Note 535 — Chapter II

De Costa, Verrazano the Explorer (N. Y., 1880), pp. 47, 63, contends that Benedetto Bordone, writing his Isole del Monde in 1521, and printing it in 1528, had access to the Zeno map thirty years and more earlier than its publication. This, he thinks, is evident from the way in which he made and filled in his outline, and from his drawing of “Islanda,” even to a like way of engraving the name, which is in a style of letter used by Bordone nowhere else. Humboldt (Cosmos, Bohn’s ed., ii. 611) has also remarked it as singular that the name Frislanda, which, as he supposed, was not known on the maps before the Zeni publication in 1538, should have been applied by Columbus to an island southerly from Iceland, in his Tratado de las cinco zonas habitables. Cf. De Costa’s Columbus and the Geographers of the North (1872), p. 19. Of course, Columbus might have used the name simply descriptively,—cold land; but it is now known that in a sea chart of perhaps the fifteenth century, preserved in the Ambrosian library at Milan, the name “Fixlanda” is applied to an island in the position of Frislanda in the Zeno chart, while in a Catalan chart of the end of the fifteenth century the same island is apparently called “Frixlanda” (Studi biog. e bibliog. della soc. geog. ital., ii. nos. 400, 404). “Frixanda” is also on a chart, a.d. 1471-83, given in fac-simile to accompany Wuttke’s “Geschichte der Erdkunde” in the Jahrbuch des Vereins für Erdkunde (Dresden, 1870, tab. vi.).