Humboldt in his Cosmos quotes Columbus as saying of this voyage near Thule that "the sea was not at that time covered with ice," and he credits that statement to the same Tratado de las Cinco Zonas Habitables of Columbus, and urges in proof that Finn Magnusen had found in ancient historical sources that in February, 1477, ice had not set in on the southern coast of that island.
Thyle.
Speaking of "Tile," the same narrative adds that "it is west of the western verge of Ptolemy [that is, Ptolemy's world map], and larger than England." This expression of its size could point only to Iceland, of all islands in the northern seas.
There are elements in the story, however, not easily reconcilable with what might be expected of an experienced mariner; and if the story is true in its main purpose, there is little more in the details than the careless inexactness, which characterizes a good many of the well-authenticated asseverations of Columbus.
The Zeni's Frisland.
Again the narrative says, "It is true that Ptolemy's Thule is where that geographer placed it, but that it is now called Frislande." Does this mean that the Zeni story had been a matter of common talk forty years after the voyage to their Frisland had been made, and eighty-four years before a later scion of the family published the remarkable narrative in Venice, in 1558? It is possible that the maker of the Historie of 1571, in the way in which it was given to the world, had interpolated this reference to the Frisland of the Zeni to help sustain the credit of his own or the other book.
A voyage undertaken by Columbus to such high latitudes is rendered in all respects doubtful, to say the least, from the fact that in 1492 Columbus detailed for the eyes of his sovereigns the unusual advantages of the harbors of the new islands which he had discovered, and added that he was entitled to express such an opinion, because his exploration had extended from Guinea on the south to England on the north. It was an occasion when he desired to make his acquaintance seem as wide as the facts would warrant, and yet he does not profess to have been farther north than England. A hundred leagues, moreover, beyond Iceland might well have carried him to the upper Greenland coast, but he makes no mention of other land being seen in those high latitudes.
Thyle and Iceland.
Thyle and Iceland are made different islands in the Ptolemy of 1486, which, if it does not prove that Iceland was not then the same as Thyle in the mind of geographers, shows that geographical confusion still prevailed at the north. It may be further remarked that Muñoz and others have found no time in Columbus's career to which this voyage to the north could so easily pertain as to a period anterior to his going to Portugal, and consequently some years before the 1477 of the Historie.