Now, whether all this was the observation of a single rude sailor, or, as is more likely, summarizes what Zeno was able to learn from all sources at his command regarding the new western mainland and its people, it is correct and forcible. Had young Nicolò the editor, a century afterward, tried to invent something of the kind, he would surely have made his invention marvelous, for that was an age of fable and bombast. On the contrary, this is a simple and accurate statement of what we now know were the facts. Nor did he have any means of knowing anything more of the case than his family archives revealed, since he wrote and published this account of his uncle’s voyages only a few years after the first return of Columbus, and before any writer had visited the northern American coasts, or had learned the habits of the natives. I can but believe, therefore, that the report was made in good faith, and records simply what the Zeni did and saw and heard; and that these bold Venetian navigators knew more about North America, at least, before the end of the fourteenth century than Columbus had learned by the end of the fifteenth. I have run ahead of my story, but I wanted to show how little impression these northern investigations and occupation of a new continent had made upon the Mediterranean “world,” which seems rarely to have heard of them, much less to have profited by the information, for more than four hundred years, in spite of the fact that there was constant communication between the Normans and British, at least, and the Mediterranean peoples.