A little later Scandinavians followed along the northern route, finding convenient stopping points in the Faroes and Iceland, discovered Greenland, and planted two settlements on its southwestern shore in the last quarter of the tenth century (Ch. VII). Some of their ruins, a less number of inscriptions, and many fragmentary relics and residua are found, so that we can form a good idea of their manner of life. Such as it was, it endured more than four hundred years. To contemporary and slightly later geography Greenland appeared most often as a far-flung promontory of Europe, jutting down on the western side of the great water; but sometimes it was thought of as an oceanic island, with greater or less shifting of location, and seems to be responsible for divers mythical Green Islands of various maps and languages.
Less than a quarter of a century after their first landing the Norse Greenlanders became aware of a more temperate coast line to the southwest, the better part of which they called Vinland, or Wineland, but all of which we now name America. Perhaps Leif Ericsson brought the first report of it as the result of an accidental landfall close to the year 1000 A. D. Not long afterward, Thorfinn Karlsefni with three ships and 160 people attempted to colonize a part of the region. The venture failed, owing chiefly to the hostility of the Indians at the most favorable point. The visitors, however, made the acquaintance of the typical American Atlantic shore line of beach and sand dune which stretches from Cape Cod to the tip of Florida with one or two slight interruptions and one or two fragmentary minor northward extensions. The Norsemen or some predecessor had observed and named the three great zones of territory which must always have existed. Among investigators there has been general concurrence as to their discovery of Labrador and Newfoundland, to which most would add Cape Breton Island and more or less of the coast beyond. It has appeared to me that they made their chief abode in the New World on the shore of Passamaquoddy Bay behind Grand Manan Island and Grand Manan Channel, with the racing ocean streams of the mouth of the Bay of Fundy; and that they found this site inclement in winter and tried to remove to a land-locked bay of southern New England but were baffled and withdrew. My reasons have been pretty fully set forth in “Early Norse Visits to North America.”[7] For the present it is enough to say that the discovered regions seem sometimes to have been thought of as a continuous coast line, sometimes as separate islands more or less at sea. But they did not get upon the maps in any shape until several centuries later.
Moorish Voyages
The Moors who conquered Spain took up the task of Atlantic exploration from that coast after a time. Its islands appear in divers of the Arabic maps. In particular we know through Edrisi,[8] the most celebrated name of Arabic geography, of the extraordinary voyage of the Moorish Magrurin of Lisbon, who set out at some undefined time before the middle of the twelfth century to cross the Sea of Darkness and Mystery. They touched upon the Isle of Sheep and other islands which were or were to become notable in sea mythology. Perhaps these islands were real, but they are not capable of certain identification now. These Moorish adventurers seem to have reached the Sargasso Sea and to have changed their course in order to avoid its impediments, attaining finally what may have been one of the Canary Islands, where they suffered a short imprisonment and whence, after release, they followed the coast of Africa homeward. Edrisi about 1154 wrought a world map in silver (long lost) for King Robert of Sicily and also wrote a famous geography illustrated by a world map and separate sectional or climatic maps. He devotes some space to Atlantic islands and their legends, shows a few of them, and believes in twenty-seven thousand; but the very few copies of his work which remain were made at different periods and in different nations, and their maps disagree surprisingly; so that it is not practicable to restore with certainty what he originally depicted. He seems to have had at least some acquaintance with the authentic island groups from the Cape Verde Islands to the Azores and Britain. The fantastic legends he appends to some of them do not seem to have greatly affected the prevailing European lore of that kind.
Italian Exploration
The Italians of the thirteenth century undertook similar explorations and temporarily occupied at least one of the Canary Islands, Lanzarote, which still bears, corrupted, the name of its Genoese invader, Lancelota Maloessel, of about 1470. On early fourteenth-century maps and some later ones the cross of Genoa is conspicuously marked on this island in commemoration of the exploit. It was probably at this period that Italian names were applied to most of the Azores and to other islands of the eastern groups. A few of these names still persist, for example, Porto Santo and Corvo; but others, after the rediscovery, gave way to Portuguese equivalents or substitutes. Thus Legname was translated into Madeira, and Li Conigi (Rabbit Island) became more prettily Flores (Island of Flowers). About 1285 the Genoese also sent out an expedition[9] “to seek the east by way of the west” under the brothers Vivaldi, who promptly vanished with all their men. Long afterward another expedition picked up on the African coast one who claimed to be a survivor; and it is probable that the Genoese expedition attempted to sail around Africa but came upon disaster before it was far on its way. The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italians undoubtedly added many islands to the maps or secured their places there; but we have no evidence that they passed westward beyond the middle of the Atlantic.
Bretons and Basques
The Bretons shared in the Irish monk voyages, their Saint Malo appearing in tradition sometimes as a companion of Saint Brendan, sometimes as an imitator or competitor. Also their fishermen, with the Basques, from an early time had pushed out into remote regions of the sea. The Pizigani map of 1367[10] ([Fig. 2]) represents a Breton voyage of adventure and disaster near one of les îles fantastiques, appearing for the first time thereon. Their presence on the American shore in the years shortly following Cabot’s discovery is commemorated by Cape Breton Island.
The Zeno Story
It has been alleged that two Venetian brothers, Antonio and Nicolò Zeno, in the service of an earl of the northern islands, took part with him about 1400 A. D. in certain explorations westward, he being incited thereto by the report of a fisherman, who claimed to have spent many years as a castaway and captive in regions southwest of Greenland. The Zeno narrative, dealt with later (Ch. IX), was accompanied by a map ([Fig. 19]), which exercised a great influence during a long period on all maps that succeeded it, adding several islands never before heard of. Both map and narrative are recognized as spurious or at best so corrupted by misunderstandings and transformed by rough treatment and a post-Columbian attempt at reconstruction as to be wholly unreliable. It is, indeed, possible that a fisherman of the Faroes made an involuntary sojourn in Newfoundland and elsewhere in America from about 1375 or 1380 onward and that his story induced the ruler of certain northern islands to sail westward and investigate. But both features are very dubious, and at any rate nothing was accomplished except the confusion of geography.