Il6 KALM'S ENGLAND. 



[T. I. p. 418.] The 22nd May, 1748. 

 Silk-grass in America. 



I asked Dr. Mitchel what sort of grass silk-grass was, 

 which is mentioned in the description of Virginia, and is 

 said to serve the same purpose as hemp. He answered 

 that it is called by M orison in his Hist* Yucca foliis 

 filamentosis, and grows in Virginia on the sea-shore. It 

 was formerly used like flax and hemp to make clothes of, 



maps last named show that it is the " Stlllante " of the Fra Mauro map, 1459, 

 i.e. Estland or Shetland. This, however, is not altogether inconsistent with its 

 being the genesis of the Frislanda in the Zeno map, referred to below, as the 

 name may have been then misread, as it has been in later days, and the learned 

 ignorance of the cartographers of the XlVth and two following centuries, and 

 their confusion as to the names and true situations of the islands in the North 

 Atlantic, is abundantly evidenced by their maps. The first map on which the 

 name " Frislanda " is found clearly written, is that by Juan de la Cosa, who 

 accompanied Columbus on his second voyage (1493-1496), drawn in 1500. 

 The name occurs also on the Portuguese " Carta da Navigar," by Alberto 

 Cantino, 1503, but in this the position of the island is shifted farther to 

 the east, close to the Ilhas de Fogo. "Insula de Uresland" is shown on a 

 Map in Kunstmann, c. 1505 (Brit. Mus. Tab. 1850, a. Blatt. II). Neither 

 Bordone. 1528, nor Zeigler, 1532, mentions it either in their text or on their 

 maps. Zurla recognises Frisland in the " Ixilandia" of the Fra Mauro map, 1459. 



Frislanda is mentioned by Christopher Columbus in a memorandum 

 referring to his voyage to Iceland in 1477 (quoted in the life of the Admiral 

 written by his son, Ferdinand Columbus, who died in 1539, in Spanish, but 

 first published in I57i,in Italian) in which he distinguishes it from Iceland 

 and identifies it with the Thule of Ptolemy. 



But it is principally in connection with the apocryphal voyages of the 

 Venetian brothers Nicolo and Antonio Zeno at the end of the XlVth 

 century that the name of Frisland is known. An account of these 

 travels was published in Venice in December, I55^> anc ' was accompanied 

 by a map compiled by Nicolo Zeno, a direct descendant of Antonio, and 

 founded, as he alleges, on an old and rotten map found among the family papers 

 of the Zeni. The narrative is given by Ramusio (3rd ed., 2nd vol., I574)i 

 by Hakluyt (Divers Voyages 1582, and Voyages and Navigations vol. 3, 1600) 

 and an abstract appears in Purchas hys Pilgrims (vol. 3, 1625). The Zeno 

 map was accepted as genuine, and copied with slight alteration by Ruscelli 



* Historic!, plantarum Universalis, Tomi III- Robert Morison. Oxon 

 1680, 1689, Fol. [J. L.] 



