Message #160369

[Autolocus]

PROBABLE BASIS OF FACT UNDERLYING THIS
LEGENDARY ISLAND

What was this island, then, which held its place in the maps
during half a millennium and more, under two chief names
and occasional substitutes, designations apparently received
from so many different peoples? One cannot easily set it aside
as a "peculiar appearance of the surface" or as a mere figment
of fancy. But there is nothing westward or southwestward of the
Azores except the Bermudas and the capes and coast islands

[E. M.) Blunt 's New Chart of the Atlantic or Western Ocean, New York,
1814.



92 MAYDA

of America. The identification with some outlying island of
the Azores, as Corvo, for example, is an old hypothesis; and the
grotesquery of that rocky islet seems to have deeply impressed
the minds of early navigators, lending some countenance to
the idea. But the Laurenziano map of 135 1 35 and the Book of
the Spanish Friar 36 show that all the islands of the Azores
group were known before the middle of the fourteenth century,
and Corvo in particular had been given the name which it still
holds. Man, afterward Mayda, appears on many maps of the
fifteenth century, which show also the Azores in full. Perhaps
this is not conclusive, for there are strange blunders and duplica-
tions on old maps; but it is at least highly significant. If Man,
or Mayda, were really Corvo or another island of the Azores
group, surely someone would have found it out in the course
of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, just as it came to be per-
ceived after a time that the Azores had been located too near
to Europe and just as Bianco's duplication of the Azores in
1448 had finally to be rejected. Mayda, if real, must have been
something more remote and difficult to determine than Corvo.
Perhaps Nicolay and Zaltieri were right in thinking that
Mayda was America, or at least was on the side of the Atlantic
toward America. The latitude generally chosen by the maps
would then call for Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland, often
supposed to be insular in early days; or perhaps for Cape Breton
Island, the next salient land feature. But that is an uncertain
reliance, for the observations of pre-Columbian navigators
would surely be rather haphazard, and they might naturally
judge by similarity of climate. This would justify them in
supposing that a region really more southerly lay in the latitude
of northern France for example Cape Cod, which juts out

85 Theobald Fischer, Portfolio 5 (Facsimile del Portolano Laurenziano-Gaddiano
dell' anno 1351). PL 4-

34 Book of the Knowledge of All the Kingdoms, Lands, and Lordships That Are in
the World, and the Arms and Devices of Each Land and Lordship, or of the Kings
and Lords Who Possess Them, written by a Spanish Franciscan in the middle of the
I4th century, published for the first time with notes by Marcos Jimenez de la Es-
pada in 1877, translated and edited by Sir Clements Markham, Hakluyt Soc.
Publs., and Ser., Vol. 29, London, 1912, p. 29.



PROBABLE BASIS OF FACT 93

conspicuously and is curved and almost insular. Or by going
farther south, although nearer Europe, they might thus indicate
the Bermudas, the main island of which is given a crescent form
on several relatively late maps. But we must not lay too much
stress on this last item, for divers other map islands were modeled
on this plan. We may be justified, then, in saying that Mayda
was probably west of the middle of the Atlantic and that Ber-
muda, Cape Cod, or Cape Breton is as likely a candidate for
identification as we can name.



CHAPTER VII
GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND

The first account of Greenland given to the world, indeed the
first mention of that region in literature, is by Adam of Bremen,
an ecclesiastical official and geographical author.

ADAM OF BREMEN'S ACCOUNT OF GREENLAND

He interviewed in 1069 the enterprising king Sweyn of Den-
mark, and acquired from him divers Scandinavian and other
northern items which Adam embodied about 1076 in his work
"Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis," the Description of the North-
ern Islands. Nansen quotes, with other matter, the following
passages: 1

. . . On the north this ocean flows past the Orchades, thence end-
lessly around the circle of the earth, having on the left Hybernia, the
home of the Scots, which is now called Ireland, and on the right the
skerries of Nordmannia, and farther off the islands of Iceland and Green-
land. . .

Furthermore, there are many other islands in the great ocean, of which
Greenland is not the least; it lies farther out in the ocean, opposite the
mountains of Suedea, or the Riphean range. To this island, it is said, one
can sail from the shore of Nortmannia [sic] in five or seven days, as like-
wise to Iceland. The people there are blue ("cerulei", bluish-green) from
the salt water; and from this the region takes its name. They live in a
similar fashion to the Icelanders, except that they are more cruel and
trouble seafarers by predatory attacks. To them also, as is reported,
Christianity has lately been wafted.

It was in fact about seventy-five years since Leif, son of Eric
the Red, according to the sagas, had effected that wafting from
the Christian court of Norway to the still pagan Norsemen of his

1 Fridtjof Nansen: In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times,
transl. by A. G. Chater, 2 vols., New York, 1911; reference in Vol. i, pp. 192 and
194-