If There Be Any Truth Whatever In The Voyages
Of The Zenos, It Is Only To Be Found In The First Section Of This Chapter;
And Even There The Possible Truth Is So Strangely Enveloped In
Unintelligible Names Of Persons And Places, As To Be Entirely Useless.
The
second section is utterly unworthy of the slightest serious
consideration; and must either have been a posterior fabrication, engrafted
upon an authentic, but ignorantly told narrative; or the seeming
possibility of the first section was invented to give currency to the
wild forgery of the second.
Latin books, a library, gold, ships, and
foreign trade, corn, beer, numerous towns and castles, all in the most
northern parts of America in the fourteenth century, where only nomadic
savages had ever existed, are all irrefragable evidence, that the whole, or
at least that portion of the voyages of the Zenos, is an idle romance. To
increase the absurdity, as if to try the gullability of the readers,
Dedalus, a king of Scotland! is assumed to have been the first discoverer
of the Western World; and his son Icarus is introduced to give his name
to a civilized island, already named Estoitland in the narrative.
After this decided opinion of the falsehood and absurdity of the whole of
this present chapter, it may be necessary to state, that, in a work so
general and comprehensive as that we have undertaken, it did not seem
advisable or proper to suppress an article which had been admitted into
other general collections of voyages and travels.
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