Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study of Medieval Geography

by William Henry Babcock

Later Derivative Records

There is great verisimilitude in the Karlsefni narrative and these later derivative records. Their geography agrees convincingly with the facts of the actual coast line from north to south—namely, first a desolate region, cold, bare, and stony, the appropriate home of Arctic foxes; secondly, a game-haunted and very wild forest land, untempting to settlement, unhopeful for agriculture, but a hunter’s paradise; thirdly, the warmer country to the south, well suited to cultivation and even producing spontaneously various kinds of edibles, notably the large fox grapes from which wine might be made. Helluland, the first, remains, as Labrador and perhaps Baffin Land, nearly unchanged excepting some uplift of the shore line; Markland has suffered great inroads of the lumberman’s axe, but still as Newfoundland contains much heavy timber in its western part; Wineland, the third, has become the chief seat of American civilization east of the Appalachian Mountains. But in the time of the Norsemen and long afterward Newfoundland was a veritable Markland, a land of woods, down to its eastern front.[205] Its rediscoverers and earliest settlers found it so; and the maps of Cantino[206] and Canerio,[207] both attributed to 1502 and certainly not much later, exhibit the great island pictorially, under different names, as a mass of woodland with tall trees standing everywhere, apparently thus commemorating the most distinctive and conspicuous natural feature of the land.

Labrador as Markland

Some have urged that the southern part of Labrador may have been Markland; but its trees of any considerable size are to be found only by following up inlets far into the interior where the Arctic current has less power to chill; there is nothing to indicate that conditions were very different then in this regard; and to judge by the narrative itself we must not conceive of the Norse visitors as pausing to explore deeply without allurement, but rather as hastening down the shore in quest of warmer regions and ampler pasturage for their stock which they carried with them, also of a good warm site for settlement, such as Leif had already reported. They were primarily colonists, not explorers of the disinterested or glory-seeking type. It was most natural to sail on; noting only what they could discern from the sea, or by a brief boat-landing. This would hardly give them the idea of a forest land in any part of hard-featured, ice-battered Labrador.

It is probable that, like some later navigators, they would not think of the Strait of Belle Isle as other than a fiord or inlet, after the pattern of the great Hamilton Inlet farther north; and if they guessed Markland to be an island it would be on quite different grounds—chiefly the natural tendency (which persisted until long after their time) to consider every western discovery insular; but they would at least be alive to the distinction between treelessness and an ample forest cover, and we see that in point of fact they did distinguish the regions on just this score.

Nova Scotia as Markland

Certainly this might involve the inclusion of Nova Scotia in the second of the three regions; and there have been many to champion this peninsula as distinctively Markland. But other features of Nova Scotia attracted the attention of Karlsefni’s party and gave parts of that land an individuality distinguished from that of the forest country. The great cape Kjalarness, which seems to have been the northern horn of Cape Breton Island, and the exceedingly long strands, which may now be represented in part by the low front of Richmond County, are duly recorded, with no suggestion of their belonging to Markland, the region farther north. Also on the Stefánsson map above referred to ([Fig. 18]), the name Promontorium Vinlandiae is applied to a long protuberance apparently meant for this part of Cape Breton Island, containing the counties of Victoria and Inverness, and the much earlier statement in Arna-Magnaean Manuscript 194 concerning the sea running in between Markland and Wineland seems to mark all south of Cabot Strait as belonging in some sense to the latter region. No doubt the name Markland may sometimes have been used with vagueness of limitation; but on the whole it seems most likely that Newfoundland was Markland almost exclusively. It seems practically certain, at the least, that the characteristics first noted in Newfoundland supplied the earlier regional name.

In many of the discussions of this exploring saga there has been too great a tendency to localize the territorial names, as though Wineland for example must denote a small area or short stretch of coast. Professor Hovgaard has even suggested that there may have been two Winelands—Leif’s Wineland being much farther south than Karlsefni’s, the name in each case standing for some one site or place and the territory immediately about it. This does not accord well with one of the notes on the Stefánsson map, which gives Wineland an extension as far as a fiord dividing it from “the America of the Spaniard.” That may be read as meaning Chesapeake Bay and must at any rate be taken to suggest great extension for this region, since the Promontorium Vinlandiae, as already stated, obviously marks its upper end. Markland need not be conceived as of equal size, for in truth it represents at most only the wild and wooded interval between the hopelessly void and barren north and the great habitable, comfortable, and fruitful region stretching far below; but so much of parallelism holds as will forbid us to anchor the name to any one locality on the Newfoundland shore. Doubtless the long sea front of the great island as a whole is entitled to the name.

Intercourse between Greenland and Markland

No doubt it is surprising, in view of the deep impression which Markland obviously made on the Norsemen from near-by treeless Greenland and Iceland, to find so few subsequent references to the name or indications of a knowledge of the region. There is a well-known and often cited instance recorded in Icelandic annals—in one instance nearly contemporary—of a small Greenland vessel storm-driven to Iceland in 1347, after having visited Markland, the latter name being presented in a matter-of-course way, much as though it were Ireland or the Orkneys. This has sometimes been taken as evidence of a regular timber traffic between Greenland and Markland during the preceding three centuries and more. It shows at least that acquaintance with the more southwestern country had been kept really alive thus long, and that it was not a half-mythical figure on the frontier of knowledge, to be doubtfully sought for, but territory that one might visit without claiming the reward of new and daring exploration or causing any extreme surprise. What Markland had to offer was so decidedly what Greenland needed, and the repetition of Karlsefni’s voyage thus far was at all times so feasible, that one must suppose the trips to and fro were not wholly intermitted between 1003 and 1347. Only they have left no clear and unquestionable trace.