ney will receive further
consideration in another place.[305] In the course of it Cabeza de Vaca
was for eight years held captive by sundry Indian tribes, and at last
his escape involved ten months of arduous travel. On one occasion he and
his friends treated some sick Indians, among other things breathing upon
them and making the sign of the cross. As the Indians happened to get
well, these Spaniards at once became objects of reverence, and different
tribes vied with one another for access to them, in order to benefit by
their supernatural gifts. In those early days, before the red men had
become used to seeing Europeans, a white captive was not so likely to be
put to death as to be cherished as a helper of vast and undetermined
value.[306] The Indians set so much store by Cabeza de Vaca that he
found it hard to tear himself away; but at length he used his influence
over them in such wise as to facilitate his moving in a direction by
which he ultimately succeeded in escaping to his friends. There seems to
be a real analogy between his strange experiences and those of the
Fisherman in Drogio, who became an object of reverence because he could
do things that the natives could not do, yet the value of which they
were able to appreciate.

[Footnote 305: See below, vol. ii. p. 501.]

[Footnote 306: In the first reception of the Spaniards in Peru,
we shall see a similar idea at work, vol. ii. pp. 398, 407.]

Now if the younger Nicolo had been in the mood for adorning his
ancestors' narrative by inserting a few picturesque incidents out of his
own hearsay knowledge of North America, it does not seem likely that he
would have known enough to hit so deftly upon one of the peculiarities
of the barbaric mind. Here, again, we seem to have come upon one of
those incidents, inherently probable, but too strange to have been
invented, that tend to confirm the story. Without hazarding anything
like a positive opinion, it seems to me likely enough that this voyage
of Scandinavian fishermen to the coast of North America in the
fourteenth century may have happened.

[Sidenote: There may have been unrecorded instances of visits to North
America.]

It was this and other unrecorded but possible instances that I had in
mind at the beginning of this chapter, in saying that occasional visits
of Europeans to America in pre-Columbian times may have occurred oftener
than we are wont to suppose. Observe that our scan