Pique du lait,
Londres,
Angleterre.

This letter, after exciting at first helpless bewilderment and
then busy speculation, was at length delivered to the right
person, _Sir Humphry Davy_, in his rooms at the Royal
Institution on Albemarle street, just off from _Piccadilly_!]

[Footnote 285: Columbus, on his journey to Iceland in 1477,
also heard the name _Faeroislander_ as _Frislanda_, and so wrote
it in the letter preserved for us in his biography by his son
Ferdinand, hereafter to be especially noticed. See Major's
remarks on this, _op. cit._ p. xix.]

[Footnote 286: Perhaps in the old worn-out map the archipelago
may have been blurred so as to be mistaken for one island. This
would aid in misleading young Nicolo.]

[Footnote 287: See the elaborate paper by Admiral Zahrtmann, in
_Nordisk Tidsskrift for Oldkyndighed_, Copenhagen, 1834, vol.
i., and the English translation of it in _Journal of Royal
Geographical Society_, London, 1836, vol. v. All that human
ingenuity is ever likely to devise against the honesty of
Zeno's narrative is presented in this erudite essay, which has
been so completely demolished under Mr. Major's heavy strokes
that there is not enough of it left to pick up. As to this part
of the question, we may now safely cry, "finis, laus Deo!"]

[Sidenote: The narrative nowhere makes a claim to the "discovery of
America."]

The narrative, however, not only sets up no such claim, but nowhere
betrays a consciousness that its incidents entitle it to make such a
claim. It had evidently not occurred to young Nicolo to institute any
comparison between his ancestors' voyages to Greenland and the voyages
of Columbus to the western hemisphere, of which _we now know_ Greenland
to be a part. The knowledge of the North American coast, and of the
bearing of one fact upon another fact in relation to it, was still, in
1558, in an extremely vague and rudimentary condition. In the mind of
the Zeno brothers, as the map shows, Greenland was a European peninsula;
such was the idea common among mediaeval Northmen, as is nowhere better
illustrated than in this map. Neither in his references to Greenland,
nor to Estotiland and Drogio, presently to be considered, does young
Nicolo appear i