| Osafada | 7s | 6d |
| Takinonimome | 4d | |
| ————— | ||
| 7s | 10d | |
Some years ago Professor Huxley told me of a letter from France which came to the London post-office thus addressed:—
Sromfrédévi,
Piqué du lait,
Londres,
Angleterre.
This letter, after exciting at first helpless bewilderment and then busy speculation, was at length delivered to the right person, Sir Humphry Davy, in his rooms at the Royal Institution on Albemarle street, just off from Piccadilly![Back to Main Text]
Footnote 285: Columbus, on his journey to Iceland in 1477, also heard the name Færoislander as Frislanda, and so wrote it in the letter preserved for us in his biography by his son Ferdinand, hereafter to be especially noticed. See Major's remarks on this, op. cit. p. xix.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 286: Perhaps in the old worn-out map the archipelago may have been blurred so as to be mistaken for one island. This would aid in misleading young Nicolò.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 287: See the elaborate paper by Admiral Zahrtmann, in Nordisk Tidsskrift for Oldkyndighed, Copenhagen, 1834, vol. i., and the English translation of it in Journal of Royal Geographical Society, London, 1836, vol. v. All that human ingenuity is ever likely to devise against the honesty of Zeno's narrative is presented in this erudite essay, which has been so completely demolished under Mr. Major's heavy strokes that there is not enough of it left to pick up. As to this part of the question, we may now safely cry, "finis, laus Deo!"[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 288: It was translated into Dutch by the famous Arctic explorer, William Barentz, whose voyages are so graphically described in Motley's United Netherlands, vol. iii. pp. 552-576. An English translation was made for Henry Hudson. A very old Danish version may be found in Rafn's Antiquitates Americanæ, pp. 300-318; Danish, Latin, and English versions in Major's Voyages of the Venetian Brothers, etc., pp. 39-54; and an English version in De Costa's Sailing Directions of Henry Hudson, Albany, 1869, pp. 61-96.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 289: So he tells us himself: "Quo cum venissent, nullum hominem, neque christianum neque paganum, invenerunt, tantummodo fera pecora et oves deprehenderunt, ex quibus quantum naves ferre poterant in has deportato domum redierunt." Descriptio Grœnlandiæ, apud Major, p. 53. The glacial men had done their work of slaughter and vanished.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 290: "Ma la maggior parte sono delle Islande." Mr. Major is clearly wrong in translating it "from the Shetland Isles." The younger Nicolò was puzzled by the similarity of the names Islanda and Eslanda, and sometimes confounded Iceland with the Shetland group. But in this place Iceland is evidently meant.[Back to Main Text]