﻿XO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA BABCOCK II 



Edrisi 1 records also the celebrated Magrurin expedition from 

 Lisbon, which is generally mentioned as occurring a little before the 

 expulsion of the Moors in 1147, though it must have been earlier, 

 since in 11 54 he mentions a street named after them, with no hint of 

 recent naming. They had resolved, it appears, to cross the Atlantic, 

 but turned southward after getting twelve days out, into the weed- 

 encumbered Sargasso Sea, and seem to have wandered rather aim- 

 lessly toward the African coast, along which, at last, they made their 

 way home. 



Humboldt 2 supposed that their farthest point may have been one 

 of the Cape Verde group. Other inquirers think it more to the 

 northward. The story gives the prince of that island an Arabic 

 interpreter and makes him declare through this mouthpiece that his 

 royal father had sailed forty days beyond it without finding land ; 

 after which he promptly shipped his visitors to Africa. But we do 

 not know Edrisi's authority for what these wanderers related. Giving 

 it full face value, however, there is nothing to indicate that they 

 crossed the ocean. 



The same is equally true of the Genoese brothers 3 Vivaldi who, 

 according to old chronicles of their city, " undertook " about 1285, 

 in the very spirit of Columbus " a new and untried voyage, that to 

 India by way of the West." This has been taken to import a voyage 

 around the Cape of Good Hope, and possibly may mean nothing 

 more, yet the words are memorable. Besides, the fourteenth century 

 maps, long antedating the Portuguese discoveries, give Italian names 

 almost exclusively to the Azores, which would lie well out of the way 

 of the course supposed. Either these adventurous men or others of 

 their country must have ranged widely eastward and northeastward, 

 with close quartering of the sea. One is tempted to think that they 

 can not have been so very far from the Newfoundland banks or the 

 Bermudas in some of their outward sweeps ; for they found and 

 named all the more eastwardly islands that are known, as well as two 

 or more dubious ones with Irish or Arabic names over which men still 

 puzzle and wrangle. For the Irish were ever before the Arabs in their 

 explorations — how far we cannot guess, the voyages of the Celts 

 having begun far back beyond the twilight of history. Perhaps the 



1 Edrisi: Geography, Jaubert's transl., vol. 2, p. 27. Their voyage is briefly 

 related also in Examen Critique, vol. 2. 



2 Examen Critique, vol. 2, p. 237. 



3 M. D'Avezac: Discoveries of the Middle Ages, p. 23. Also Humboldt : 

 Examen Critique, vol. 2, p. 234. 



