"ESTOTILAND" AND "DROGIO" FIRST USED 127 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. 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. Nicold 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 con- jectural restoration, such as the deficiencies of rottenness seemed to call for, and somewhat more. Nicol6 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 Nicol6 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 Nicold 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 impor- tance. But those were less critical and exacting times than the present, and conceivably it may have been felt that any corrob- oration 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" The two names "Estotiland" and "Drogio" are supplied by a story within a story, an alleged yarn of a fisherman, reporting
