OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 611 



consequence of Ingolf s first colonization in Iceland, in the year 

 875, lias proved, amid the vague and misty forms of Scandi- 

 navian myths and symbolical cosmogonies, an event of great 

 importance in its influence on the poetic fancy of mankind. 

 It was natural knowledge alone that acquired no enlargement. 

 Icelandic travellers certainly occasionally visited the univer- 

 sities of Germany and Italy, but the discoveries of the Green- 

 landers in the South, and the inconsiderable intercourse main- 

 tained with Vinland, whose vegetation presented no remark- 

 able physiognomical character, withdrew colonists and mariners 

 so little from their European interests, that no knowledge of 

 these newly colonised countries seems to have been diffused 

 amongst the cultivated nations of southern Europe. It would 

 even appear that no tidings of these regions reached the great 

 Genoese navigator in Iceland. Iceland and Greenland had 

 then been separated upwards of two hundred years, since 

 1261, when the latter country had lost its republican form of 

 government, and when, on its becoming a fief of the crown of 

 Norway, all intercourse with foreigners and even with Iceland 

 was interdicted to it. Christopher Columbus, in a work " On 

 the five habitable zones of the earth," which has now become 

 extremely rare, says that in the month of February 1477, he 

 visited Iceland, "where the sea was not at that time covered 

 with ice, and which had been resorted to by many traders from 

 Bristol."* If he had there heard tidings of the earlier coloni- 

 sation of an extended and continuous tract of land, situated on 



* Whilst this circumstance of the absence of ice in February 1477, 

 has been brought forward as a proof that Columbus' Island of Thule 

 could Dotbe Iceland, Finn Magnus-en found in ancient historical sources, 

 that until March 1477, there was no snow in the northern part of Ice- 

 land, and that in February of the same year, the southern coast was free 

 from ice. Examen crit., t. i. p. 105; t. v. p. 213. It is very remark- 

 able, that Columbus, in the same " Tratado de las cinco zonas kabi- 

 tables" mentions a more southern island, Frislanda; a name which is 

 not in the maps of Andrea Bianco (1436), or in that of Fra Mauro 

 (1457-1470), but which plays a great part in the travels, mostly regarded 

 as fabulous, of the brothers Zeni (1388-1404). (Compare Examen crit., 

 t. ii. pp. 114-126.) Columbus cannot have been acquainted with the 

 travels of the Fratelli Zeni, as they even remained unknown to the 

 Venetian family until the year 1558, in which Marcolini first published 

 them, fifty-two years after the death of the great admiral. Whence came 

 the admiral's acquaintance with the name Frislanda ] 



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