[511] The subject of these pre-Columbian claims is examined in almost all the general works on early discovery. Cf. Robertson’s America; J. S. Vater’s Untersuchungen über Amerikas Bevölkerung aus dem alten Continent (Leipzig, 1810); Dr. F. X. A. Deuber’s Geschichte der Schiffahrt im Atlantischen Ozean (Bamberg, 1814); Ruge, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen (ch. 2); Major’s Select Letters of Columbus, introd.; C. A. A. Zestermann’s Memoir on the Colonization of America in antehistoric times, with critical observations by E. G. Squier (London, 1851); Nouvelles Annales des Voyages (ii. 404); “Les précurseurs de Colomb” in Études par les Pères de la Compagnie de Jesus (Leipzig, 1876); Oscar Dunn in Revue Canadienne, xii. 57, 194, 305, 871, 909,—not to name numerous other periodical papers. Paul Gaffarel, in his “Les relations entre l’ancien monde et l’Amérique étaient-elles possibles au moyen âge?” (Soc. Normande de Géog. Bulletin, 1881, p. 209), thinks that amid the confused traditions there is enough to convince us that we have no right to determine that communication was impossible.
[512] MSS. de la bibliothèque royale (Paris, 1787), i. 462.
[513] De Costa in Journal Amer. Geog. Soc. xii. (1880) p. 159, etc., with references.
[514] Humboldt, Views of Nature, p. 124. He also notes the drifting of Eskimo boats to Europe.
[515] Tratado de las cinco zonas habitables.
[516] Respecting these Christian Irish see the supplemental chapters of Mallet’s Northern Antiquities (London, 1847); Dasent’s Burnt Njal, i. p. vii.; Moore’s History of Ireland; Forster’s Northern Voyages; Worsaae’s Danes and Norwegians in England, 332. Cf. on the contact of the two races H. H. Howorth on “The Irish monks and the Norsemen” in the Roy. Hist. Soc. Trans. viii. 281.
[517] Conybeare remarks that jarl, naturalized in England as earl, has been displaced in its native north by graf.
[518] It has sometimes been contended that a bull of Gregory IV, in a.d. 770, referred to Greenland, but Spitzbergen was more likely intended, though its known discovery is much later. A bull of a.d. 835, in Pontanus’s Rerum Daniarum Historia, is also held to indicate that there were earlier peoples in Greenland than those from Iceland. Sabin (vi. no. 22,854) gives as published at Godthaab, 1859-61, in 3 vols., the Eskimo text of Greenland Folk Lore, collected and edited by natives of Greenland, with a Danish translation, and showing, as the notice says, the traditions of the first descent of the Northmen in the eighth century.
[519] Known as the Katortuk church.
[520] An apocryphal story goes that one of these churches was built near a boiling spring, the water from which was conducted through the building in pipes for heating it! The Zeno narrative is the authority for this. Cf. Gay’s Pop. Hist. U. S. i. 79.