ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 137 



wood, trunks of an unknown species of Pine from Mexico and the 

 West Indian Islands, and corpses of men of unknown race with un- 

 usually broad faces, contributed to the discovery of America, by 

 confirming Columbus in his belief of the existence to the westward 

 of Asiatic countries and islands at no impassable distance. The 

 great discoverer even heard from the lips of settlers near the Cape 

 de la Verga in the Azores, of some, "who, in sailing westward, had 

 met decked or covered boats, manned by persons of strange and 

 foreign appearance, and built apparently in such a manner that they 

 could not founder, almadias con casa movediza que nunca se hun- 

 den." There is highly credible and well-confirmed testimony to the 

 fact, much as it has long been doubted, of natives of America (pro- 

 bably Esquimaux from Greenland or Labrador), carried by currents 

 or driven by storms from the northwest, having actually crossed the 

 Atlantic in their canoes and reached our shores. James Wallace, 

 in his "Account of the Islands of Orkney (1700, p. 60)," relates 

 that, in 1682, a Greenlander was seen in his boat off the south point 

 of the Island of Eda by several persons, who did not succeed in 

 bringing him to shore. In 1684, a Greenland fisherman appeared 

 in his boat off the Island of Westram. In the church at Barra there 

 was suspended an Esquimaux boat, driven thither by currents and 

 tempests. The inhabitants of the Orkneys call G-reenlanders so 

 appearing among them Finns or "Finnmen." 



In Cardinal Bembo's History of Venice, I find a narrative to the 

 effect that in 1508 a French ship captured near the English coast- a 

 small boat, with seven persons of a strange and foreign appearance. 

 The description suits extremely well with Esquimaux (homines 

 erant septem mediocri statura, colore subobscuro, lato et patente vultu, 

 cicatriceque una violacea signato). No one understood their lan- 

 guage. Their clothing was composed of fish-skins sewn together. 

 On their heads they wore " coronam e culmo pictam, septem quasi 

 auriculis intextam." They ate raw flesh, and drank blood as we 

 would wine. Six of the men died during the passage of the vessel, 

 on board which they had been taken ; but the seventh, a youth, 

 was presented to the king of France, who was then at Orleans. 

 (Bembo, Historia Venetse, ed. 1718, lib. vii. p. 257.) 



The appearance of men called Indians on the western coast of 



