Conjectures as to the Derivation of “Estotiland”
Evidently this map-maker attributed the name Estotiland to the Norsemen of Greenland on the faith of the fisherman’s story, for no other Scandinavians can be supposed to have fastened a name on the region in question. But, barring the last syllable, which is a common affix, the name has an Italian sound rather than Scandinavian. “East-out-land” has been suggested as a derivation, but why in this instance should either Norse or Italian borrow an English name? Another suggestion requires the use of the first three syllables of the motto “esto fidelis usque ad mortem” making up “Estofi,” with the appendant “land.” But there seems no historic link of positive connection, and the letter “f” would not readily change into “t.” Perhaps “Escotiland” or “Escociland” (Scotland) is a more likely conjecture (first made by Beauvois[220]), since “c” often resembles “t” in older forms of handwriting and might readily be misunderstood. The name may have been applied in the same spirit which has long affixed “Scotia” (Nova Scotia) to a lower part of the same Atlantic coast. That the name was ever really thus applied by the Norsemen seems very unlikely; but Nicolò Zeno may have used it to help out his fisherman’s yarn as readily as he certainly adapted “King Daedalus of Scotland” to help out his more mythical account of Icaria. Or “Estotiland” may be a modification of Estilanda or Esthlanda, a form sometimes taken by Shetland, for example on the map of Prunes, 1553[221] ([Fig. 12]). In casting about for a name, it would be an economy of effort on the part of Zeno or the fisherman to utilize one that was familiar. But I do not know that this derivation from Estiland has ever before been suggested.
The Estotilanders
Ortelius, in crediting the discovery of the New World to the Norsemen, seems to identify Estotiland with Vinland.[222] He was so far right that the fisherman’s account of the people of Estotiland was evidently composed by some one acquainted with the mistaken ideal of Vinland, or Wineland, which pictured it a permanent Norse offshoot from Greenland, perhaps slowly deteriorating but still possessed of a city and library, letters and the ordinary useful arts of at least a primitive northern white civilization, trading regularly with Greenland though archaic enough to lack the mariner’s compass, and in most respects fairly on a par with the Icelanders, Faroese, Shetlanders, or Orkneymen of the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. We know that such Estotilanders did not exist; that the ground was occupied by Beothuk Indians, possibly slightly influenced by Greenlanders’ timber-gathering visits, with Eskimos for neighbors on one side and Micmac Algonquins on the other; and that none of these could be thought even so far advanced in culture as some natives farther down the coast. But it is interesting to get the point of view of the narrator or reporter.
Drogio
The tale is of a prolonged residence among these alleged relatively advanced Estotiland people, followed by a much longer wandering sojourn, mostly as a captive, in a great “new world” southwest of it and a final escape. Drogio (also spelled “Drogeo” and “Droceo” on some maps) was the region through which this continental territory was entered. It is plainly an island, to judge by the maps; but, according to the narrative, it should be close inshore, since no mention is made of water being crossed by the neighboring chief, who made war on the first captors and thus acquired the fishermen. This accords curiously with the facts as to Cape Breton Island, which is barely cut off by the Gut of Canso, being easily reached by any incursion from the mainland. It also lies southward from Newfoundland (Estotiland), but sailing vessels would ordinarily be required to get to it across the broad Cabot Strait, where the conditions of storm and shipwreck might well be supplied. It is, indeed, surprising, since the description of inhabitants and conditions is so far from the truth, that the geography of Estotiland and Drogio should be given so much more accurately than in some carefully prepared and useful maps of the same period, for example Nicolay’s of 1560[223] ([Fig. 6]) and Zaltieri’s of 1566,[224] both of which represent Newfoundland as broken up into an archipelago; and the same may be said of Gastaldi’s map illustrating Ramusio.[225]
It has been generally surmised that the name Drogio represents some native word, but there is a lack of evidence and a difficulty in identification. Lucas thinks it may be a corruption of Boca del Drago,[226] a strait between Trinidad and the mainland South America; but this seems a far-fetched and unsupported conjecture: All the other island names used by Zeno are of European origin, and Drogio by its sound and orthography suggests Italy. Perhaps the best guess we can make would point to the Italian words “deroga” or “dirogare” as supplying in disparagement a form afterward contracted to Drogio; for the latter island, lower in latitude and elevation, was also, according to the narrative, inferior in the status of its population and might well be spoken of derogatively. We have seen that a fairly high culture is imputed to Estotiland; whereas the natives of Drogio were sunk in mere cannibal savagery. Notwithstanding the plain implication of the story as to the comparative nearness of the two regions and the concurrent testimony of the Zeno map, Drogio has been located by some theorizers at divers different points of our coast line from Canada to Florida and even as far afield as Ireland—which is perhaps a shade more extravagant than Lucas’s South American derivation of the name.
Discrepancies in the Narrative of the Fisherman
There is this to be said for the last-mentioned speculation and some others, that the statements concerning the mainland natives are plainly prompted by Spanish accounts of certain naked and cannibalistic denizens of the tropics, when not due to the experience of Cortés and his companions among the teocallis and ceremonial sacrifices of the Aztecs. That any one starting from Nova Scotia or thereabout could have reached southern or at least central Mexico and returned alone must have struck even Nicolò Zeno the younger as incredible, if he had any conception of the distances and difficulties involved. But probably he believed the area of temple building to extend farther northward than it actually did and had little notion of the great waste of intervening interior. Besides, it is not explicitly stated that the fisherman saw these things; and to have gone far enough to encounter a rumor of them, though a very improbable, would not be a quite impossible, feat.
As regards the characteristics of the ruder inhabitants who nearly devoured him, fought for him, and two dozen times shifted ownership of him from chief to chief, he must surely be understood to speak from personal observation; but there is a conspicuous failure of corroboration from internal evidence. We know a good deal about the Indian tribes of northeastern America of a time not very much later, and hardly a distinctive characteristic which he gives will fit what we know. To say that the Algonquian tribes and their neighbors had not sense to clothe themselves with the skins of the animals they killed is itself arrant nonsense; to assert that they habitually ate each other like Caribs is an imputation without foundation. The total absence of metals among them is as untrue as the great abundance of gold in Estotiland, for many of them had at least a little copper. They did not live wholly by hunting—at least south of Nova Scotia—but were partly agricultural, raising Indian corn and various vegetables. They did not depend, in hunting, on wooden lances with sharpened points, though some backward and feeble far-southern insular tribes are reported to have done so. They were expert fishermen with weirs and nets and inducted many of the white settlers into their secrets, so naturally would not extravagantly need nor prize the counsel of a white specialist in the same line, though he might have some things to teach them. Finally, the really distinctive features of the Indian race in these latitudes, such as bark canoes and the peculiarities of maize cultivation, are not mentioned at all.