Moreover, the dread of the Council could not overshadow distant
geographers like Mercator and Ortelius, whose maps of 1569 and
1570[217] (cf. Fig. 10) almost eagerly embody the most distinctive
Zeno additions, giving them the greatest currency and implying some
sense of the general probability of discoveries by members of that
family. Estotiland and Drogio are very distinctly shown, the former
apparently as Newfoundland united to Labrador, the latter as a smaller
and more southern island which may well be Cape Breton Island, pushed a
bit offshore, but still not very far from the mainland.
[Illustration: FIG. 19--The map of the northern regions by the Zeno
brothers, 1558, showing Frisland, Estotiland, Icaria, and Drogio.
(After Lucas’ photographic facsimile.)]
There has been much discussion as to whether the book should be
regarded as wholly a forgery or not, as to the location of these
regions, and as to the derivation and meaning of the names; but all
agree that Estotiland and Drogio were not known before 1558.
Nicolò the compiler reports: “The sailing chart which I find, I still
have among our family antiquities and, though it is rotten with age,
I have succeeded with it tolerably well.” Just what this success
involved is an interesting question. It has been understood by his most
reasonable advocates to include conjectural restoration, such as the
deficiencies of rottenness seemed to call for, and somewhat more.
Nicolò the younger avers, further, that his ancestor Antonio wrote
a book recording his northern observations and many facts about
Greenland, but that the compiler as a boy had thoughtlessly destroyed
the book with other papers and that the Zeno narrative as he gives it
is made up from fragmentary letters of the elder Nicolò to Antonio
and of the latter to their brother, Carlo, remaining in Venice; which
letters by good fortune happened to survive.
Nobody except the younger Nicolò is asserted to have seen the map,
the letters, or any of the original documents; though his parents, it
would seem, must have been custodian of them before him, and he would
surely have been likely to display such precious evidences to some one
after awakening to their importance. But those were less critical and
exacting times than the present, and conceivably it may have been felt
that any corroboration would be superfluous. Yet the fact remains that
we are not informed of any means of testing the accuracy of restoration
or even of demonstrating that there was anything to restore.
FIRST USE OF THE NAMES “ESTOTILAND” AND “DROGIO”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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