Various “Green Islands:” Shrinkage of the Name
There is, indeed, one instance of a Green Island with which Greenland can have had nothing whatever to do. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s sketch map of 1511[182] shows a small tropical Isla Verde near Trinidad; it is apparently Tobago. Doubtless its luxuriance of vegetation prompted the name.
This may have happened in other instances of warm climates or even in temperate zones where grass and foliage grow freely; so that we in many cases cannot distinguish on the maps the Green Islands, real or fanciful, which acquired their name as a remote legacy of Eric’s land from those which were called “green” simply because they were green. Both derivations may sometimes apply; but the islands of the far northwest bearing that name, like Coppo’s island and the Catalan’s Illa Verde, must naturally go into the former category.
As we have seen, Green Islands were scattered rather widely; but the name occurs most often in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the middle or eastern part of the ocean to indicate a small island, having Mayda (Vlaenderen) for its rather distant consort. Desceliers indeed, in 1546[183] ([Fig. 9]), shows it in the same longitude as the tip of Labrador, but this is done by carrying Labrador too far eastward. St. Brandan’s Island is a neighbor on his map. Ortelius, in 1570[184] ([Fig. 10]) and Mercator, in 1587,[185] represent Y Verde west of Vlaenderen in the region north of the Azores. In the eighteenth century it still held its ground west of France in the eastern Atlantic as Isla Verde, Isla Verte, Ile Verte, Ilha Verde, and Green Island. By the early part of the nineteenth century it had, after its kind, dwindled to Green Rock—Brazil Island similarly becoming Brazil Rock—as dubious rocks became easier to believe in than dubious islands. Perhaps the well-known actual instances of Rockall and the Virgin Rocks may have prompted credence in other spears and knolls of the earth crust here and there reaching the surface.
The Hydrographic Office does not believe in any such Green Rock or Green Island but supplies, in a letter to the writer, a mariner’s yarn which is not without interest and may be evidence for the rock as far as it goes.
“Captain Tulloch, of New Hampshire, states that an acquaintance of his, Captain Coombs, of the ship Pallas, of Bath, Maine, in keeping a lookout for Green Island actually saw it on a remarkably fine day when the sea was smooth. According to the story, he went out in his boat and examined it and found it to be a large rock covered with green moss. The rock did not seem much larger than a vessel floating bottom upward, and it was smooth all around. The summit was higher than a vessel’s bottom would appear out of the water, being about twenty feet above the surface of the sea. Captain Coombs added that if the object had not been so high he would have thought it to be a capsized vessel. A sounding taken near this spot shows that a depth of 1,500 fathoms exists there.”
So Greenland, misunderstood and carried southward, dwindles to what may be taken for a capsized vessel’s hull, the existence of which is denied by those who best should know. Or, to take it the other way about, the traditions of Green Island, dwindling, prompted the mariner’s fancy to develop a Green Rock; and Green Island is in numerous instances derived mainly, even if remotely, from Greenland, reinforced sometimes by implications of attractiveness.