Thorne, the Englishman, in the map which he sent from Seville in 1527,[767] seems to conform to the view which made Greenland a European peninsula, which may also have been the opinion of Orontius Finæus in 1531.[768] A novel feature attaches to an Atlas, of about this date, preserved at Turin, in which an elongated Greenland is made to stretch northerly.[769] In 1532 we have the map in Ziegler’s Schondia, which more nearly resembles the earliest map of all, that of Claudius Clavus, than any other.[770] The 1538 cordiform map of Mercator makes it a peninsula of an arctic region connected with Scandinavia.[771] This map is known to me only through a fac-simile of the copy given in the Geografia of Lafreri, published at Rome about 1560, with which I am favored by Nordenskjöld in advance of its publication in his Atlas.
FROM OLAUS MAGNUS’ HISTORIA, 1567.
The great Historia of Olaus Magnus, as for a long time the leading authority on the northern geography, as well as on the Scandinavian chronicles, gives us some distinct rendering of this northern geographical problem. It was only recently that his earliest map of 1539 has been brought to light, and a section of it is here reproduced from a much reduced fac-simile kindly sent to the editor by Dr. Oscar Brenner of the university at Munich. Nordenskjöld, in giving a full fac-simile of the Olaus Magnus map of 1567,[772] of which a fragment is herewith also given in fac-simile, says that it embodies the views of the northern geographers in separating Greenland from Europe, which was in opposition to those of the geographers of the south of Europe, who united Greenland to Scandinavia. Sebastian Münster in his 1540 edition of Ptolemy introduced a new confusion. He preserved the European elongated peninsula, but called it “Islandia,” while to what stands for Iceland is given the old classical name of Thyle.[773] This confusion is repeated in his map of 1545,[774] where he makes the coast of “Islandia” continuous with Baccalaos. This continuity of coast line seemed now to become a common heritage of some of the map-makers,[775] though in the Ulpius globe of 1542 “Groestlandia,” so far as it is shown, stands separate from either continent,[776] but is connected with Europe according to the early theory in the Isolario of Bordone in 1547.
BORDONE’S SCANDINAVIA, 1547.
Reproduced from the fac-simile given in Nordenskjöld’s Studien (Leipzig, 1885).
We have run down the main feature of the northern cartography, up to the time of the publication of the Zeno map in 1558. The chief argument for its authenticity is that there had been nothing drawn and published up to that time which could have conduced, without other aid, to so accurate an outline of Greenland as it gives. In an age when drafts of maps freely circulated over Europe, from cartographer to cartographer, in manuscript, it does not seem necessary that the search for prototypes or prototypic features should be confined to those which had been engraved.
ZENO MAP. (Reduced.)