1394. N. AND A. ZENO. 23 



The name, says M. Malte-Brun, appears to be 

 Scandinavian ; ^' for Est-outUnul in English would 

 signify land stretching farthest out to the east, 

 which ao^rees with the situation of Newfoundland 

 with reo-ard to the continent of America.'"* The 

 same author observes, that the inhabitants of Es- 

 totiland appear to be the descendants of the 

 Scandinavian colonists of VinJand, whose lan- 

 guage, in the course of three ages, might have 

 been sufficiently altered to be unintelligible to the 

 fishermen of Feroe. The Latin books (of which 

 Zeno speaks) had doubtless, he thinks, been carried 

 thither by that Greenland bishop, who, in 1121, 

 betook himself to Vinland to preach the Christian 

 religion in that country; that Drogio, on this 

 hypothesis, w^ould be Nova Scotia and New 

 England; and he concludes, that by bringing 

 together under one point of view the discoveries 

 of the Scandinavians in the tenth and eleventh 

 centuries, and the voyages of the two Venetians 

 in the fourteenth, we must be persuaded that the 

 New World has been visited by the nations of the 

 north as far back as the year 1000; and that it 

 may perhaps be thought that this first discovery, 

 historically proved, after having been confirmed 

 anew in 1 390 by Zeno, may have been known to 

 Columbus in 1477, (1467) when he made a voyage 



* Precis de la Geog, Universclle, torn. i. p. 405. 



c 4 



