Quintus
Metellus Celer, "when as proconsul he governed Gaul, received as a
present from the King of the Baeti [Pliny says of the Suevi] some
Indians, and when he inquired how they came to those countries, he
was informed that they had been driven by storm from the Indian
Ocean to the coasts of Germany" (Pomponius Mela, lib. iii. cap. 5,
after a lost work of Cornelius Nepos. Plinius, _Hist. Nat._, lib.
ii. cap. 67).

Of a similar occurrence in the middle ages, the learned AEneas
Sylvius, afterwards Pope under the name of Pius II., gives the
following account of his cosmography:--"I have myself read in Otto
[Bishop Otto, of Freising], that in the time of the German Emperor
an Indian vessel and Indian merchants were driven by storm to the
German coast. Certain it was that, driven about by contrary winds,
they came from the east, which had been by no means possible, if, as
many suppose, the North Sea were unnavigable and frozen" (Pius II.,
_Cosmographia in Asiae et Europae eleganti descriptione, etc._,
Parisiis, 1509, leaf 2). Probably it is the same occurrence which is
mentioned by the Spanish historian Gomara (_Historia general de las
Indias_, Saragoca, 1552-53), with the addition, that the Indians
stranded at Luebeck in the time of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa
(1152-1190). Gomara also states that he met with the exiled Swedish
Bishop Olaus Magnus, who positively assured him that it was possible
to sail from Norway by the north along the coasts to China (French
translation of the above-quoted work, Paris, 1587, leaf 12). An
exceedingly instructive treatise on this subject is to be found in
_Aarboeger for nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie_, Kjoebenhavn, 1880.
It is written by F. Schiern, and entitled _Om en etnologisk Gaade
fra Oldtiden_. ]

[Footnote 31: Olaus Magnus, _Auslegung und Verklerung der neuen
Mappen von den alten Goettewreich_, Venedig, 1539. Now perhaps
(according to a communication from the Librarian-in-chief, G.E.
Klemming) there is scarcely any copy of this edition of the map
still in existence, but it is given unaltered in the 1567 Basel
edition of Olaus Magnus, "_De gentium septentrionalium rariis
conditionibus_," &c. The edition of the same work printed at Rome in
1555, on the other hand, has a map, which differs a little from the
original map of 1539. ]

[Footnote 32: To interpret Nicolo and Antonio Zeno's travels towards
the end of the fourteenth century, which have given rise to so much
disc