The story got a strong advocate, after nearly forty years of comparative rest, when R. H. Major, of the map department of the British Museum, gave it an English dress and annexed a commentary, all of which was published by the Hakluyt Society in 1873. In this critic’s view, the good parts of the map are of the fourteenth century, gathered on the spot, while the false parts arose from the misapprehensions of the young Zeno, who put together the book of 1558.[719] The method of this later Zeno was in the same year (1873) held by Professor Konrad Maurer to be hardly removed from a fraudulent compilation of other existing material. There has been a marked display of learning, of late years, in some of the discussions.
BARON NORDENSKJÖLD.
[From a recent photograph. There is another engraved likeness in the second volume of his Vega.]
Cornelio Desimoni, the archivist of Genoa, has printed two elaborate papers.[720] The Danish archivist Frederik Krarup published (1878) a sceptical paper in the Geografisk Tidsskrift (ii. 145).[721] The most exhaustive examination, however, has come from a practical navigator, the Baron A. E. Nordenskjöld, who in working up the results of his own Arctic explorations was easily led into the intricacies of the Zeno controversy. The results which he reaches are that the Zeni narratives are substantially true; that there was no published material in 1558 which could have furnished so nearly an accurate account of the actual condition of those northern waters; that the map which Zahrtmann saw in the University library at Copenhagen, and which he represented to be an original from which the young Zeno of 1558 made his pretended original, was in reality nothing but the Donis map in the Ptolemy of 1482, while the Zeno map is much more like the map of the north made by Claudius Clavis in 1427, which was discovered by Nordenskjöld in a codex of Ptolemy at Nancy.[722]
Since Nordenskjöld advanced his views there have been two other examinations: the one by Professor Japetus Steenstrup of Copenhagen,[723] and the other by the secretary of the Danish Geographical Society, Professor Ed. Erslef, who offered some new illustrations in his Nye Oplysninger om Broedrene Zenis Rejser (Copenhagen, 1885).[724]
Among those who accept the narratives there is no general agreement in identifying the principal geographical points of the Zeno map. The main dispute is upon Frislanda, the island where the Zeni were wrecked. That it was Iceland has been maintained by Admiral Irminger,[725] and Steenstrup (who finds, however, the text not to agree with the map), while the map accompanying the Studi biografici e bibliografici sulla storia della geografia in Italia (Rome, 1882) traces the route of the Zeni from Iceland to Greenland, under 70° of latitude.
On the other hand, Major has contended for the Faröe islands, arguing that while the engraved Zeno map shows a single large island, it might have been an archipelago in the original, with outlines run together by the obscurities of its dilapidation, and that the Faröes by their preserved names and by their position correspond best with the Frislanda of the Zeni.[726] Major’s views have been adopted by most later writers, perhaps, and a similar identification had earlier been made by Lelewel,[727] Kohl,[728] and others.
The identification of Estotiland involves the question if the returned fisherman of the narrative ever reached America. It is not uncommon for even believers in the story to deny that Estotiland and Drogeo were America. That they were parts of the New World was, however, the apparent belief of Mercator and of many of the cartographers following the publication of 1558, and of such speculators as Hugo Grotius, but there was little common consent in their exact position.[729]
[I.] Alleged Jewish Migration.—The identification of the native Americans with the stock of the lost tribes of Israel very soon became a favorite theory with the early Spanish priests settled in America. Las Casas and Duran adopted it, while Torquemada and Acosta rejected it. André Thevet, of mendacious memory, did not help the theory by espousing it. It was approved in J. F. Lumnius’s De extremo Dei Judicio et Indorum vocatione, libri iii. (Venice and Antwerp, 1569);[730] and a century later the belief attracted new attention in the Origen de los Americanos de Manasseh Ben Israel, published at Amsterdam in 1650.[731] It was in the same year (1650) that the question received the first public discussion in English in Thomas Thorowgood’s Jewes in America, or, Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race. With the removall of some contrary reasonings, and earnest desires for effectuall endeavours to make them Christian (London, 1650).[732] Thorowgood was answered by Sir Hamon L’Estrange in Americans no Iewes, or Improbabilities that the Americans are of that race (London, 1652). The views of Thorowgood found sympathy with the Apostle Eliot of Massachusetts; and when Thorowgood replied to L’Estrange he joined with it an essay by Eliot, and the joint work was entitled Iewes in America, or probabilities that those Indians are Judaical, made more probable by some additionals to the former conjectures: an accurate discourse is premised of Mr. John Eliot (who preached the gospel to the natives in their own language) touching their origination, and his Vindication of the planters (London, 1660). What seems to have been a sort of supplement, covering, however, in part, the same ground, appeared as Vindiciæ Judæcorum, or a true account of the Jews, being more accurately illustrated than heretofore, which includes what is called “The learned conjectures of Rev. Mr. John Eliot” (32 pp.). Some of the leading New England divines, like Mayhew and Mather,[733] espoused the cause with similar faith. Roger Williams also was of the same opinion. William Penn is said to have held like views. The belief may be said to have been general, and had not died out in New England when Samuel Sewall, in 1697, published his Phænomena quædam Apocalyptica ad aspectum Novi Orbis Configurata.[734]