The Discovery of America Part 17

[Footnote 275: Laing, _op. cit._ i. 142.]

[Sidenote: The story of the Venetian brothers.]

Our account of pre-Columbian voyages to America would be very incomplete without some mention of the latest voyage said to have been made by European vessels to the ancient settlement of the East Bygd. I refer to the famous narrative of the Zeno brothers, which has furnished so many subjects of contention for geographers that a hundred years ago John Pinkerton called it "one of the most puzzling in the whole circle of literature."[276] Nevertheless a great deal has been done, chiefly through the acute researches of Mr. Richard Henry Major and Baron Nordenskjold, toward clearing up this mystery, so that certain points in the Zeno narrative may now be regarded as established;[277] and from these essential points we may form an opinion as to the character of sundry questionable details.

[Footnote 276: Yet this learned historian was quite correct in his own interpretation of Zeno's story, for in the same place he says, "If real, his Frisland is the Ferro islands, and his Zichmni is Sinclair." Pinkerton's _History of Scotland_, London, 1797, vol. i. p. 261.]

[Footnote 277: Major, _The Voyages of the Venetian Brothers, Nicol and Antonio Zeno, to the Northern Seas in the XIVth Century_, London, 1873 (Hakluyt Society); cf. Nordenskjold, _Om broderna Zenos resor och de aldsta kartor ofner Norden_, Stockholm, 1883.]

[Sidenote: The Zeno family.]

[Sidenote: Nicol Zeno wrecked upon one of the Faeroe islands, 1390.]

[Sidenote: Nicol's voyage to Greenland, cir. 1394.]

[Sidenote: Voyage of Earl Sinclair and Antonio Zeno.]

The Zeno family was one of the oldest and most distinguished in Venice.

Among its members in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we find a doge, several senators and members of the Council of Ten, and military commanders of high repute. Of these, Pietro Dracone Zeno, about 1350, was captain-general of the Christian league for withstanding the Turks; and his son Carlo achieved such success in the war against Genoa that he was called the Lion of St. Mark, and his services to Venice were compared with those of Camillus to Rome. Now this Carlo had two brothers,--Nicol, known as "the Chevalier," and Antonio. After the close of the Genoese war the Chevalier Nicol was seized with a desire to see the world,[278] and more particularly England and Flanders. So about 1390 he fitted up a s.h.i.+p at his own expense, and, pa.s.sing out from the strait of Gibraltar, sailed northward upon the Atlantic. After some days of fair weather, he was caught in a storm and blown along for many days more, until at length the s.h.i.+p was cast ash.o.r.e on one of the Faeroe islands and wrecked, though most of the crew and goods were rescued.

According to the barbarous custom of the Middle Ages, some of the natives of the island (Scandinavians) came swarming about the unfortunate strangers to kill and rob them, but a great chieftain, with a force of knights and men-at-arms, arrived upon the spot in time to prevent such an outrage. This chief was Henry Sinclair of Roslyn, who in 1379 had been invested by King Hacon VI., of Norway, with the earldom of the Orkneys and Caithness. On learning Zeno's rank and importance, Sinclair treated him with much courtesy, and presently a friends.h.i.+p sprang up between the two. Sinclair was then engaged with a fleet of thirteen vessels in conquering and annexing to his earldom the Faeroe islands, and on several occasions profited by the military and nautical skill of the Venetian captain. Nicol seems to have enjoyed this stirring life, for he presently sent to his brother Antonio in Venice an account of it, which induced the latter to come and join him in the Faeroe islands. Antonio arrived in the course of 1391, and remained in the service of Sinclair fourteen years, returning to Venice in time to die there in 1406. After Antonio's arrival, his brother Nicol was appointed to the chief command of Sinclair's little fleet, and a.s.sisted him in taking possession of the Shetland islands, which were properly comprised within his earldom. In the course of these adventures, Nicol seems to have had his interest aroused in reports about Greenland. It was not more than four or five years since Queen Margaret had undertaken to make a royal monopoly of the Greenland trade in furs and whale oil, and this would be a natural topic of conversation in the Faeroes. In July, 1393, or 1394, Nicol Zeno sailed to Greenland with three s.h.i.+ps, and visited the East Bygd. After spending some time there, not being accustomed to such a climate, he caught cold, and died soon after his return to the Faeroes, probably in 1395. His brother Antonio succeeded to his office and such emoluments as pertained to it; and after a while, at Earl Sinclair's instigation, he undertook a voyage of discovery in the Atlantic ocean, in order to verify some fishermen's reports of the existence of land a thousand miles or more to the west. One of these fishermen was to serve as guide to the expedition, but unfortunately he died three days before the s.h.i.+ps were ready to sail. Nevertheless, the expedition started, with Sinclair himself on board, and encountered vicissitudes of weather and fortune. In fog and storm they lost all reckoning of position, and found themselves at length on the western coast of a country which, in the Italian narrative, is called "Icaria,"

but which has been supposed, with some probability, to have been Kerry, in Ireland. Here, as they went ash.o.r.e for fresh water, they were attacked by the natives and several of their number were slain. From this point they sailed out into the broad Atlantic again, and reached a place supposed to be Greenland, but which is so vaguely described that the identification is very difficult.[279] Our narrative here ends somewhat confusedly. We are told that Sinclair remained in this place, "and explored the whole of the country with great diligence, as well as the coasts on both sides of Greenland." Antonio Zeno, on the other hand, returned with part of the fleet to the Faeroe islands, where he arrived after sailing eastward for about a month, during five and twenty days of which he saw no land. After relating these things and paying a word of affectionate tribute to the virtues of Earl Sinclair, "a prince as worthy of immortal memory as any that ever lived for his great bravery and remarkable goodness," Antonio closes his letter abruptly: "But of this I will say no more in this letter, and hope to be with you very shortly, and to satisfy your curiosity on other subjects by word of mouth."[280]

[Footnote 278: "Or M. Nicol il Caualiere ... entr in grandissimo desiderio di ueder il mondo, e peregrinare, e farsi capace di varij costumi e di lingue de gli huomini, acci che con le occasioni poi potesse meglio far seruigio alla sua patria ed a se acquistar fama e onore." The narrative gives 1380 as the date of the voyage, but Mr. Major has shown that it must have been a mistake for 1390 (_op. cit._ xlii.-xlviii.).]

[Footnote 279: It appears on the Zeno map as "Trin p[-p]montor," about the site of Cape Farewell; but how could six days' sail W. from Kerry, followed by four days' sail N.

E., reach any such point? and how does this short outward sail consist with the return voyage, twenty days E. and eight days S. E., to the Faeroes? The place is also said to have had "a fertile soil" and "good rivers," a description in nowise answering to Greenland.]

[Footnote 280: "Per non ni dir altro in questa lettera, sperando tosto di essere con uoi, e di sodisfarui di molte altre cose con la uiua uoce." Major, p. 34.]

[Sidenote: Publication of the remains of the doc.u.ments by the younger Nicol Zeno.]

The person thus addressed by Antonio was his brother, the ill.u.s.trious Carlo Zeno. Soon after reaching home, after this long and eventful absence, Antonio died. Besides his letters he had written a more detailed account of the affairs in the northern seas. These papers remained for more than a century in the palace of the family at Venice, until one of the children, in his mischievous play, got hold of them and tore them up. This child was Antonio's great-great-great-grandson, Nicol, born in 1515. When this young Nicol had come to middle age, and was a member of the Council of Ten, he happened to come across some remnants of these doc.u.ments, and then all at once he remembered with grief how he had, in his boyhood, pulled them to pieces.[281] In the light of the rapid progress in geographical discovery since 1492, this story of distant voyages had now for Nicol an interest such as it could not have had for his immediate ancestors. Searching the palace he found a few grimy old letters and a map or sailing chart, rotten with age, which had been made or at any rate brought home by his ancestor Antonio.

Nicol drew a fresh copy of this map, and pieced together the letters as best he could, with more or less explanatory text of his own, and the result was the little book which he published in 1558.[282]

[Footnote 281: "All these letters were written by Messire Antonio to Messire Carlo, his brother; and I am grieved that the book and many other writings on these subjects have, I don't know how, come sadly to ruin; for, being but a child when they fell into my hands, I, not knowing what they were, tore them in pieces, as children will do, and sent them all to ruin: a circ.u.mstance which I cannot now recall without the greatest sorrow. Nevertheless, in order that such an important memorial should not be lost, I have put the whole in order, as well as I could, in the above narrative." Major, p. 35.]

[Footnote 282: Nicol Zeno, _Dello scoprimento dell' isole Frislanda, Eslanda, Engronelanda, Estotilanda, & Icaria, fatto per due fratelli Zeni, M. Nicol it Caualiere, & M. Antonio.

Libro Vno, col disegno di dette Isole._ Venice, 1558. Mr.

Major's book contains the entire text, with an English translation.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Zeno Map, cir. 1400--western half.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Zeno Map, cir. 1400--eastern half.]

[Sidenote: Queer transformations of names.]

[Sidenote: "Frislanda."]

Unfortunately young Nicol, with the laudable purpose of making it all as clear as he could, thought it necessary not simply to reproduce the old weather-beaten map, but to amend it by putting on here and there such places and names as his diligent perusal of the ma.n.u.script led him to deem wanting to its completeness.[283] Under the most favourable circ.u.mstances that is a very difficult sort of thing to do, but in this case the circ.u.mstances were far from favourable. Of course Nicol got these names and places into absurd positions, thus perplexing the map and damaging its reputation. With regard to names, there was obscurity enough, to begin with. In the first place, they were Icelandic names falling upon the Italian ears of old Nicol and Antonio, and spelled by them according to their own notions; in the second place, these outlandish names, blurred and defaced withal in the weather-stained ma.n.u.script, were a puzzle to the eye of young Nicol, who could but decipher them according to _his_ notions. The havoc that can be wrought upon winged words, subjected to such processes, is sometimes marvellous.[284] Perhaps the slightest sufferer, in this case, was the name of the group of islands upon one of which the s.h.i.+pwrecked Nicol was rescued by Sinclair. The name _Faeroislander_ sounded to Italian ears as _Frislanda_, and was uniformly so written.[285] Then the p.r.o.nunciation of _Shetland_ was helped by prefixing a vowel sound, as is common in Italian, and so it came to be _Estland_ and _Esland_. This led young Nicol's eye in two or three places to confound it with _Islanda_, or _Iceland_, and probably in one place with _Irlanda_, or _Ireland_.

Where old Nicol meant to say that the island upon which he was living with Earl Sinclair was somewhat larger than Shetland, young Nicol understood him as saying that it was somewhat larger than Ireland; and so upon the amended map "Frislanda" appears as one great island surrounded by tiny islands.[286] After the publication of this map, in 1558, sundry details were copied from it by the new maps of that day, so that even far down into the seventeenth century it was common to depict a big "Frislanda" somewhere in mid-ocean. When at length it was proved that no such island exists, the reputation of the Zeno narrative was seriously damaged. The nadir of reaction against it was reached when it was declared to be a tissue of lies invented by the younger Nicol,[287]

apparently for the purpose of setting up a Venetian claim to the discovery of America.

[Footnote 283: The map is taken from Winsor's _Narr. and Crit.

Hist._, i. 127, where it is reduced from Nordenskjold's _Studien ok Forskningar_. A better because larger copy may be found in Major's _Voyages of the Venetian Brothers_. The original map measures 12 x 15-1/2 inches. In the legend at the top the date is given as M CCC Lx.x.x. but evidently one X has been omitted, for it should be 1390, and is correctly so given by Marco Barbaro, in his _Genealogie dei n.o.bili Veneti_; of Antonio Zeno he says, "Scrisse con il fratello Nicol Kav. li viaggi dell' Isole sotto il polo artico, e di quei scoprimente del 1390, e che per ordine di Zieno, re di Frislanda, si port nel continente d'Estotilanda nell' America settentrionale e che si ferm 14 anni in Frislanda, cioe 4 con suo fratello Nicol e 10 solo." (This valuable work has never been published. The original MS., in Barbaro's own handwriting, is preserved in the Biblioteca di San Marco at Venice. There is a seventeenth century copy of it among the Egerton MSS. in the British Museum.)--Nicol did not leave Italy until after December 14, 1388 (Muratori, _Rerum Italicarum Scriptores_, tom. xxii. p.

779). The map can hardly have been made before Antonio's voyage, about 1400. The places on the map are wildly out of position, as was common enough in old maps. Greenland is attached to Norway according to the general belief in the Middle Ages. In his confusion between the names "Estland" and "Islanda," young Nicol has tried to reproduce the Shetland group, or something like it, and attach it to Iceland.

"Icaria," probably Kerry, in Ireland, has been made into an island and carried far out into the Atlantic. The queerest of young Nicol's mistakes was in placing the monastery of St.

Olaus ("St. Thomas"). He should have placed it on the southwest coast of Greenland, near his "Af [-p]montor;" but he has got it on the extreme northeast, just about where Greenland is joined to Europe.]

[Footnote 284: "Combien de coquilles typographiques ou de lectures defectueuses ont cree de noms boiteux, qu'il est ensuite bien difficile, quelquefois impossible de redresser!

L'histoire et la geographie en sont pleines." Avezac, _Martin Waltzemuller_, p. 9.

It is interesting to see how thoroughly words can be disguised by an unfamiliar phonetic spelling. I have seen people hopelessly puzzled by the following bill, supposed to have been made out by an illiterate stable-keeper somewhere in England:--

Osafada 7s 6d Takinonimome 4d ------ 7s 10d

Some years ago Professor Huxley told me of a letter from France which came to the London post-office thus addressed:--

Sromfredevi, Pique du lait, Londres, Angleterre.

This letter, after exciting at first helpless bewilderment and then busy speculation, was at length delivered to the right person, _Sir Humphry Davy_, in his rooms at the Royal Inst.i.tution on Albemarle street, just off from _Piccadilly_!]

[Footnote 285: Columbus, on his journey to Iceland in 1477, also heard the name _Faeroislander_ as _Frislanda_, and so wrote it in the letter preserved for us in his biography by his son Ferdinand, hereafter to be especially noticed. See Major's remarks on this, _op. cit._ p. xix.]

[Footnote 286: Perhaps in the old worn-out map the archipelago may have been blurred so as to be mistaken for one island. This would aid in misleading young Nicol.]

[Footnote 287: See the elaborate paper by Admiral Zahrtmann, in _Nordisk Tidsskrift for Oldkyndighed_, Copenhagen, 1834, vol.

i., and the English translation of it in _Journal of Royal Geographical Society_, London, 1836, vol. v. All that human ingenuity is ever likely to devise against the honesty of Zeno's narrative is presented in this erudite essay, which has been so completely demolished under Mr. Major's heavy strokes that there is not enough of it left to pick up. As to this part of the question, we may now safely cry, "finis, laus Deo!"]

[Sidenote: The narrative nowhere makes a claim to the "discovery of America."]

The narrative, however, not only sets up no such claim, but nowhere betrays a consciousness that its incidents ent.i.tle it to make such a claim. It had evidently not occurred to young Nicol to inst.i.tute any comparison between his ancestors' voyages to Greenland and the voyages of Columbus to the western hemisphere, of which _we now know_ Greenland to be a part. The knowledge of the North American coast, and of the bearing of one fact upon another fact in relation to it, was still, in 1558, in an extremely vague and rudimentary condition. In the mind of the Zeno brothers, as the map shows, Greenland was a European peninsula; such was the idea common among mediaeval Northmen, as is nowhere better ill.u.s.trated than in this map. Neither in his references to Greenland, nor to Estotiland and Drogio, presently to be considered, does young Nicol appear in the light of a man urging or suggesting a "claim." He appears simply as a modest and conscientious editor, interested in the deeds of his ancestors and impressed with the fact that he has got hold of important doc.u.ments, but intent only upon giving his material as correctly as possible, and refraining from all sort of comment except such as now and then seems needful to explain the text as he himself understands it.

[Sidenote: Earl Sinclair.]

[Sidenote: Bardsen's "Description of Greenland."]

The identification of "Frislanda" with the Faeroe islands was put beyond doubt by the discovery that the "Zichmni" of the narrative means Henry Sinclair; and, in order to make this discovery, it was only necessary to know something about the history of the Orkneys; hence old Pinkerton, as above remarked, got it right. The name "Zichmni" is, no doubt, a fearful and wonderful bejugglement; but Henry Sinclair is a personage well known to history in that corner of the world, and the deeds of "Zichmni," as recounted in the narrative, are neither more nor less than the deeds of Sinclair. Doubtless Antonio spelled the name in some queer way of his own, and then young Nicol, unable to read his ancestor's pot-hooks where--as in the case of proper names--there was no clue to guide him, contrived to make it still queerer. Here we have strong proof of the genuineness of the narrative. If Nicol had been concocting a story in which Earl Sinclair was made to figure, he would have obtained his knowledge from literary sources, and thus would have got his names right; the earl might have appeared as Enrico de Santo Claro, but not as "Zichmni." It is not at all likely, however, that any literary knowledge of Sinclair and his doings was obtainable in Italy in the sixteenth century. The Zeno narrative, moreover, in its references to Greenland in connection with the Chevalier Nicol's visit to the East Bygd, shows a topographical knowledge that was otherwise quite inaccessible to the younger Nicol. Late in the fourteenth century Ivar Bardsen, steward to the Gardar bishopric, wrote a description of Greenland, with sailing directions for reaching it, which modern research has proved to have been accurate in every particular. Bardsen's details and those of the Zeno narrative mutually corroborate each other. But Bardsen's book did not make its way down into Europe until the very end of the sixteenth century,[288] and then amid the dense ignorance prevalent concerning Greenland its details were not understood until actual exploration within the last seventy years has at length revealed their meaning. The genuineness of the Zeno narrative is thus conclusively proved by its knowledge of Arctic geography, such as could have been obtained only by a visit to the far North at a time before the Greenland colony had finally lost touch with its mother country.

[Footnote 288: It was translated into Dutch by the famous Arctic explorer, William Barentz, whose voyages are so graphically described in Motley's _United Netherlands_, vol.

iii. pp. 552-576. An English translation was made for Henry Hudson. A very old Danish version may be found in Rafn's _Antiquitates Americanae_, pp. 300-318; Danish, Latin, and English versions in Major's _Voyages of the Venetian Brothers_, etc., pp. 39-54; and an English version in De Costa's _Sailing Directions of Henry Hudson_, Albany, 1869, pp. 61-96.]

[Sidenote: The monastery of St. Olaus and its hot spring.]

The visit of the Chevalier Nicol, therefore, about 1394, has a peculiar interest as the last distinct glimpse afforded us of the colony founded by Eric the Red before its melancholy disappearance from history.

Already the West Bygd had ceased to exist. Five and forty years before that time it had been laid waste and its people ma.s.sacred by Eskimos, and trusty Ivar Bardsen, tardily sent with a small force to the rescue, found nothing left alive but a few cattle and sheep running wild.[289]

Nicol Zeno, arriving in the East Bygd, found there a monastery dedicated to St. Olaus, a name which in the narrative has become St.

Thomas. To this monastery came friars from Norway and other countries, but for the most part from Iceland.[290] It stood "hard by a hill which vomited fire like Vesuvius and Etna." There was also in the neighbourhood a spring of hot water which the ingenious friars conducted in pipes into their monastery and church, thereby keeping themselves comfortable in the coldest weather. This water, as it came into the kitchen, was hot enough to boil meats and vegetables. The monks even made use of it in warming covered gardens or hot-beds in which they raised sundry fruits and herbs that in milder climates grow out of doors.[291] "Hither in summertime come many vessels from ... the Cape above Norway, and from Trondheim, and bring the friars all sorts of comforts, taking in exchange fish ... and skins of different kinds of animals.... There are continually in the harbour a number of vessels detained by the sea being frozen, and waiting for the next season to melt the ice."[292]