Perhaps Nicolay and Zaltieri were right in thinking that Mayda was America, or at least was on the side of the Atlantic toward America. The latitude generally chosen by the maps would then call for Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland, often supposed to be insular in early days; or perhaps for Cape Breton Island, the next salient land feature. But that is an uncertain reliance, for the observations of pre-Columbian navigators would surely be rather haphazard, and they might naturally judge by similarity of climate. This would justify them in supposing that a region really more southerly lay in the latitude of northern France—for example Cape Cod, which juts out conspicuously and is curved and almost insular. Or by going farther south, although nearer Europe, they might thus indicate the Bermudas, the main island of which is given a crescent form on several relatively late maps. But we must not lay too much stress on this last item, for divers other map islands were modeled on this plan. We may be justified, then, in saying that Mayda was probably west of the middle of the Atlantic and that Bermuda, Cape Cod, or Cape Breton is as likely a candidate for identification as we can name.
CHAPTER VII
GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND
The first account of Greenland given to the world, indeed the first mention of that region in literature, is by Adam of Bremen, an ecclesiastical official and geographical author.
Adam of Bremen’s Account of Greenland
He interviewed in 1069 the enterprising king Sweyn of Denmark, and acquired from him divers Scandinavian and other northern items which Adam embodied about 1076 in his work “Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis,” the Description of the Northern Islands. Nansen quotes, with other matter, the following passages:[175]
... On the north this ocean flows past the Orchades, thence endlessly around the circle of the earth, having on the left Hybernia, the home of the Scots, which is now called Ireland, and on the right the skerries of Nordmannia, and farther off the islands of Iceland and Greenland....
Furthermore, there are many other islands in the great ocean, of which Greenland is not the least; it lies farther out in the ocean, opposite the mountains of Suedea, or the Riphean range. To this island, it is said, one can sail from the shore of Nortmannia [sic] in five or seven days, as likewise to Iceland. The people there are blue (“cerulei”, bluish-green) from the salt water; and from this the region takes its name. They live in a similar fashion to the Icelanders, except that they are more cruel and trouble seafarers by predatory attacks. To them also, as is reported, Christianity has lately been wafted.
It was in fact about seventy-five years since Leif, son of Eric the Red, according to the sagas, had effected that wafting from the Christian court of Norway to the still pagan Norsemen of his father’s far-western domain. For Adam clearly means these white people and not the Eskimos, with whom they had not yet come in contact and of whom no whisper had yet reached the European world unless it related to relics of former occupancy discerned on first landing. It is surely matter for astonishment to find the ruddy followers of hot-blooded Eric described as bluish-green and so conspicuous in this complexion that it gave their region its name. Perhaps there is no more curious instance to be found of the inveterate human tendency to read into any unfamiliar name some meaning that seems plausible.
It is not clear where Adam supposed Greenland to be located; perhaps he, too, was not clear about the matter. The earlier of his two passages on the subject seems to call for something like the true location in the far west; but the later mention of the mountains of Sweden has been understood by the most learned commentators to indicate a site directly north of Norway. King Sweyn perhaps had a fairly good idea of the sailing courses for Iceland and Greenland, but his guest may have assimilated the information rather confusedly. Adam seems convinced that Greenland was a distinctly oceanic island, with no suggestion of any near relation to any continent. In this respect he differs from certain maps of the fifteenth century with which we shall presently have to deal. We know now that the truth lies between these views; that the highly glaciated mass which we name in its entirety Greenland is, indeed, an island and probably the largest of islands but an island with the aspect and attributes of a peninsula, being barely severed from that polar archipelago which crowns our American mainland and being not very remote at one point from the mainland itself.