Grocland, Helluland, etc.
On the western side of the Atlantic there are divers instances of island names given of old—sometimes with considerable changes of location, area, or outline, or of all three—to regions which we know quite otherwise. Some of these have been dealt with extensively already. Greenland has a lesser neighbor, Grocland, on its western side in divers sixteenth-century maps; which I take to be a magnified presentation of Disko or possibly a reflection of Baffin Land brought near. It appears conspicuously in Mercator’s map of the Polar basin (1569),[309] the Hakluyt map of 1587 illustrating Peter Martyr,[310] and the map of Mathias Quadus (1608).[311]
This is not the place to enlarge on the Helluland, Markland, and Vinland of the Norsemen beginning with the eleventh century, as this theme has been dealt with elsewhere.[312] But they were often thought of as islands, as shown by the notice of Adam of Bremen. Perhaps there was never any great clearness of conception as to extent or form. But in a general way they may be identified respectively with northern Labrador, Newfoundland, and the warmer parts of the Atlantic coast. Great Iceland, or White Men’s Land, seems also to have been understood as what we should now call America. Eugène Beauvois located it conjecturally about the mouth of the St. Lawrence River.[313] Dr. Gustav Storm, on the other hand, thought it was merely Iceland misunderstood.[314]