A story was repeated by Oviedo in 1535 as an idle rumor, adopted by Gomara in 1552 without comment, and given considerable currency in 1609 by Garcilasso de la Vega, of a Spanish pilot,—Sanches, as the name is sometimes given,—who had sailed from Madeira, and had been driven west and had seen land (Hispaniola, it is inferred), and who being shipwrecked had been harbored by Columbus in his house. Under this roof the pilot is said to have died in 1484, leaving his host the possessor of his secret. La Vega claimed to have received the tale from his father, who had been at the Court of Spain in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. Oviedo repeated it, but incredulously;[97] and it was later told by Gomara, Acosta, Eden, and others. Robertson,[98] Irving,[99] and most later writers find enough in the indecision and variety of its shapes to discard it altogether. Peter Martyr, Bernaldez, and Herrera make no mention of it. It is singular, however, that Ferdinand de Galardi, in dedicating his _Traité politique des abassadeurs_, published at Cologne in 1666, to a descendant of Columbus, the Duke of Veraguas, mentions the story as an indisputable fact;[100] and it has not escaped the notice of querulous writers even of our day.[101] Others have thought that Columbus, in his voyage to Thule or Iceland,[102] in February, 1477, could have derived knowledge of the Sagas of the westerly voyages of Eric the Red and his countrymen.[103] It seems to be true that commercial relations were maintained between Iceland and Greenland for some years later than 1400; but if Columbus knew of them, he probably shared the belief of the geographers of his time that Greenland was a peninsula of Scandinavia.[104] The extremely probable and almost necessary pre-Columbian knowledge of the northeastern parts of America follows from the venturesome spirit of the mariners to those seas for fish and traffic, and from the easy transitions from coast to coast by which they would have been lured to meet the more southerly climes. The chances from such natural causes are quite as strong an argument in favor of the early Northmen venturings as the somewhat questionable representations of the Sagas.[105] There is the same ground for representing, and similar lack of evidence in believing, the alleged voyage of Joāo Vas Costa Cortereal to the Newfoundland banks in 1463-1464. Barrow finds authority for it in Cordeyro, who gives, however, no date in his _Historia Insulana das Ilhas a Portugal_, Lisbon, 1717; but Biddle, in his _Cabot_, fails to be satisfied with Barrow’s uncertain references, as enforced in his _Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions_, London, 1818.[106]