André Thevet.

Attempts have been made to trace some portion of the development of the coasts of the northeastern parts of the United States to the publications of a mendacious monk, André Thevet. He had been sent out to the French colony of Rio de Janeiro in 1555, where he remained prostrated with illness till he was able to reëmbark for France, January 31, 1556. In 1558 he published his Singularitez de la France Antarctique, a descriptive and conglomerate work, patched together from all such sources as he could pillage, professing to follow more or less his experiences on this voyage. He says nothing in it of his tracking along the east coast of the present United States. Seeking notoriety and prestige for his country, he pretends, however, in his Cosmographie published in 1575, to recount the experiences of the same voyage, and now he professes to have followed this same eastern coast to the region of Norumbega. Well-equipped scholars find no occasion to believe that these later statements were other than boldly conceived falsehoods, which he had endeavored to make plausible by the commingling of what he could filch from the narratives of others.

The Zeni story.

THE ZENI MAP.
[1st part]
[THE ZENI MAP. (complete view)]

It was at this time also (1558) that there was published at Venice the strange and riddle-like narrative which purports to give the experiences of the brothers Zeni in the north Atlantic waters in the fourteenth century. The publication came at a time when, with the transfer of cartographical interest from over the Alps to the home of its earliest growth, the countrymen of Columbus were seeking to reinstate their credit as explorers, which during the fifteenth century and the early part of the sixteenth they had lost to the peoples of the Iberian peninsula. Anything, therefore, which could emphasize their claims was a welcome solace. This accounts both for the bringing forward at this time of the long-concealed Zeni narrative,—granting its genuineness,—and for the influence which its accompanying map had upon contemporary cartography. This map professed to be based upon the discoveries made by the Zeni brothers, and upon the knowledge acquired by them at the north in the fourteenth century. It accordingly indicated the existence of countries called Estotiland and Drogeo, lying to the west, which it was now easy to identify with the Baccalaos of the Cabots, and with the New France of the later French.

The Zeni map.

"If this remarkable map," says Nordenskiöld, "had not received extensive circulation under the sanction of Ptolemy's name," for it was copied in the edition of 1561 of that geographer, "it would probably have been soon forgotten. During nearly a whole century it had exercised an influence on the mapping of the northern countries to which there are few parallels to be found in the history of cartography." It is Nordenskiöld's further opinion that the Zeni map was drawn from an old map of the north made in the thirteenth century, from which the map found in the Warsaw Codex of Ptolemy of 1467 was also drawn. He further infers that some changes and additions were imposed to make it correspond with the text of the Zeni narrative.