KINGS OF NORWAY.
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be not known, cannot affect this fact,—nor the very strong side-fact, that eighty years after this fact was recorded in writing, in no obscure manuscript, but in one of the most beautiful works of penmanship in Europe, Columbus came to Iceland[1] from Bristol, in 1477, on purpose to gain nautical information, and must have heard of the written accounts of discoveries recorded in it. It is as great an error to prove too
- ↑ much as to prove too little. Enough is proved for The English trade with Iceland appears to have been very considerable. Annals in manuscript of 1411 and 1413, quoted by Finn Magnuson, in his Treatise on the English Trade to Iceland in the "Nordisk Tidsskrift for Oldkyndighed," mention, besides plundering and piracy committed by the English, proclamations of Eric of Pomerania against trading with them. In 1413 there were thirty English vessels on the Iceland coast. In 1415, in the harbour of Havnefiord there were six English vessels at one time. The trade had been made a monopoly, and the English appear to have forcibly broken through its regulations, in spite of the proclamations of their own and the Norwegian sovereign. The Icelandic bishops at that time—viz. John Johnson, bishop of Holum,and his successor in 142& John Williamson—were Englishmen; and also the bishop of Skalholt in 1430, John Garrickson, appears to have come from England. Bristol and Hull appear, in 1474, to have had a great share of the trade to Iceland. It appears, from the Memoir of Columbus by his son Fernando, that in February, 1477> his father visited Tyle (Thule) or Friesland, "an island as large as England, with which the English, especially those of Bristol, drive a great trade." It is a curious coincidence that he mentions he came to the island without meeting any ice, and the sea was not frozen; and in an authentic document of March in the same year, 1477' it is mentioned as a kind of testimony of the act of which the document is the protocol, that there was no snow whatever upon the ground at the date it was executed,— a rare circumstance, by which it would be held in remembrance. In the year 1477' Magnus Eyolfson was bishop of Skalholt: he had been abbot of the monastery at Helgafel, where the old accounts concerning Vinland and Greenland were, it is supposed, originally written and preserved, and the discoverers were people originally from that neighbourhood. Columbus came in spring to the south end of Iceland, where Whalefiord was the usual harbour; and it is known that Bishop Magnus, exactly in the spring of that year, was on a visitation in that part of his see, and it is to be presumed Columbus must have met and conversed with him. These are curious coincidences of small circumstances, which have their weight.—See Captain Zahrtmann on the Voyage of Zeno, and F. Magnuson on the English Trade to Iceland, 2d vol. of Nordisk Tidsskrift, 1833.
