Note Back to Main Text — Chapter II · PRE-COLUMBIAN VOYAGES.

The identification of "Frislanda" with the Færoe islands was put beyond doubt by the discovery that the "Zichmni" of the narrative means Henry Sinclair; Earl 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 Nicolò, 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 Nicolò 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 Nicolò's visit to the East Bygd, shows a topographical knowledge that was otherwise quite inaccessible to the younger Nicolò. Late in the fourteenth century Ivar Bardsen, steward to the Gardar bishopric, wrote a description of Bardsen's "Description of Greenland." 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 prevalent concerning Greenland its details were not understood until actual exploration within the last seventy years has at length revealed their meaning. The genuineness of the Zeno narrative is thus conclusively proved by its knowledge of Arctic geography, such as could have been obtained only by a visit to the far North at a time before the Greenland colony had finally lost touch with its mother country.