In view of these discrepancies it is not easy to believe that the fisherman ever visited America or at any rate ever journeyed far inland. The nature of the errors rather points to Nicolò Zeno “the compiler” as their author, since they embody observations made elsewhere, which the fisherman would not be aware of and which had not been made in his time, so far as now known. The landing by shipwreck on Estotiland in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, though a startling feature, cannot be called impossible or perhaps even wildly improbable; and, once on this side of the Atlantic at that point, some accident might take him across to Cape Breton Island, whence he well might travel or be carried a little farther. This sequence of events may be said to hang well together, and the geographic accuracy as to Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island may be taken diffidently as establishing a faint presumption that something like it really occurred. But farther than this we cannot go, for all other indications are adverse; and, even if we credit the incongruities to one of the Zeni and suppose them to take the place of forgotten or disregarded observations of the original adventurer, we are without these last, and it is only substituting a vacuum for incorrectness. Perhaps the only thing that remains to be said in favor of the story is that if it were wholly the invention of Nicolò Zeno it would have been natural and quite easy for him to make his ancestor the discoverer, instead of an unnamed and insignificant fisherman. THE ZENO NARRATIVE ITSELF