The Estotilanders
Ortelius, in crediting the discovery of the New World to the Norsemen, seems to identify Estotiland with Vinland.[222] He was so far right that the fisherman’s account of the people of Estotiland was evidently composed by some one acquainted with the mistaken ideal of Vinland, or Wineland, which pictured it a permanent Norse offshoot from Greenland, perhaps slowly deteriorating but still possessed of a city and library, letters and the ordinary useful arts of at least a primitive northern white civilization, trading regularly with Greenland though archaic enough to lack the mariner’s compass, and in most respects fairly on a par with the Icelanders, Faroese, Shetlanders, or Orkneymen of the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. We know that such Estotilanders did not exist; that the ground was occupied by Beothuk Indians, possibly slightly influenced by Greenlanders’ timber-gathering visits, with Eskimos for neighbors on one side and Micmac Algonquins on the other; and that none of these could be thought even so far advanced in culture as some natives farther down the coast. But it is interesting to get the point of view of the narrator or reporter.