n 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 documents, 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 Nicolo, 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 Nicolo 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 Nicolo's visit to the East Bygd, shows a
topographical knowledge that was otherwise quite inaccessible to the
younger Nicolo. 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 p