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 knew of the compass, so that we should expect them to have at least recorded such a change of course.

The story of the fisherman hardly concerns us, as he was not an Orkneyman but a Faröe islander. His "Estotiland " has been identified with Newfoundland, his "Drogio" with Nova Scotia. The civilised people he found dwelling in the "fair and populous city" are assumed to have been the descendants of the Norse colony planted centuries before by Leif Eriksson and his followers. There are, however, no clear traces of a Norse settlement in Newfoundland or Nova Scotia; no ruins of a city and no indisputably Norse relics have been disinterred. The ocean of time has closed upon the Norseman and does not give up its dead. Yet the evidence of some settlement appears indisputable. Others again have seen in this people the remnants of the Irish colonisation with even less probability. The fact that the people drank beer points to a Norse origin. Yet at no time before the coming of the Anglo-Saxon were the gold mines in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia worked; and we are expressly told that the strange people had "abundance of gold." It is far from improbable that some vague report of a strange new world had reached even the Faröes, from Iceland, at the close of the fourteenth century, when the traditions of Winland and Markland had not been forgotten.

But it is more probable that Nicolo Zeno interpolated much of the fisherman's narrative, or at least wrote it up from the tales of Columbus and Cortes, than that the fisherman ever sailed where he says he did. Indeed, the interpolation of Nicolo the younger is a convenient deus ex machinâ to fall back upon in difficulty. Mr. Major holds that the "rich and populous city" is only a piece of bombast on a level with the mention of "the Duchy of Sorano," or Swona, and so also he explains the "king's library," where Latin manuscripts were seen by the fisherman, and the "temples." "Estotiland" some have supposed is Scotland, but the particulars do not fit. "Drogio" would appear to be some part of the American mainland: the wild tribes are in