ESQUIMAUX DRIFTED TO SHETLAND. 59 
On the 16th of April, 1853, another bottle cast into the 
waters in the vicinity of the Bank of Newfoundland, on the 
15th of March, 1852, was found near Bayonne, not far from the 
mouth of the Adour. 
On the coasts of Orcadia, a sort of fruit, commonly known by 
the name of Molucca, or Orkney beans, are found in large 
quantities, particularly after storms of westerly wind. 
These beans are the produce of West Indian trees (Anacar- 
dium occidentale), and find their way from the woods of Cuba 
and Jamaica, to the Ultima Thule of the ancients, by means of 
the Gulf-stream. 
Large quantities of American drift-wood are transported by 
the same current to the dreary shores of Iceland, —a welcome gift 
to the inhabitants of a region where the highest tree is but a 
dwarfish shrub, and cabbages of the size of an apple are raised, 
as a great rarity, in the governor’s garden. 
A short time before Humboldt visited the island of Teneriffe, 
the sea had thrown out the trunk of a North American cedar-tree 
(Cedrela odorata), covered with the mosses and.lichens that had 
grown upon it in the virgin forest. 
The Gulf-stream has even contributed to the discovery of 
America, for it is well known that Columbus was strengthened 
in his belief in the existence of a western continent, by the 
stranding on the Azores of bamboos of an enormous size, of 
artificially carved pieces of wood, of trunks of a species of 
Mexican pine, and of the dead bodies of two men, whose features, 
resembling neither those of the inhabitants of Europe nor of 
Africa, indicated a hitherto unknown race. But not only life- 
less and inanimate objects find their way across the wide At- 
lantic by means of the Gulf-stream and its spreading waters ; 
the living aborigines of the distant regions of America have also 
sometimes been driven towards the coasts of Europe by the 
combined action of the currents and the winds. Thus, James 
Wallace tells us that, in the year 1682, a Greenlander in his 
boat was seen by many people near the south point of the 
island of Eda, but escaped pursuit. In 1684 another Green- 
land fisherman appeared near the island of Wistram. An Ks- 
‘quimaux canoe, which the current and the storm had cast ashore, 
is still to be seen in the church of Burra. In Cardinal Bembo’s 
** History of Venice,” it is related that, in the year 1508, a small 
