Message #160372

[Autolocus]

This is even more obviously true of Nicolay's map of I56o 6
(Fig. 6), which carries Verde into the Newfoundland Banks, even
nearer than his Brazil to a broken-up Newfoundland; and of
Zaltieri's map of I566, 7 which plants Verde rather close to
"C. Ras" (Cape Race), with only a narrow strip of water between.
These cartographers undoubtedly indicated American habitats
for their little island ; but they can have had no thought of con-

A. E. Nordenskiold: Periplus: An Essay on the Early History of Charts and
Sailing-Directions, transl. by F. A. Bather, Stockholm, 1897, PI- 27.
7 Kretschmer. atlas, PI. 19, map 3.



SHRINKAGE OF NAME 99

fusing it with Greenland, which they well knew and which Zaltieri
distinctly shows as Grutlandia. They would be far from admit-
ting a common origin. Perhaps in most of such northern cases a
conception like Coppo's of Greenland as an oceanic island is at
the root of the derivation ; but successive copyings, modifications,
and shiftings may have altered the area, form, and location, while
the clue was gradually lost and only the name remained hardly
as a reminder, for it is of too general descriptive application.

VARIOUS "GREEN ISLANDS:" SHRINKAGE OF THE NAME

There is, indeed, one instance of a Green Island with which
Greenland can have had nothing whatever to do. Peter Martyr
d'Anghiera's sketch map of 151 1 8 shows a small tropical Isla
Verde near Trinidad; it is apparently Tobago. Doubtless its
luxuriance of vegetation prompted the name.

This may have happened in other instances of warm climates
or even in temperate zones where grass and foliage grow freely;
so that we in many cases cannot distinguish on the maps the
Green Islands, real or fanciful, which acquired their name as a
remote legacy of Eric's land from those which were called "green"
simply because they were green. Both derivations may some-
times apply; but the islands of the far northwest bearing that
name, like Coppo's island and the Catalan's Ilia Verde, must
naturally go into the former category.

As we have seen, Green Islands were scattered rather widely;
but the name occurs most often in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries in the middle or eastern part of the ocean to indicate
a small island, having Mayda (Vlaenderen) for its rather distant
consort. Desceliers indeed, in I546 9 (Fig. 9), shows it in the same
longitude as the tip of Labrador, but this is done by carrying
Labrador too far eastward. St. Brandan's Island is a neighbor
on his map. Ortelius, in isyo 10 (Fig. 10) and Mercator, in 1587,"



8 A. E. Nordenskiold: Facsimile-Atlas to the Early History of Cartography,
transl. by J. A. Ekelof and C. R. Markham, Stockholm, 1889, p. 67.

9 Kretschmer, atlas, PI. 17.

10 A. E. Nordenskiold, Facsimile-Atlas, PI. 46.
Ibid.. PI. 47.



ioo GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND

represent Y Verde west of Vlaenderen in the region north of the
Azores. In the eighteenth century it still held its ground west of
France in the eastern Atlantic as Isla Verde, Isla Verte, lie
Verte, Ilha Verde, and Green Island. By the early part of the
nineteenth century it had, after its kind, dwindled to Green Rock
Brazil Island similarly becoming Brazil Rock as dubious
rocks became easier to believe in than dubious islands. Perhaps
the well-known actual instances of Rockall and the Virgin
Rocks may have prompted credence in other spears and knolls
of the earth crust here and there reaching the surface.

The Hydrographic Office does not believe in any such Green
Rock or Green Island but supplies, in a letter to the writer, a
mariner's yarn which is not without interest and may be evidence
for the rock as far as it goes.

"Captain Tulloch, of New Hampshire, states that an acquaint-
ance of his, Captain Coombs, of the ship Pallas, of Bath, Maine,
in keeping a lookout for Green Island actually saw it on a
remarkably fine day when the sea was smooth. According to the
story, he went out in his boat and examined it and found it to be
a large rock covered with green moss. The rock did not seem
much larger than a vessel floating bottom upward, and it was
smooth all around. The summit was higher than a vessel's
bottom would appear out of the water, being about twenty feet
above the surface of the sea. Captain Coombs added that if the
object had not been so high he would have thought it to be a
capsized vessel. A sounding taken near this spot shows that a
depth of 1,500 fathoms exists there."

So Greenland, misunderstood and carried southward, dwindles
to what may be taken for a capsized vessel's hull, the existence
of which is denied by those who best should know. Or, to take
it the other way about, the traditions of Green Island, dwindling,
prompted the mariner's fancy to develop a Green Rock; and
Green Island is in numerous instances derived mainly, even if
remotely, from Greenland, reinforced sometimes by implications
of attractiveness.



ORIGIN OF NAME AND JUSTIFICATION 101

ORIGIN OF THE NAME "GREENLAND" AND ITS JUSTIFICATION

There can be no doubt that the Down East sea captain, who
was so quick to perceive green vegetation on his fancied Green
Island, came nearer the true explanation of Greenland's name
than the good prebendary of Bremen with his bluish-green
Norsemen colored by the sea. It is pretty well understood that
about 985 or 986 Eric Rauda (Eric the Red, or Ruddy), the first
explorer and colonizer of this new region, applied the name at
least partly as an advertisement of fertility and promising con-
ditions for the encouragement of Icelandic colonists. This is
the way Ari Frode (the Wise), the best informed man of Iceland,
puts it in his surviving Libellus of the "Islendingabok" about a
century later: 13

This country which is called Greenland was discovered and colonized
from Iceland. Eric the Red was the name of the man, an inhabitant of
Breidafirth, who went thither from here and settled at that place, which
has since been called Ericsfirth. He gave a name to the country and called
it Greenland and said that it must persuade men to go thither if it had a
good name. They found there both east and west in the country the
dwellings of men and fragments of boats and stone implements such that
it might be perceived from these that that manner of people had been
there who have inhabited Wineland and whom Greenlanders call Skrae-
lings. And this when he set about the colonization of the country was
fourteen or fifteen winters before the introduction of Christianity here in
Iceland, according to what a certain man who himself accompanied Eric
the Red thither informed Thorkell Gellison.

This last was an uncle of Ari, a man of liberal and inquiring
mind and one of Ari's most valued sources of knowledge as
to the affairs of earlier generations.

The passage has been often quoted, but that Eric was largely
justified in his nomenclature is less generally known. Greenland
to the intending colonists would naturally mean not the ice-
enshrouded waste of the almost continental interior nor yet the
forbidding cliffs of the eastern coast guarded by a nearly impas-
sable floe-laden Arctic current, but the really habitable thousand-
mile fringe of uncovered land along the southwestern shore, on

12 Quoted by Nansen in his "In Northern Mists," Vol. i, p. 260.