetland (Eslanda, Estland, or Estiland) was as positively, though not as familiarly, known as Great Britain. But the indication of aim and scope was sufficient.
The name of the author, or, as he calls himself, “the compiler,” was not given; but he is generally recognized to have been the Nicolò Zeno of a younger generation, a man of local prominence and a member of the dominant Council of Ten of the Venetian republic. In 1561 he edited for Ruscelli’s edition of Ptolemy, a subsequent edition of the map (Fig. 19) which is the volume’s most conspicuous feature. His account of the Zeno book’s origin seems to have been accepted generally and promptly among his own people, as also the general accuracy of its geography. But, as Lucas remarks, “An adverse critic of a member of the Council of Ten, in Venice, in the sixteenth century, would have been a remarkably bold, not to say foolhardy, man.”216 However, there are shelters and places of seclusion from even the most arbitrary power; and it would seem that the eminent younger Nicolò would hardly have the effrontery to challenge the world in matters then easily susceptible of disproof concerning his still more eminent ancestor and kinsman. Surely they must have had some notable experiences in northern islands on the reports of which he could rely in a general way, however erroneous or fraudulent in some important features, though then first advancing the transatlantic claim to discovery.
Moreover, the dread of the Council could not overshadow distant geographers like Mercator and Ortelius, whose maps of 1569 and 1570217 (cf. Fig. 10) almost eagerly embody the most distinctive Zeno additions, giving them the greatest currency and implying some sense of the general probability of discoveries by members of that family. Estotiland and Drogio are very distinctly shown, the former apparently as Newfoundland united to Labrador, the latter as a smaller and more southern island which may well be Cape Breton Island, pushed a bit offshore, but still not very far from the mainland.
There has been much discussion as to whether the book should be regarded as wholly a forgery or not, as to the location of these regions, and as to the derivation and meaning of the names; but all agree that Estotiland and Drogio were not known before 1558.
Nicolò the compiler reports: “The sailing chart which I find, I still have among our family antiquities and, though it is rotten with age, I have succeeded with it tolerably well.” Just what this success involved is an interesting question. It has been understood by his most reasonable advocates to include conjectural restoration, such as the deficiencies of rottenness seemed to call for, and somewhat more.
Nicolò the younger avers, further, that his ancestor Antonio wrote a book recording his northern observations and many facts about Greenland, but that the compiler as a boy had thoughtlessly destroyed the book with other papers and that the Zeno narrative as he gives it is made up from fragmentary letters of the elder Nicolò to Antonio and of the latter to their brother, Carlo, remaining in Venice; which letters by good fortune happened to survive.
Nobody except the younger Nicolò is asserted to have seen the map, the letters, or any of the original documents; though his parents, it would seem, must have been custodian of them before him, and he would surely have been likely to display such precious evidences to some one after awakening to their importance. But those were less critical and exacting times than the present, and conceivably it may have been felt that any corroboration would be superfluous. Yet the fact remains that we are not informed of any means of testing the accuracy of restoration or even of demonstrating that there was anything to restore.
The two names “Estotiland” and “Drogio” are supplied by a story within a story, an alleged yarn of a fisherman, reporting to his island ruler, whom the elder Zeno served. Obviously, the chances of lapse from truth are multiplied. Either the later Nicolò or his ancestor of more than a century and a half before may have wholly invented or more or less transformed it; or the first narrator may have created his tale out of no real happenings or have so distorted it by mistake or willful imposture as to render it wholly unreliable. In its general outlines it is by no means impossible; but neither would it have been very difficult to compose such a yarn out of nothing but fancy and the American information at the command of the younger Nicolò. It comes to us through the medium of an alleged letter of his ancestor Antonio, written home to the latter’s brother Carlo near the end of the fifteenth century. With some slight compression, the narrative runs as follows:
Six and twenty years ago four fishing boats put out to sea, and, encountering a heavy storm, were driven over the sea in utter helplessness for many days; when at length, the tempest abating, they discovered an island called Estotiland, lying to the westwards above one thousand miles from Frislanda. One of the boats was wrecked, and six men that were in it were taken by the inhabitants, and brought into a fair and populous city, where the king of the place sent for many interpreters, but there were none could be found that understood the language of the fishermen, except one that spoke Latin, and who had also been cast by chance upon the same island.... They ... remained five years on the island, and learned the language. One of them in particular visited different parts of the island, and reports that it is a very rich country, abounding in all good things. It is a little smaller than Iceland, but more fertile; in the middle of it is a very high mountain, in which rise four rivers which water the whole country.
The inhabitants are a very intelligent people, and possess all the arts like ourselves; and it is to be believed that in time past they have had intercourse with our people, for he said that he saw Latin books in the king’s library, which they at this present time do not understand. They have their own language and letters. They have all kinds of metals, but especially they abound with gold. Their foreign intercourse is with Greenland, whence they import furs, brimstone and pitch.... They have woods of immense extent. They make their buildings with walls, and there are many towns and villages. They make small boats and sail them, but they have not the loadstone, nor do they know the north by the compass. For this reason these fishermen were held in great estimation, insomuch that the king sent them with twelve boats to the southwards to a country which they call Drogio; but in their voyage they had such contrary weather that they were in fear for their lives.
... They were taken into the country and the greater number of them were eaten by the savages.... But as that fisherman and his remaining companions were able to show them the way of taking fish with nets, their lives were saved.... As this man’s fame spread ... there was a neighboring chief who was very anxious to have him with him ... he made war on the chief with whom the fisherman then was, and ... at length overcame him, and so the fisherman was sent over to him with the rest of his company. During the space of thirteen years that he dwelt in those parts, he says that he was sent in this manner to more than five-and-twenty chiefs ... wandering up and down ... he became acquainted with almost all those parts. He says that it is a very great country, and, as it were, a new world; the people are very rude and uncultivated, for they all go naked and suffer cruelly from the cold, nor have they the sense to clothe themselves with the skins of the animals which they take in hunting. They have no kind of metal. They live by hunting, and carry lances of wood, sharpened at the point. They have bows, the strings of which are made of beasts’ skins. They are very fierce, and have deadly fights amongst each other, and eat one another’s flesh.... The farther you go southwestwards, however, the more refinement you meet with, because the climate is more temperate, and accordingly there they have cities and temples dedicated to their idols, in which they sacrifice men and afterwards eat them.
His fellow captives having decided to remain where they were, he bade them farewell, and made his escape through the woods in the direction of Drogio, ... where he spent three years. [One day] some boats had arrived. He went down to the seaside, and ... found they had come from Estotiland. [They took him aboard as interpreter.] He afterwards traded in their company to such good purpose that he became very rich, and, fitting out a vessel of his own, returned to Frislanda.218
In spite of plain geographical indications in the above recital, Estotiland has been located by some random or oversubtle conjectures in the strangest and most widely scattered places, including even parts of the British Isles. But a region a thousand miles west of the Faroes or any other Atlantic islands can be nothing but American, and the restriction of its commerce to Greenland, apparently as a next neighbor, points very clearly (as Estotiland) to that outjutting elbow of North America, which culminates in Cape Race, south of Greenland and thrust out toward Europe. The clear definition of it in the tale as an island, largely explored by the narrator, approximating the size of Iceland but more fertile, with mountainous interior, great forests (such as gave the name Markland to Norse tradition), and rivers flowing several ways, clearly indicates Newfoundland. The Zeno map accords with this, and most of the later maps accept that identification—though often with a great extension of territory. Thus a French map in the United States National Museum,219 having 1668 for an entry of discovery and perhaps dating from about 1700, presents the whole region southeast of Hudson Bay in an inscription as called Estotiland by the Danes, Nouvelle Bretagne (New Britain) by the English, Canada Septentrionale by the French, and Labrador by the Spanish; but here again Labrador and Newfoundland may have been chiefly in mind.
Evidently this map-maker attributed the name Estotiland to the Norsemen of Greenland on the faith of the fisherman’s story, for no other Scandinavians can be supposed to have fastened a name on the region in question. But, barring the last syllable, which is a common affix, the name has an Italian sound rather than Scandinavian. “East-out-land” has been suggested as a derivation, but why in this instance should either Norse or Italian borrow an English name? Another suggestion requires the use of the first three syllables of the motto “esto fidelis usque ad mortem” making up “Estofi,” with the appendant “land.” But there seems no historic link of positive connection, and the letter “f” would not readily change into “t.” Perhaps “Escotiland” or “Escociland” (Scotland) is a more likely conjecture (first made by Beauvois220), since “c” often resembles “t” in older forms of handwriting and might readily be misunderstood. The name may have been applied in the same spirit which has long affixed “Scotia” (Nova Scotia) to a lower part of the same Atlantic coast. That the name was ever really thus applied by the Norsemen seems very unlikely; but Nicolò Zeno may have used it to help out his fisherman’s yarn as readily as he certainly adapted “King Daedalus of Scotland” to help out his more mythical account of Icaria. Or “Estotiland” may be a modification of Estilanda or Esthlanda, a form sometimes taken by Shetland, for example on the map of Prunes, 1553221 (Fig. 12). In casting about for a name, it would be an economy of effort on the part of Zeno or the fisherman to utilize one that was familiar. But I do not know that this derivation from Estiland has ever before been suggested.
Ortelius, in crediting the discovery of the New World to the Norsemen, seems to identify Estotiland with Vinland.222 He was so far right that the fisherman’s account of the people of Estotiland was evidently composed by some one acquainted with the mistaken ideal of Vinland, or Wineland, which pictured it a permanent Norse offshoot from Greenland, perhaps slowly deteriorating but still possessed of a city and library, letters and the ordinary useful arts of at least a primitive northern white civilization, trading regularly with Greenland though archaic enough to lack the mariner’s compass, and in most respects fairly on a par with the Icelanders, Faroese, Shetlanders, or Orkneymen of the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. We know that such Estotilanders did not exist; that the ground was occupied by Beothuk Indians, possibly slightly influenced by Greenlanders’ timber-gathering visits, with Eskimos for neighbors on one side and Micmac Algonquins on the other; and that none of these could be thought even so far advanced in culture as some natives farther down the coast. But it is interesting to get the point of view of the narrator or reporter.
The tale is of a prolonged residence among these alleged relatively advanced Estotiland people, followed by a much longer wandering sojourn, mostly as a captive, in a great “new world” southwest of it and a final escape. Drogio (also spelled “Drogeo” and “Droceo” on some maps) was the region through which this continental territory was entered. It is plainly an island, to judge by the maps; but, according to the narrative, it should be close inshore, since no mention is made of water being crossed by the neighboring chief, who made war on the first captors and thus acquired the fishermen. This accords curiously with the facts as to Cape Breton Island, which is barely cut off by the Gut of Canso, being easily reached by any incursion from the mainland. It also lies southward from Newfoundland (Estotiland), but sailing vessels would ordinarily be required to get to it across the broad Cabot Strait, where the conditions of storm and shipwreck might well be supplied. It is, indeed, surprising, since the description of inhabitants and conditions is so far from the truth, that the geography of Estotiland and Drogio should be given so much more accurately than in some carefully prepared and useful maps of the same period, for example Nicolay’s of 1560223 (Fig. 6) and Zaltieri’s of 1566,224 both of which represent Newfoundland as broken up into an archipelago; and the same may be said of Gastaldi’s map illustrating Ramusio.225
It has been generally surmised that the name Drogio represents some native word, but there is a lack of evidence and a difficulty in identification. Lucas thinks it may be a corruption of Boca del Drago,226 a strait between Trinidad and the mainland South America; but this seems a far-fetched and unsupported conjecture: All the other island names used by Zeno are of European origin, and Drogio by its sound and orthography suggests Italy. Perhaps the best guess we can make would point to the Italian words “deroga” or “dirogare” as supplying in disparagement a form afterward contracted to Drogio; for the latter island, lower in latitude and elevation, was also, according to the narrative, inferior in the status of its population and might well be spoken of derogatively. We have seen that a fairly high culture is imputed to Estotiland; whereas the natives of Drogio were sunk in mere cannibal savagery. Notwithstanding the plain implication of the story as to the comparative nearness of the two regions and the concurrent testimony of the Zeno map, Drogio has been located by some theorizers at divers different points of our coast line from Canada to Florida and even as far afield as Ireland—which is perhaps a shade more extravagant than Lucas’s South American derivation of the name.
There is this to be said for the last-mentioned speculation and some others, that the statements concerning the mainland natives are plainly prompted by Spanish accounts of certain naked and cannibalistic denizens of the tropics, when not due to the experience of Cortés and his companions among the teocallis and ceremonial sacrifices of the Aztecs. That any one starting from Nova Scotia or thereabout could have reached southern or at least central Mexico and returned alone must have struck even Nicolò Zeno the younger as incredible, if he had any conception of the distances and difficulties involved. But probably he believed the area of temple building to extend farther northward than it actually did and had little notion of the great waste of intervening interior. Besides, it is not explicitly stated that the fisherman saw these things; and to have gone far enough to encounter a rumor of them, though a very improbable, would not be a quite impossible, feat.
As regards the characteristics of the ruder inhabitants who nearly devoured him, fought for him, and two dozen times shifted ownership of him from chief to chief, he must surely be understood to speak from personal observation; but there is a conspicuous failure of corroboration from internal evidence. We know a good deal about the Indian tribes of northeastern America of a time not very much later, and hardly a distinctive characteristic which he gives will fit what we know. To say that the Algonquian tribes and their neighbors had not sense to clothe themselves with the skins of the animals they killed is itself arrant nonsense; to assert that they habitually ate each other like Caribs is an imputation without foundation. The total absence of metals among them is as untrue as the great abundance of gold in Estotiland, for many of them had at least a little copper. They did not live wholly by hunting—at least south of Nova Scotia—but were partly agricultural, raising Indian corn and various vegetables. They did not depend, in hunting, on wooden lances with sharpened points, though some backward and feeble far-southern insular tribes are reported to have done so. They were expert fishermen with weirs and nets and inducted many of the white settlers into their secrets, so naturally would not extravagantly need nor prize the counsel of a white specialist in the same line, though he might have some things to teach them. Finally, the really distinctive features of the Indian race in these latitudes, such as bark canoes and the peculiarities of maize cultivation, are not mentioned at all.
In view of these discrepancies it is not easy to believe that the fisherman ever visited America or at any rate ever journeyed far inland. The nature of the errors rather points to Nicolò Zeno “the compiler” as their author, since they embody observations made elsewhere, which the fisherman would not be aware of and which had not been made in his time, so far as now known. The landing by shipwreck on Estotiland in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, though a startling feature, cannot be called impossible or perhaps even wildly improbable; and, once on this side of the Atlantic at that point, some accident might take him across to Cape Breton Island, whence he well might travel or be carried a little farther. This sequence of events may be said to hang well together, and the geographic accuracy as to Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island may be taken diffidently as establishing a faint presumption that something like it really occurred. But farther than this we cannot go, for all other indications are adverse; and, even if we credit the incongruities to one of the Zeni and suppose them to take the place of forgotten or disregarded observations of the original adventurer, we are without these last, and it is only substituting a vacuum for incorrectness. Perhaps the only thing that remains to be said in favor of the story is that if it were wholly the invention of Nicolò Zeno it would have been natural and quite easy for him to make his ancestor the discoverer, instead of an unnamed and insignificant fisherman.
For the story above considered enters the Zeno narrative only as the incentive to a voyage of exploration which failed of its aim; and it is nowhere alleged, unless in the title, that either of the Zeno brothers discovered anything American. Each of them, it says, visited Greenland, but that needed no discovery. Briefly summarized, the Zeno story is that the elder Nicolò, being an adventurous wanderer like many of his countrymen, was shipwrecked about 1380 on the island of Frisland and taken into the service of Zichmni, lord of the Orkneys, then prosecuting the conquest of the former region. Zeno took part in the warfare of this chieftain, chiefly against the King of Norway his feudal lord, also in his various navigations, including a visit to Greenland, of which this elder Nicolò writes quite fully to his brother Antonio in Venice, urging the latter to join him in Zichmni’s service. Antonio did so, after many adventures and hardships and incidental delay, and served with him four years, when Nicolò died, and Antonio succeeded to his honors and emoluments for thirteen years longer. About 1400 the fisherman returned with his story of transatlantic experience, and Earl Zichmni resolved to attempt to reach Estotiland in person. Instead, he was storm-driven to Icaria, whatever that may be, and again visited Greenland, exploring parts of its coast. Antonio Zeno went with him and sailed home separately, under orders, slightly missing his course and first reaching Porlanda (Pomona) of the Orkneys and Neome (Fair Island) midway between the Orkneys and Shetland. He knew then that he was “beyond Iceland” (i. e. to the eastward) and readily found his way to Frisland. He was never allowed to return to Venice but wrote his brother Carlo what he had seen and heard, including the fisherman’s story.
Major endeavored to end the long-standing discussion as to the authenticity of the map and the narrative of voyages by an elaborate and ingenious study, on the hypothesis of an honestly intended reproduction, the various additions, interpolations, and changes being due partly to misunderstandings by the original Zeno brothers, partly to injuries accidentally inflicted by the compiler and inaccurately repaired, and partly to extraneous matter of illustration and ornament, which the later Nicolò Zeno had not the self-control to withhold. This method of exposition leads to some curious experiences of prodigious exaggeration backed by a veritable genius for transforming words. Thus when we read that Zichmni, ruling in Porlanda and conqueror of Frisland, made successful war on his feudal superior, the King of Norway, it means, according to Major, that Henry St. Clair (or Sinclair), who was given the Earldom of the Orkneys in 1379, had a skirmish with a forgotten claimant to a part of his territory. A little later in the narrative a warm spring (108° maximum) on an island of a fiord in the inhabited part of Greenland, beside which some ruins are found, evolves a monastery and monk-ruled village of dome-topped houses on the slope of a volcanic mountain far up the impossible ice-bound eastern coast, with house-warming, cooking, and hothouse gardening by subterranean heat and a continual commerce maintained with northern Europe—though all this had never been heard of before. It is true that Major was handicapped by a belief, formerly prevalent, that the eastern coast of Greenland was the site of the Eastern Settlement of the Norsemen, though in modern times that coast is subjected to conditions which make life hardly practicable; whereas it is now conclusively established that both of the Norse settlements were on the relatively pleasant southwestern coast, one settlement being more easterly and the other more westerly. But at the best such interpretations run the gauntlet of the reader’s involuntary skepticism. It is often easier to discard the statements altogether.
Lucas, writing some years afterward, with the benefit of recently discovered maps and information, has chosen this destructive alternative for nearly the whole Zeno narration: denying that Nicolò Zeno had any map of a former generation to restore; styling his own keenly critical and exhaustive production “an indictment,” and branding the book under consideration as a forgery throughout—with, necessarily, some true things in it. He has gone far toward making good his case. Some things not fully accounted for suggest that there may have been a basis of genuine material, a nucleus of truth; but it must have been very slight.
Major and his preservative school relied chiefly on three points of coincidence: a fairly good description of that most unusual boat, the kayak of the Eskimos; the hot water of the monastery already mentioned; and the general geography of Greenland, which is shown more accurately than on many maps of the sixteenth century and later. But Lucas points out that the history of Olaus Magnus, or other northern sources, might have supplied the kayak to Zeno the younger. This may seem rather far-fetched in view of the wide interval between Italy and Scandinavia; but intercourse was regular in 1558, and Zeno was a man of ample information and intelligence, using material from many sources and having his attention especially directed to the north.
The Zeno account of the monastery of St. Thomas is very extended and particular, going into details of daily life, artificial agriculture, and traffic. It is the sublimation of cultivation in hothouse conditions (of volcanic origin), located far up within the Arctic Circle at a particularly repellent point, where no man has ever lived or perhaps will live hereafter. Lucas tries to explain the account—which is interesting in its own way with a certain wild and preposterous plausibility—by reminiscences of a favored Scandinavian fortress, the gardens of which were hardly ever frozen, enjoying “all the advantages which any fortunate abode of mortals could demand and obtain from the powers above.”227 But this is manifestly vague, a general picture of balminess and delightfulness, far removed from a specific account of roasting food by subterranean heat, warming garden beds to the forcing point by pipes naturally supplied, and carrying on an extensive commerce from the polar regions by the aid of a tame volcano. Certainly the warm spring of southwestern Greenland is not much more to the point; but neither fortress gardens nor flowing water should be needed to stimulate a lively fancy in creating rather obvious marvels. Nicolò knew of volcanoes in Iceland (as well as Italy), may well have surmised their activity in Greenland, and would be only one of many who have amused themselves with speculations as to what might be accomplished by tapping the great reservoir of heat and energy below us. It is not necessary to find a precise earlier parallel, to be sure that there is no corroboration for his tale of ancestral voyages in such fancies.
A glance at the Zeno map (Fig. 19) discloses a good approximation to the general outline, trend, and taper of Greenland, with certain features which imply information. For a long time it was thought that no earlier source existed from which this could have been drawn by Zeno the compiler. But of later years other fifteenth-century maps showing Greenland have been discovered in various libraries, notably four by Nordenskiöld,228 out of which or out of others like them Zeno could certainly have gleaned all that he needed for judicious copying. In particular the maps of Donnus Nicolaus Germanus (1466 to 1474, or a little later; e. g. Fig. 17), elaborated from the map of Claudius Clavus (1427; Fig. 16), seem to supply the chief features of the Zeno exhibition.229 Sharing an error common to Clavus and all successors of his school, Zeno connected Greenland to Europe. He also represented its eastern coast as habitable at the extreme upper end. It is true that a visitor to the real surviving Greenland settlement about Ericsfiord probably would not learn the facts about these matters, so that his misinformation is no disproof of the visits of the older Zeni to that country. On the other hand, it would be difficult to point to any convincing evidence that either of them was ever there. Kohl suggests230 that the fisherman’s story may be a mere reflection of the general American knowledge of Greenlanders, and this might call for the presence of one of the Zeni in Greenland to hear the story. But, if the Norse of Greenland knew anything about Newfoundland or Labrador, they could hardly have credited and passed along these word pictures of cities, libraries, and kings. The only thing like internal corroboration is in the geography of Estotiland and Drogio.
As Nicolò Zeno followed the disciples of Claudius Clavus in outlining Greenland, so he took for his guide Mattheus Prunes’ map of 1553231 in dealing with the more eastern islands. Podanda or Porlanda (Pomona, the main island of the Orkneys) and Neome (Fair Island) are in both (Figs. 19 and 12). Prunes displaces these islands to a position west, instead of south, of southern Shetland (Estiland or Esthlanda), and Zeno simply carries them both still farther west, while moving them southward; but his Neome is still in the latitude of the lower end of Shetland. Long before the time of either of them, the Faroe Islands had been shown as one territory—see the Ysferi (Faroe Islands) of the eleventh-century map of the Cottonian MS. in the British Museum, reproduced by Santarem.232 The main islands are in fact barely severed from each other by a thread of water.
It was, and is, so common to use “land” as a final syllable for island names (witness Iceland, Shetland, and the rest) that “Ferisland” would easily be derived from the form of the name last given and would be as readily contracted into “Frisland.” We find the latter (Frislanda), indeed, on the map of Cantino (1502)233 and in the life of Columbus ascribed to his son Ferdinand.234 There seems no doubt of its very early use for a northern island or islands; apparently primarily for the Faroe group, often blended as one island.
But there seems to have been some confusion in men’s minds between Iceland and Frisland as northern fishing centers and neighbors of like conditions. Thus the portolan atlas known as Egerton MS. 2803, contains two maps235 (one shown in Fig. 8) naming Iceland “Fislanda,” and the notable Catalan map of about 1480236 (Fig. 7), first copied by Nordenskiöld, which shows Greenland as an elongated rectangular “Illa Verde” and Brazil in the place later given to Estotiland, also depicts a large insular “Fixlanda,” which is surely Iceland, if any faith may be put in general outline and the arrangement of islets offshore. Prunes (1553; Fig. 12) substantially reproduces it, with the same name and apparently the same meaning. Zeno (Fig. 19) follows him closely in area and aspect but draws also an elongated Iceland to the northward, the latter island trending southwestward in imitation of Greenland and seeming to derive its geography therefrom. This version of Iceland was probably suggested by one of the Nicolaus Germanus maps above referred to.
Thus Zeno has two great islands, Frisland and Iceland, the former being several times larger than Shetland and many times larger than Orkney. His Frisland gets its name from the Faroes, its area and outline from Iceland; it is located south of Iceland, where there never was anything but waste water. No such large island, distinct from Iceland, ever existed at the north. Certainly, as shown, it is a mythical island indeed.
Major stoutly argued that any derelictions of the map are to be explained as the defects of age and rottenness, unskillfully cobbled by a later hand. This sounds reasonable to one who has seen how the changes of time deface these old memorials and how easily outlines and much more may be misread. But in point of fact the map as we have it answers to the narrative singularly well. Any blurs or lacunae which needed restoration must have occurred in very fortunate places. Iceland, Shetland, Greenland, Scotland, Estotiland, and Drogio are all not very far from where they should be. The Orkneys and Fair Island, if too far west in fact, are only far enough to suit the tale, for when Antonio sails eastward he comes to them and knows he has passed east of Iceland, a reflection more likely to occur if the interval were rather small than if it were very great.
Again, when Earl Zichmni and Antonio Zeno with their little flotilla, fired by the fisherman’s American experiences, strike westward from Frisland for Estotiland they, indeed, do not reach that goal but do attain by accident the mysterious Icaria and find themselves where Greenland can be and is reached without much difficulty. Now, on the map (Fig. 19), Icaria, about the size of Shetland, is the most westerly of all the islands not distinctly American. Draw a straight line from Iceland to Estotiland and another from the center of Frisland to Cape Hwarf near the lower end of Greenland, and Icaria lies at the intersection. Granting the rest of the story, it is shown where they might very well have stumbled upon it in trying to go farther west.
Of course, it is not there; nothing ever was there except an ample expanse of sea. Where Zeno got the idea of Icaria is not known—except as an appended and unimportant myth from the Aegean; it certainly was not supplied by the facts of the North Atlantic. Probably the initial “I” stands for island as usual, and “Caria” is a not impossible transformation of either “Kerry” (preferred by Major) or “Kilda”—the latter more likely, for southern Ireland was continually visited by Italian traders, whereas St. Kilda lay off the trade routes rather far away in the mists and myths of the ocean and might be a fairer field for exaggeration and shifting of place. But, with every allowance, it is hard to see how this small ultra-Hebridean rock pile could become a large island territory just short of America. Perhaps it is as well to treat Icaria as merely the unprovoked creation of the romantic brain of the younger Zeno.
It may be true that the elder Zeno brothers served for a time under some northern island ruler, whose name the later Nicolò Zeno read and copied as the impossible Zichmni; that they then visited various countries and islands, possibly including the surviving but dwindling Greenland settlement; that one of them heard in general outline the adventures of a fisherman or minor mariner cast away at two points of the American coast; and that a futile attempt was thereupon made by their patron to explore the same regions. Every one of these admissions lacks adequate confirmation and is very dubious; yet they are all possible. But it is not possible that a map made about 1400 could bear at almost all points the plain marks of copying with slight changes from maps of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and, since the narrative so well fits the map, the two as we have them must stand or fall together.
Either Nicolò Zeno of 1558 invented the whole matter, building up his imposture by the aid of maps and information already existent and accessible, or he actually had some sort of old sketch map and fragments of letters and has recast them with more modern aids quite at his convenience, leaving no certain trace of the original outlines or statements. It comes to much the same thing in either case.
Also in either case his unscrupulous and misleading achievements in imaginary cartography remain as historic facts. For a century or more he supplied the maps of the world with several new great islands; he shifted others widely into new positions; he adorned other regions with new names that were loath to depart; and he presented a story of pre-Columbian discovery of America which was long accepted as true and is not wholly discarded even yet.