In view of these discrepancies it is not easy to believe that the fisherman ever visited America or at any rate ever journeyed far inland. The nature of the errors rather points to Nicolò Zeno “the compiler” as their author, since they embody observations made elsewhere, which the fisherman would not be aware of and which had not been made in his time, so far as now known. The landing by shipwreck on Estotiland in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, though a startling feature, cannot be called impossible or perhaps even wildly improbable; and, once on this side of the Atlantic at that point, some accident might take him across to Cape Breton Island, whence he well might travel or be carried a little farther. This sequence of events may be said to hang well together, and the geographic accuracy as to Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island may be taken diffidently as establishing a faint presumption that something like it really occurred. But farther than this we cannot go, for all other indications are adverse; and, even if we credit the incongruities to one of the Zeni and suppose them to take the place of forgotten or disregarded observations of the original adventurer, we are without these last, and it is only substituting a vacuum for incorrectness. Perhaps the only thing that remains to be said in favor of the story is that if it were wholly the invention of Nicolò Zeno it would have been natural and quite easy for him to make his ancestor the discoverer, instead of an unnamed and insignificant fisherman.
The Zeno Narrative Itself
For the story above considered enters the Zeno narrative only as the incentive to a voyage of exploration which failed of its aim; and it is nowhere alleged, unless in the title, that either of the Zeno brothers discovered anything American. Each of them, it says, visited Greenland, but that needed no discovery. Briefly summarized, the Zeno story is that the elder Nicolò, being an adventurous wanderer like many of his countrymen, was shipwrecked about 1380 on the island of Frisland and taken into the service of Zichmni, lord of the Orkneys, then prosecuting the conquest of the former region. Zeno took part in the warfare of this chieftain, chiefly against the King of Norway his feudal lord, also in his various navigations, including a visit to Greenland, of which this elder Nicolò writes quite fully to his brother Antonio in Venice, urging the latter to join him in Zichmni’s service. Antonio did so, after many adventures and hardships and incidental delay, and served with him four years, when Nicolò died, and Antonio succeeded to his honors and emoluments for thirteen years longer. About 1400 the fisherman returned with his story of transatlantic experience, and Earl Zichmni resolved to attempt to reach Estotiland in person. Instead, he was storm-driven to Icaria, whatever that may be, and again visited Greenland, exploring parts of its coast. Antonio Zeno went with him and sailed home separately, under orders, slightly missing his course and first reaching Porlanda (Pomona) of the Orkneys and Neome (Fair Island) midway between the Orkneys and Shetland. He knew then that he was “beyond Iceland” (i. e. to the eastward) and readily found his way to Frisland. He was never allowed to return to Venice but wrote his brother Carlo what he had seen and heard, including the fisherman’s story.
R. H. Major’s Study of the Zeno Narrative
Major endeavored to end the long-standing discussion as to the authenticity of the map and the narrative of voyages by an elaborate and ingenious study, on the hypothesis of an honestly intended reproduction, the various additions, interpolations, and changes being due partly to misunderstandings by the original Zeno brothers, partly to injuries accidentally inflicted by the compiler and inaccurately repaired, and partly to extraneous matter of illustration and ornament, which the later Nicolò Zeno had not the self-control to withhold. This method of exposition leads to some curious experiences of prodigious exaggeration backed by a veritable genius for transforming words. Thus when we read that Zichmni, ruling in Porlanda and conqueror of Frisland, made successful war on his feudal superior, the King of Norway, it means, according to Major, that Henry St. Clair (or Sinclair), who was given the Earldom of the Orkneys in 1379, had a skirmish with a forgotten claimant to a part of his territory. A little later in the narrative a warm spring (108° maximum) on an island of a fiord in the inhabited part of Greenland, beside which some ruins are found, evolves a monastery and monk-ruled village of dome-topped houses on the slope of a volcanic mountain far up the impossible ice-bound eastern coast, with house-warming, cooking, and hothouse gardening by subterranean heat and a continual commerce maintained with northern Europe—though all this had never been heard of before. It is true that Major was handicapped by a belief, formerly prevalent, that the eastern coast of Greenland was the site of the Eastern Settlement of the Norsemen, though in modern times that coast is subjected to conditions which make life hardly practicable; whereas it is now conclusively established that both of the Norse settlements were on the relatively pleasant southwestern coast, one settlement being more easterly and the other more westerly. But at the best such interpretations run the gauntlet of the reader’s involuntary skepticism. It is often easier to discard the statements altogether.
The Work of F. W. Lucas
Lucas, writing some years afterward, with the benefit of recently discovered maps and information, has chosen this destructive alternative for nearly the whole Zeno narration: denying that Nicolò Zeno had any map of a former generation to restore; styling his own keenly critical and exhaustive production “an indictment,” and branding the book under consideration as a forgery throughout—with, necessarily, some true things in it. He has gone far toward making good his case. Some things not fully accounted for suggest that there may have been a basis of genuine material, a nucleus of truth; but it must have been very slight.
Major and his preservative school relied chiefly on three points of coincidence: a fairly good description of that most unusual boat, the kayak of the Eskimos; the hot water of the monastery already mentioned; and the general geography of Greenland, which is shown more accurately than on many maps of the sixteenth century and later. But Lucas points out that the history of Olaus Magnus, or other northern sources, might have supplied the kayak to Zeno the younger. This may seem rather far-fetched in view of the wide interval between Italy and Scandinavia; but intercourse was regular in 1558, and Zeno was a man of ample information and intelligence, using material from many sources and having his attention especially directed to the north.
A Monastery in the Arctic
The Zeno account of the monastery of St. Thomas is very extended and particular, going into details of daily life, artificial agriculture, and traffic. It is the sublimation of cultivation in hothouse conditions (of volcanic origin), located far up within the Arctic Circle at a particularly repellent point, where no man has ever lived or perhaps will live hereafter. Lucas tries to explain the account—which is interesting in its own way with a certain wild and preposterous plausibility—by reminiscences of a favored Scandinavian fortress, the gardens of which were hardly ever frozen, enjoying “all the advantages which any fortunate abode of mortals could demand and obtain from the powers above.”[227] But this is manifestly vague, a general picture of balminess and delightfulness, far removed from a specific account of roasting food by subterranean heat, warming garden beds to the forcing point by pipes naturally supplied, and carrying on an extensive commerce from the polar regions by the aid of a tame volcano. Certainly the warm spring of southwestern Greenland is not much more to the point; but neither fortress gardens nor flowing water should be needed to stimulate a lively fancy in creating rather obvious marvels. Nicolò knew of volcanoes in Iceland (as well as Italy), may well have surmised their activity in Greenland, and would be only one of many who have amused themselves with speculations as to what might be accomplished by tapping the great reservoir of heat and energy below us. It is not necessary to find a precise earlier parallel, to be sure that there is no corroboration for his tale of ancestral voyages in such fancies.