Message #160370

[Autolocus]

INSULAR CHARACTER 95

father's far-western domain. For Adam clearly means these white
people and not the Eskimos, with whom they had not yet come
in contact and of whom no whisper had yet reached the European
world unless it related to relics of former occupancy discerned
on first landing. It is surely matter for astonishment to find the
ruddy followers of hot-blooded Eric described as bluish-green
and so conspicuous in this complexion that it gave their region
its name. Perhaps there is no more curious instance to be found
of the inveterate human tendency to read into any unfamiliar
name some meaning that seems plausible.

It is not clear where Adam supposed Greenland to be located ;
perhaps he, too, was not clear about the matter. The earlier of
his two passages on the subject seems to call for something like
the true location in the far west; but the later mention of the
mountains of Sweden has been understood by the most learned
commentators to indicate a site directly north of Norway. King
Sweyn perhaps had a fairly good idea of the sailing courses for
Iceland and Greenland, but his guest may have assimilated the
information rather confusedly. Adam seems convinced that
Greenland was a distinctly oceanic island, with no suggestion
of any near relation to any continent. In this respect he differs
from certain maps of the fifteenth century with which we shall
presently have to deal. . We know now that the truth lies between
these views; that the highly glaciated mass which we name in its
entirety Greenland is, indeed, an island and probably the largest
of islands but an island with the aspect and attributes of a
peninsula, being barely severed from that polar archipelago which
crowns our American mainland and being not very remote at
one point from the mainland itself.

ITS INSULAR CHARACTER

Adam's idea of oceanic insulation was accepted in many
quarters, as the maps disclose. Of course, they may not have
derived it from him in all instances, directly or indirectly, but at
least they shared it. Usually the name, slightly changed, becomes
the equivalent "Green Island" in one or another of several



96 GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND

languages. Thus, to take a very late instance, the map of
Coppo, 1528* (Fig. 13), discloses near the true site of Greenland
a mass of land elongated from east to west, but clearly all at sea
with no greater land near it, and labeled Isola Verde. There
seems no room for doubt of the meaning or origin of this name.
That any land found there should be an island of the sea was the
natural assumption of geographers at that time. Maps of the
early sixteenth century generally show a scattering of islands
south of North America sometimes approaching an archipelago,
sometimes more widely distributed, and in either case being
substitutes for what we now know as North America and its
appendages.

As "ILLA VERDE" ON THE CATALAN MAP OF 1480

In another well-known map 3 (Fig. 7), an unnamed cartographer,
said to be Catalan, probably about 1480, delineates an elongated
Ilia Verde (using the Portuguese name for island), locating it
southwest of Iceland, which bears the name Fixlanda, but is
easily identifiable by its outline and geographical features. His
Ilia Verde runs nearly north and south, approximating more
closely than Coppo's island the true trend of Greenland. It
also by its greater bulk seems founded on more adequate informa-
tion. It is equally at sea and remote from other land, except that
off its concave southern end, with a narrow interval, lies a large
circular island named Brazil, our old mythical acquaintance of
medieval maps not often located so far westward but, as we have
seen in Chapter IV, apparently intended to represent the Gulf of
St. Lawrence region. These two islands strikingly resemble in
general situation and arrangement the Greenland and Estotiland
(Labrador) in a map (Fig. 14) illustrating Torfaeus' early eight-

* Konrad Kretschmer: Die Entdeckung Araerika's in ihrer Bedeutung fur die
Geschichte des Weltbildes, 2 vols. (text and atlas), Berlin, 1892; reference in atlas,
PI. 14, map 5.

3 A. E. Nordenskiold: Bidrag till nordens aldsta kartografi, Stockholm, 1892,
PI. 5. Also (reduced) in Nansen (Vol. 2, p. 285), and in T. J. Westropp: Brasil and
the Legendary Islands of the North Atlantic: Their History and Fable, Proc. Royal
Irish Acad., Vol. 30, Section C, 1912-13, pp. 223-260; see PI. 20, opp. p. 260.



ON SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MAPS



97



eenth century "Gronlandia/' 4 except that the rounded outline
of Estotiland is not completed, its proportional area is greater
than "Brazil," the strait between the two bodies of land is a
little wider, and the lower end of Torfaeus' Greenland is not
made concave like that of Ilia Verde. But again there can be




FIG. 13 Coppo's world map of 1528 showing Green Island ("isola v'erde").
(After Kretschmer's hand-copied reproduction.)

no doubt that the Ilia Verde of the Catalan (if he were a Catalan)
represents the Greenland of Adam of Bremen and the sagas.

GREEN ISLAND ON SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MAPS

To the same origin, in a remoter sense, we may ascribe the
rather large Insula Viridis of Schoner, I52O, 5 which is brought
down to a latitude between that of southern Ireland and that of
northern Spain and something east of mid-ocean. It must seem
that the map-maker had quite lost sight of any relation between
this Latinized Green Island and the true Greenland of the
northwest.

4 Thormodus Torfaeus: Gronlandia Antiqua seu veteris Gronlandiae descriptio,
Copenhagen, 1706; Tabula I, facing p. 20.
6 Kretschmer, atlas, PI. 13.



9 8



GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND




FIG. 14 Bishop Thorlaksson's map of Greenland 1606, showing Estotiland as a
part of America. Cf. with Fig. 18. (From Torfaeus* "Gronlandia antiqua," Copen-
hagen, 1706, in the library of the American Geographical Society.)