Position of Greenland.
Thought to be a part of Europe.
There mightpossibly have been shown to Columbus an old manuscript chronicle of the kings of Norway, which they called the Heimskringla, and which had been written by Snorre Sturlason in the thirteenth century; and if he had turned the leaves with any curiosity, he could have read, or have had translated for him, accounts of the Norse colonization of Greenland in the ninth century. Where, then, was this Greenland? Could it possibly have had any connection with that Cathay of Marco Polo, so real in the vision of Columbus, and which was supposed to lie above India in the higher latitudes? As a student of contemporary cartography, Columbus would have answered such a question readily, had it been suggested; for he would have known that Greenland had been represented in all the maps, since it was first recognized at all, as merely an extended peninsula of Scandinavia, made by a southward twist to enfold a northern sea, in which Iceland lay. One certainly cannot venture to say how far Columbus may have had an acquaintance with the cartographical repertories, more or less well stocked, as they doubtless were, in the great commercial centres of maritime Europe, but the knowledge which we to-day have in detail could hardly have been otherwise than a common possession among students of geography then. We comprehend now how, as far back as 1427, a map of Claudius Clavus showed Greenland as this peninsular adjunct to the northwest of Europe,—a view enforced also in a map of 1447, in the Pitti palace, and in one which Nordenskiöld recently found in a Codex of Ptolemy at Warsaw, dated in 1467. A few years later, and certainly before Columbus could have gone on this voyage, we find a map which it is more probable he could have known, and that is the engraved one of Nicholas Donis, drawn presumably in 1471, and later included in the edition of Ptolemy published at Ulm in 1482. The same European connection is here maintained. Again it is represented in the map of Henricus Martellus (1489-90), in a way that produced a succession of maps, which till long after the death of Columbus continued to make this Norse colony a territorial appendage of Scandinavian Europe, betraying not the slightest symptom of a belief that Eric the Red had strayed beyond the circle of European connections.
CLAUDIUS CLAVUS, 1427.
[From Nordenskiöld's Studien.]
BORDONE, 1528.
[Greenland is the Northernmost Peninsula of N. W. Europe.]