Perhaps the nearest approach thereto is a fifteenth-century Catalan map[208] ([Fig. 7]) preserved in the Ambrosian library in Milan, which as we have seen in Chapter IV, presents Greenland (Illa Verde) as a great elongated rectangle of land in northern waters, having a concave southern end. Below this, beyond a narrow interval of water, appears a large round island, the direction certainly calling for Labrador or Newfoundland, probably the latter. The minimizing of the distance between these land masses may indicate some report of the ease with which the crossing was effected. At any rate, unless we are prepared to set aside the testimony of the map altogether as mere fancy work, we must acknowledge that some one had a general impression of land in mass south or southwest of Greenland and reasonably accessible therefrom.
Brazil Island in the Place of Markland
The name Brazil given to this island on the map and its disk-like form link it to the long series, already discussed, of “Brazil islands,” approximately in the latitude of Newfoundland, on the medieval maps, beginning with that of Dalorto of 1325[209] ([Fig. 4]). Usually, as in this last instance, they have the circular form—sometimes, however, being annular, with an island-studded lake or gulf inside, and sometimes being divided into two parts by a curved channel. Usually, too, the station of this Brazil is pretty near southern Ireland, off the Blaskets, but sometimes it is carried out into mid-Atlantic, and in the sixteenth-century maps of Nicolay[210] (1560; [Fig. 6]) and Zaltieri[211] (1566) it is taken clear across to the Banks of Newfoundland or a little nearer inshore. From various mutually corroborative indications, I have been impressed with the belief that it is probably a record of some early crossing of the Atlantic from Ireland; but whatever the explanation, Brazil Island remains one of the most interesting of map phenomena. Its name was somehow passed along to Terceira of the Azores, where there is still a Mt. Brazil, and long thereafter to the largest of South American countries.
Its appearance near Greenland and as a substitute for Markland is not easily accounted for. The matter is indeed complicated on this fifteenth-century map by the appearance of a second Brazil (of the channeled type) in the middle of the Atlantic. It may be that the cartographer was familiar with this form and kind of presentation in older maps and did not feel warranted in giving up that “Brazil;” but had received convincing information of lands southwest or south of Greenland, with some suggestion of Brazil as a name traditionally associated with such discoveries, and so drew and named it. Undoubtedly the map is the work of a man well acquainted with the first disk form of Brazil and the later channeled or divided form, beside having some knowledge of later discoveries in Greenland and beyond.
There is a parallel to the two Brazils of his map in the two series of Azores on that of Bianco (1448).[212] The latter cartographer retained the original Italian-discovered series, inaccurately aligned north and south, but showed also farther afield the islands of Portuguese rediscovery, properly slanted northwestward, omitting only Flores and Corvo, which the rediscoverers had not yet found or at least had not yet brought to his notice. Another map of about the same period makes the same double showing—certainly a curious compromise between conservatism and progressiveness.
The Zeno Narrative
There is perhaps no other news of Markland before it became Newfoundland, unless we may put some glimmer of faith in the much-discussed Zeno narrative[213] (Ch. IX), which embodies the tale of an Orkney islander wrecked on the shore of Estotiland (perhaps the name was first written Escociland—Scotland) a little before the opening of the fifteenth century. He professed to have found there a people having some of the rudiments of civilization and carrying on trade with Greenland, but ignorant of the mariner’s compass. The picture given is not incredible and perhaps receives some support from the really notable works known to have been executed by the Beothuks[214] of Newfoundland in their later and feebler, though not quite their latest days—such as extensive deer fences, to give their hunters the utmost benefit from the annual migrations. Granted a certain infusion of Norse blood, or even without it, there is perhaps nothing stated of the Escocilanders which may not have been true. As to the name, it is no more strange than Nova Scotia, which still occupies the coast just to the south, and it may have been applied in the same spirit.
Very early in the history of European colonization this Markland—which by its outjutting position was accused of being a New-found-land, again and again with varying designations during the ill-recorded centuries—took under the latter name the position, which it still holds, of the very earliest of the English colonies of the New World.