﻿172 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



to lapse away out of mind is no more remarkable than that Edrisi 

 should have known of the lake sources of the White Nile in the 

 twelfth century and drawn them conspicuously on his map ; although 

 the unheeding world of Europe forgot them and they had to be labor- 

 iously rediscovered seven hundred years afterward. We are learning 

 that the world's memory has had many trances of oblivion. 



As to influence on succeeding voyages, Nansen has called attention 

 to the many Scandinavians who had settled in Bristol before the dis- 

 covery of North America. Storm very reasonably urged long ago 

 the identity of Markland and the Irish Brazil, the quest for which 

 passed from Limerick to this same Bristol ; Fischer * has treated 

 the same subject rather more conspicuously ; and, as we have seen, 

 the fourteenth and fifteenth century maps afford very curious cor- 

 roborative indications along several converging lines. Moreover, 

 John Cabot in his first voyage turned northward for a time (Payne 2 

 thinks to Iceland) from his first westward course, a proceeding that 

 cost him some trouble, according to Sebastian, and which would 

 hardly recommend itself to one who had never heard of discoveries 

 made from that quarter. Also he promptly gave the land 3 which he 

 found substantially the name currently in use then, or not very long 

 before, by Icelanders, for some western region of uncertain identity 

 which, on the whole, is most likely to be this same Newfoundland. 

 Finally, soon after his return that summer, as reported by an Italian 

 envoy who was his friend and whose letter is still extant, he and his 

 mercantile backers reported that they thought brazil-wood grew 

 there, this being the characteristic product which was popularly 

 believed to have given the great Isle of Brazil its name. Everything 

 goes to prove that he had the former Irish and Icelandic voyages and 

 legends in mind, and that these and like influences would soon have 

 impelled him or some other to success along this line, even if there 

 had been no Spanish discovery of the Antilles. 



Apart from this effect in Britain, Adam of Bremen's account of 

 Wineland and its products was circulating in print from Holland 

 before the seventeenth century, and Ortelius also was presenting 

 Wineland by name as a Norse discovery identical with Estotiland, in 

 theorizing about the origin of the American Indians ; while in 

 Iceland itself there was a continuous succession of sagas and other 

 works touching the subject, oral, written and printed, original and 



^he Explorations of the Northmen, etc., p. 105. Cf. E. J. Payne: History 

 of America. 

 2 As above, p. 233. 

 3 E. J. Payne: History of America, p. 217. 



