Greenland as a Peninsula
We must remember, though, that during the earlier part of this period there were not many maps extant which included the Atlantic, and of these the greater number were more concerned with theological conceptions and figures of wonder than with the sober facts of geography, especially in remote places. About 1300 a remarkable series of navigators’ portolan maps, revolutionizing this attitude, began to add to the delineation of the Mediterranean, which they had already developed with considerable minuteness, something definite of the outer European coasts, islands, and waters. Step by step they advanced into the unknown or little known, but perhaps none of them, before the fifteenth century, can be confidently relied on as indicating Greenland.
This remained for the Nancy map of Claudius Clavus (Schwartz), 1427[191] ([Fig. 16]). Greenland is, however, made distinctly continuous with Europe, being connected thereto by a long land bridge, far north of Iceland, in accordance with an hypothesis then prevailing. The second half of the same century saw this conception of Claudius Clavus greatly popularized. Divers maps[192] appeared, some showing Greenland as a prodigiously elongated peninsula of Europe, having its tip in the correct location ([Fig. 17]), while others ran up a perverse trapezoidal Greenland from the north coast of Norway.
Probably one or more of the former kind suggested in part the memorable Zeno map of 1558[193] ([Fig. 19]), professing to be a reproduction of a map prepared by the Zeni of a past generation and carelessly damaged by the final editor in boyhood. If not a total forgery, it is at least untrustworthy, as we shall see in Chapter IX, and the same is true of an accompanying narrative of experiences in Greenland about 1400.
Another map of somewhat later date, by Sigurdr Stefánsson, probably 1590[194] ([Fig. 18]), is a quite honest presentation of the traditional views of Icelanders at that time and is distinctly more modern than the Zeno map in the complete severance of Greenland from Europe and its union with the great western land mass which included Helluland, Markland, and Vinland, supposed to be divided by a fiord from “America of the Spaniards.” Of course, that union with the Western continent is not precisely accurate and the eastward trend which he gives his great peninsula is still less so; but his map, often copied, remains a peculiarly interesting production.