habitants, who had Latin books, but could not speak Norse, and whose
country was called Estotiland, while a region on the mainland, farther
south, to which he had also gone, was called Drogeo. Here he had met
with cannibals. Still farther south was a great country with towns and
temples."

The two brothers Zeni finally conveyed this account to another brother
in Venice, together with a map of those distant regions, but these
documents remained neglected till 1558, when a descendant compiled a
book to embody the information, accompanied by a map, now famous as
"the Zeno map."

Humboldt, with reference to this map, remarks that it is singular that
the name Frislanda should have been applied by Columbus to an island
south of Iceland. Washington Irving (in his Life of Columbus) explains
the book by a desire to appeal to the national pride of Italy, since, if
true, the discovery of the brothers would antedate that of Columbus by a
century.

Malte-Brun, the distinguished geographer, distinctly accepted the Zeni
narrative as true, and believed that it was by colonists from Greenland
that the Latin books had reached Estotiland. Another strong advocate
afterward appeared in Mr. Major, an official in the map department of
the British Museum, who believed that much of the map in question
represented genuine information of the fourteenth century, mixed with
some spurious parts inserted by the younger Zeno. Mr. Major's paper on
The Site of the Lost Colony of Greenland Determined, and the
pre-Columbian Discoveries of America Confirmed, appeared in R. Geog.
Soc. Journal, 1873; _v_. also Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., 1874. Nordenskjold
also accepted the chief results of this Italian discovery, and as an
arctic explorer of experience, his opinion carries weight. Mercator and
Hugo Grotius were also believers in the Zeni account.

CHAPTER II

"DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN"

At the beginning of this book a reference was made to the great upheaval
in European history called the "Renascence" (Fr. _renaissance_) or
Revival of Learning. In 1453 the Turks took Constantinople, driving the
Greek scholars to take refuge in Italy, which at once became the most
civilized nation in Europe. Poetry, philosophy, and art thence found
their way to France, England, and Germany, being greatly assisted by the
invention of printing, which just then was beginning to make books
cheaper than they ever had been. At the same time feudalism was ruined