narrator, "that the book and various other writings concerning these things should so lamentably have been destroyed; for being but a child when they fell into my possession, and not knowing of what importance they were, I tore them in pieces, as the manner of children is, which I cannot call to remembrance without the deepest grief."*

The more the narrative of the two Zenos has been scrutinized, the stronger has the internal evidence appeared in favour of its general veracity. The heating of the monastery, the cooking of the friars' victuals, and watering their gardens with hot water, were considered, however, by many as things utterly incredible. But we are now "wiser than of yore," and manage these things in the same manner as the monks of St. Thomas were wont to do in the fourteenth century. The great difficulty, however, among geographers was that of assigning a proper position for the island of Frisland; a name which occurs in the life of Christopher Columbus, and is placed by Frobisher as the southern extremity of Greenland. Ortelius maintained that it was a certain part of the coast of North America. Delislet and some others supposed that Buss island, to the south of Iceland, was the remains of Friesland, which had been swallowed up by an

* Dello Scoprimento del l'Isole Frisland, &c. per Fran. Marcolini, 1558.

+ Hémisphère Occidental, 1720.

earthquake; and others again cut the matter short by considering the existence of Frisland, and even the whole voyage of the two Zenos, as a fiction. But M. Buache and M. Eggers have gone far to prove the truth of the narrative on two different grounds; the former having shewn that the geographical position of Frisland corresponds with the cluster of the Feroe islands;† and the latter, that the names given by Zeno correspond pretty nearly with the modern names of those islands.‡ Forster has tried the same thing, and finds a corresponding island for every name mentioned in the narrative of the two Zenos. He has also discovered that one Henry Sinclair was Earl of Orkney and possessor of the Shetland islands so far down as the year 1406; and as Sinclair or Siclair to an Italian ear might sound like Zichmni, he concludes that Sinclair is the prince mentioned by Zeno. The name even of the aggregate, Feroesland, differs not materially from Frisland. Estotiland may be Newfoundland or Labrador.

It is got rid of in this way by the Duc d'Almadover, the Abbé Zurla and Amoretti; (Voyage à la Mer Atlantique, &c. traduit par Ch. Amoretti ;) and Buss island itself is gone, if it ever had any existence above water.

Mém. sur l'Ile de Frislande, dans l'Hist. de l'Acad. des Scien. 1784.

Mem. sur l'Ancien Greenland. 1792.

History of Voyages and Discoveries made in the North,

p. 209.

The name, says M. Malte-Brun, appears to be Scandinavian; "for Est-outland in English would signify land stretching farthest out to the east, which agrees with the situation of Newfoundland with regard to the continent of America."* The same author observes, that the inhabitants of Estotiland appear to be the descendants of the Scandinavian colonists of Vinland, whose language, in the course of three ages, might have been sufficiently altered to be unintelligible to the fishermen of Feroe. The Latin books (of which Zeno speaks) had doubtless, he thinks, been carried thither by that Greenland bishop, who, in 1121, betook himself to Vinland to preach the Christian religion in that country; that Drogio, on this hypothesis, would be Nova Scotia and New England; and he concludes, that by bringing together under one point of view the discoveries of the Scandinavians in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the voyages of the two Venetians in the fourteenth, we must be persuaded that the New World has been visited by the nations of the north as far back as the year 1000; and that it may perhaps be thought that this first discovery, historically proved, after having been confirmed anew in 1390 by Zeno, may have been known to Columbus in 1477, (1467) when he made a voyage

* Précis de la Géog. Universelle, tom. i. p. 405.

into the northern seas.

At any rate, that the most prejudiced, on casting a glance on the map, must be convinced that nature herself had designed Newfoundland to be the first for receiving the visits of Europeans.*

With regard to Columbus, too little remains on record, concerning his voyage to the north, even for hazarding any conjecture to what part, (beyond Iceland,) or for what purpose, it was undertaken. The discovery, however, which has just been made on Newfoundland would seem to corroborate the conjecture, that this island is the Estotiland of Zeno. A party of English settlers, in proceeding up the river which falls into Conception Bay, a little to the northward of St. John's, observed, at the distance of about six or seven miles above the

bay, the appearance of stone walls, rising just above the surface. On removing the sand and alluvial earth, they discovered the remains of ancient buildings, oak-beams, and mill stones sunk in oaken beds. Enclosures resembling gardens were traced out, and plants of various kinds growing about the place not indigenous to the island. But the most decisive proof of these ruins being the remains of an ancient European colony was in the different kinds of coins that were found, some of ductile gold, which the inhabitants con

sidered to be old Flemish coins, and others of copper without inscriptions.

The coins, which are said to be in the hands of many of the inhabitants of St. John's, will probably decide the question, whether these newly discovered remains of a former colony be that founded by Zichmni, in the latter part of the fourteenth century, or some attempt at the establishment of a colony by the descendants of Eric and Biorn from Iceland in the eleventh century. The Scandinavians were in the practice of coining money before the tenth century, stamped with the impression of a sun, a star, or simply a cross, but without any inscription; and they also trafficked even before that period with foreign money, which they received principally from the Flemings.† One circumstance would seem rather to militate against the supposition of the recently discovered ruins being the remains of a Scandinavian colony. These northern settlers on Iceland and Greenland build chiefly with wood in countries where no wood grows. The ruins in question are of stone, and on a spot where timber grows abundantly. The probability, therefore, is in favour of their being the remains of the fort which Zichmni built on the banks of a fair river, if they may not be

* This information is received in a letter from Captain Buchan, written at the moment of his sailing on the Northern Expedition.

+ Mallet's Northern Antiquities.