Effects of the Gulf Stream in stranding on the Islands of Fayal, Flores, and Corvo in the Azores, bamboos, artificially cut pieces of wood, trunks of an unknown species of Pine from Mexico and the West Indian Islands, and corpses of men of unknown race with unusually 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 hunden.” There is highly credible and well-confirmed testimony to the fact, much as it has long been doubted, of natives of America, (probably Esquimaux from Greenland or Labrador), carried by currents or driven by storms from the North West, 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 Greenlanders 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 language. 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 Venetæ, ed. 1718, lib. vii. p. 257).