Its Insular Character
Adam’s idea of oceanic insulation was accepted in many quarters, as the maps disclose. Of course, they may not have derived it from him in all instances, directly or indirectly, but at least they shared it. Usually the name, slightly changed, becomes the equivalent “Green Island” in one or another of several languages. Thus, to take a very late instance, the map of Coppo, 1528[176] ([Fig. 13]), discloses near the true site of Greenland a mass of land elongated from east to west, but clearly all at sea with no greater land near it, and labeled Isola Verde. There seems no room for doubt of the meaning or origin of this name. That any land found there should be an island of the sea was the natural assumption of geographers at that time. Maps of the early sixteenth century generally show a scattering of islands south of North America sometimes approaching an archipelago, sometimes more widely distributed, and in either case being substitutes for what we now know as North America and its appendages.
As “Illa Verde” on the Catalan Map of 1480
In another well-known map[177] ([Fig. 7]), an unnamed cartographer, said to be Catalan, probably about 1480, delineates an elongated Illa Verde (using the Portuguese name for island), locating it southwest of Iceland, which bears the name Fixlanda, but is easily identifiable by its outline and geographical features. His Illa Verde runs nearly north and south, approximating more closely than Coppo’s island the true trend of Greenland. It also by its greater bulk seems founded on more adequate information. It is equally at sea and remote from other land, except that off its concave southern end, with a narrow interval, lies a large circular island named Brazil, our old mythical acquaintance of medieval maps not often located so far westward but, as we have seen in Chapter IV, apparently intended to represent the Gulf of St. Lawrence region. These two islands strikingly resemble in general situation and arrangement the Greenland and Estotiland (Labrador) in a map ([Fig. 14]) illustrating Torfaeus’ early eighteenth century “Gronlandia,”[178] except that the rounded outline of Estotiland is not completed, its proportional area is greater than “Brazil,” the strait between the two bodies of land is a little wider, and the lower end of Torfaeus’ Greenland is not made concave like that of Illa Verde. But again there can be no doubt that the Illa Verde of the Catalan (if he were a Catalan) represents the Greenland of Adam of Bremen and the sagas.
Fig. 13—Coppo’s world map of 1528 showing Green Island (“isola verde”). (After Kretschmer’s hand-copied reproduction.)
Green Island on Sixteenth-Century Maps
To the same origin, in a remoter sense, we may ascribe the rather large Insula Viridis of Schöner, 1520,[179] which is brought down to a latitude between that of southern Ireland and that of northern Spain and something east of mid-ocean. It must seem that the map-maker had quite lost sight of any relation between this Latinized Green Island and the true Greenland of the northwest.
Fig. 14—Bishop Thorláksson’s map of Greenland 1606, showing Estotiland as a part of America. Cf. with [Fig. 18]. (From Torfaeus’ “Gronlandia antiqua,” Copenhagen, 1706, in the library of the American Geographical Society.)