Probable Basis of Fact Underlying This Legendary Island
What was this island, then, which held its place in the maps during half a millennium and more, under two chief names and occasional substitutes, designations apparently received from so many different peoples? One cannot easily set it aside as a “peculiar appearance of the surface” or as a mere figment of fancy. But there is nothing westward or southwestward of the Azores except the Bermudas and the capes and coast islands of America. The identification with some outlying island of the Azores, as Corvo, for example, is an old hypothesis; and the grotesquery of that rocky islet seems to have deeply impressed the minds of early navigators, lending some countenance to the idea. But the Laurenziano map of 1351[173] and the Book of the Spanish Friar[174] show that all the islands of the Azores group were known before the middle of the fourteenth century, and Corvo in particular had been given the name which it still holds. Man, afterward Mayda, appears on many maps of the fifteenth century, which show also the Azores in full. Perhaps this is not conclusive, for there are strange blunders and duplications on old maps; but it is at least highly significant. If Man, or Mayda, were really Corvo or another island of the Azores group, surely someone would have found it out in the course of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, just as it came to be perceived after a time that the Azores had been located too near to Europe and just as Bianco’s duplication of the Azores in 1448 had finally to be rejected. Mayda, if real, must have been something more remote and difficult to determine than Corvo.
Perhaps Nicolay and Zaltieri were right in thinking that Mayda was America, or at least was on the side of the Atlantic toward America. The latitude generally chosen by the maps would then call for Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland, often supposed to be insular in early days; or perhaps for Cape Breton Island, the next salient land feature. But that is an uncertain reliance, for the observations of pre-Columbian navigators would surely be rather haphazard, and they might naturally judge by similarity of climate. This would justify them in supposing that a region really more southerly lay in the latitude of northern France—for example Cape Cod, which juts out conspicuously and is curved and almost insular. Or by going farther south, although nearer Europe, they might thus indicate the Bermudas, the main island of which is given a crescent form on several relatively late maps. But we must not lay too much stress on this last item, for divers other map islands were modeled on this plan. We may be justified, then, in saying that Mayda was probably west of the middle of the Atlantic and that Bermuda, Cape Cod, or Cape Breton is as likely a candidate for identification as we can name.
CHAPTER VII
GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND
The first account of Greenland given to the world, indeed the first mention of that region in literature, is by Adam of Bremen, an ecclesiastical official and geographical author.