The Zeno Map
A glance at the Zeno map ([Fig. 19]) discloses a good approximation to the general outline, trend, and taper of Greenland, with certain features which imply information. For a long time it was thought that no earlier source existed from which this could have been drawn by Zeno the compiler. But of later years other fifteenth-century maps showing Greenland have been discovered in various libraries, notably four by Nordenskiöld,[228] out of which or out of others like them Zeno could certainly have gleaned all that he needed for judicious copying. In particular the maps of Donnus Nicolaus Germanus (1466 to 1474, or a little later; e. g. [Fig. 17]), elaborated from the map of Claudius Clavus (1427; [Fig. 16]), seem to supply the chief features of the Zeno exhibition.[229] Sharing an error common to Clavus and all successors of his school, Zeno connected Greenland to Europe. He also represented its eastern coast as habitable at the extreme upper end. It is true that a visitor to the real surviving Greenland settlement about Ericsfiord probably would not learn the facts about these matters, so that his misinformation is no disproof of the visits of the older Zeni to that country. On the other hand, it would be difficult to point to any convincing evidence that either of them was ever there. Kohl suggests[230] that the fisherman’s story may be a mere reflection of the general American knowledge of Greenlanders, and this might call for the presence of one of the Zeni in Greenland to hear the story. But, if the Norse of Greenland knew anything about Newfoundland or Labrador, they could hardly have credited and passed along these word pictures of cities, libraries, and kings. The only thing like internal corroboration is in the geography of Estotiland and Drogio.
As Nicolò Zeno followed the disciples of Claudius Clavus in outlining Greenland, so he took for his guide Mattheus Prunes’ map of 1553[231] in dealing with the more eastern islands. Podanda or Porlanda (Pomona, the main island of the Orkneys) and Neome (Fair Island) are in both (Figs. 19 and 12). Prunes displaces these islands to a position west, instead of south, of southern Shetland (Estiland or Esthlanda), and Zeno simply carries them both still farther west, while moving them southward; but his Neome is still in the latitude of the lower end of Shetland. Long before the time of either of them, the Faroe Islands had been shown as one territory—see the Ysferi (Faroe Islands) of the eleventh-century map of the Cottonian MS. in the British Museum, reproduced by Santarem.[232] The main islands are in fact barely severed from each other by a thread of water.