Nova Scotia as Markland
Certainly this might involve the inclusion of Nova Scotia in the second of the three regions; and there have been many to champion this peninsula as distinctively Markland. But other features of Nova Scotia attracted the attention of Karlsefni’s party and gave parts of that land an individuality distinguished from that of the forest country. The great cape Kjalarness, which seems to have been the northern horn of Cape Breton Island, and the exceedingly long strands, which may now be represented in part by the low front of Richmond County, are duly recorded, with no suggestion of their belonging to Markland, the region farther north. Also on the Stefánsson map above referred to ([Fig. 18]), the name Promontorium Vinlandiae is applied to a long protuberance apparently meant for this part of Cape Breton Island, containing the counties of Victoria and Inverness, and the much earlier statement in Arna-Magnaean Manuscript 194 concerning the sea running in between Markland and Wineland seems to mark all south of Cabot Strait as belonging in some sense to the latter region. No doubt the name Markland may sometimes have been used with vagueness of limitation; but on the whole it seems most likely that Newfoundland was Markland almost exclusively. It seems practically certain, at the least, that the characteristics first noted in Newfoundland supplied the earlier regional name.
In many of the discussions of this exploring saga there has been too great a tendency to localize the territorial names, as though Wineland for example must denote a small area or short stretch of coast. Professor Hovgaard has even suggested that there may have been two Winelands—Leif’s Wineland being much farther south than Karlsefni’s, the name in each case standing for some one site or place and the territory immediately about it. This does not accord well with one of the notes on the Stefánsson map, which gives Wineland an extension as far as a fiord dividing it from “the America of the Spaniard.” That may be read as meaning Chesapeake Bay and must at any rate be taken to suggest great extension for this region, since the Promontorium Vinlandiae, as already stated, obviously marks its upper end. Markland need not be conceived as of equal size, for in truth it represents at most only the wild and wooded interval between the hopelessly void and barren north and the great habitable, comfortable, and fruitful region stretching far below; but so much of parallelism holds as will forbid us to anchor the name to any one locality on the Newfoundland shore. Doubtless the long sea front of the great island as a whole is entitled to the name.