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 languages. Thus, to take a very late instance, the map of Coppo, 1528[176] ([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.