The Zeno Narrative
There is perhaps no other news of Markland before it became Newfoundland, unless we may put some glimmer of faith in the much-discussed Zeno narrative[213] (Ch. IX), which embodies the tale of an Orkney islander wrecked on the shore of Estotiland (perhaps the name was first written Escociland—Scotland) a little before the opening of the fifteenth century. He professed to have found there a people having some of the rudiments of civilization and carrying on trade with Greenland, but ignorant of the mariner’s compass. The picture given is not incredible and perhaps receives some support from the really notable works known to have been executed by the Beothuks[214] of Newfoundland in their later and feebler, though not quite their latest days—such as extensive deer fences, to give their hunters the utmost benefit from the annual migrations. Granted a certain infusion of Norse blood, or even without it, there is perhaps nothing stated of the Escocilanders which may not have been true. As to the name, it is no more strange than Nova Scotia, which still occupies the coast just to the south, and it may have been applied in the same spirit.
Very early in the history of European colonization this Markland—which by its outjutting position was accused of being a New-found-land, again and again with varying designations during the ill-recorded centuries—took under the latter name the position, which it still holds, of the very earliest of the English colonies of the New World.
CHAPTER IX
ESTOTILAND AND THE OTHER ISLANDS OF ZENO
Some of the well-known mythical or dubious map islands of the North Atlantic make their entry into cartography very early indeed, apparently as the contribution or record of otherwise forgotten voyages, though we cannot say with certainty precisely when or how; others, long afterward, were the products of mirage, ocean-surface phenomena, or mariners’ fancies working under the suggestion of saintly or demoniacal legends amid the hazes and perils of little-known seas, the precise time of their origin remaining uncertain. As a rule the latter class were less persistent on the maps and are geographically rather unimportant.
In two cases, however, Estotiland and Drogio, we know the first appearance of their names before the public, which is very probably the first use of them among men. They derive a special interest from being located in America and from an asserted journey by Europeans to them more than a hundred years before the first voyage of Columbus. The map which first shows them also displays divers other Atlantic islands, either of unusual name or unusual location and area, not conforming at all to the insular tracts of the North Atlantic basin as we know them now. The fantastic exhibition as a whole had an immediate, long-continuing, and considerable—almost revolutionary—effect on the map-making of the world.