them according to their own notions; in the second place, these
outlandish names, blurred and defaced withal in the weather-stained
manuscript, were a puzzle to the eye of young Nicolo, 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 shipwrecked Nicolo
was rescued by Sinclair. The name _Faeroislander_ sounded to Italian
ears as _Frislanda_, and was uniformly so written.[285] Then the
pronunciation 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 Nicolo'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 Nicolo meant to say that the island upon which he was living
with Earl Sinclair was somewhat larger than Shetland, young Nicolo
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 Nicolo,[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 Nordenskjoeld'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 LXXX. but evidently one X has
been omitted, for it should be 1390, and is correctly so given
by Marco Barbaro, in his _Genealogie dei nobili Veneti_; of
Antonio Zeno he says, "Scrisse con il fratello Nicolo Kav. li
viaggi dell' Isole sotto il polo artico, e di quei scoprimente