Excerpt from The Discoverers, Pioneers, and Settlers of North and South America, From the Earliest Period (982) To the Present Time: Comprising the Lives of the Most Famous Discoveries, Explorers, and Conquerors of the New WorldNatural history, in especial, was at a sad discount. Peter Martyr, with classical fondness, records the appearance of Tritons in the waters of the New World, Columbus and Hudson chronicle with much particularity their respective encounters with shoals of mermaids and the Pilgrims of Plymouth honestly relate their alarm at the roar of lions prowling in the frozen forests of New England. One writer contended that India must be in the vicinity of Cuba, seeing that the parrots there answered so well to the description of Pliny, and another, near a century later, surmised an easy northerly passage to the same country, because the horns of a unicorne (doubtless brought from India by the tides had been found on some dreary shore of the Arctic ocean.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.