124 VIEWS OF NATURE. 



violacea signatd). No one understood their language. Their 

 clothing was made of fish skins sewn together. On their 

 heads they wore coronam e culmo pictam, septem quasi auriculis 

 intextam. They ate raw flesh, and drank blood as we would 

 wine. Six of these men perished during the voyage, and the 

 seventh, a youth, was presented to the King of France, who 

 was then at Orleans.* 



The appearance of men called Indians on the coasts of 

 Germany under the Othos and Frederic Barbarossa in the tenth 

 and twelfth centuries, and as Cornelius NejDOS (in his Frag- 

 ments')^ Pomponius Mela,J and Pliny§ relate, when Quintus 

 Metellus Ccler was Proconsul in Gaul, may be explained by 

 similar effects of oceanic currents and b} r the long continuance 

 of north-westerly winds. A king of the Boii, or, as others 

 say, of the Suevi, gave these stranded dark-coloured men to 

 Metellus Celer. Gomara|| regards these Indian subjects of 

 the King of the Boii as natives of Labrador. He writes, Si 

 ya no fuesen de Tierra del Labrador, y los tuviesen los Romanos 

 por Indianos enganados en el color. It may be inferred that 

 the appearance of Esquimaux on the northern shores of 

 Europe was more frequent in earlier times, for we learn from 

 the investigations of Rask and Finn Magnusen, that this race 

 had spread in the eleventh and twelfth century in considerable 

 numbers, under the name of Skralingers, from Labrador as far 

 south as the Good Vinland, i.e. the shore of Massachussets and 

 Connecticut.^! 



As the winter cold of the most northern part of Scandinavia 

 is ameliorated by the action of the Gulf Stream, which 

 carries American tropical fruits (as cocoa-nuts, seeds of 

 Mimosa scandens and Anacardium occidentale) beyond 62° 

 north lat. ; so also Iceland enjoys from time to time the genial 

 influence of the diffusion of the warm waters of the Gulf 

 Stream far to the northward. The sea coasts of Iceland, like 

 those of the Faroe Isles, receive a large number of trunks of 



* Bcmbo, Historian V entice, ed. 1718, lib. vii. p. 257. 

 t Ed. Van. Staveren, cur. Bardili, t. ii. 1820, p. 356. 

 % Lib. iii, cap. 5, § 8. 

 § Hist. Nat, ii. 67. 



|| Historia Gen. de las Indias. Saragossa, 1553, fol. vii. 

 *U See Cosmos, vol. ii. p. 604 (Bonn's ed.) and Examen critique de 

 rHist, de la Geographic, t. ii. pp. 247 — 278. 



