Chapter VII: Greenland or Green Island

The first account of Greenland given to the world, indeed the first mention of that region in literature, is by Adam of Bremen, an ecclesiastical official and geographical author.

ADAM OF BREMEN’S ACCOUNT OF GREENLAND

He interviewed in 1069 the enterprising king Sweyn of Denmark, and acquired from him divers Scandinavian and other northern items which Adam embodied about 1076 in his work “Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis,” the Description of the Northern Islands. Nansen quotes, with other matter, the following passages:[175]

... On the north this ocean flows past the Orchades, thence
endlessly around the circle of the earth, having on the left
Hybernia, the home of the Scots, which is now called Ireland,
and on the right the skerries of Nordmannia, and farther off
the islands of Iceland and Greenland....

Furthermore, there are many other islands in the great ocean,
of which Greenland is not the least; it lies farther out in
the ocean, opposite the mountains of Suedea, or the Riphean
range. To this island, it is said, one can sail from the shore
of Nortmannia [_sic_] in five or seven days, as likewise to
Iceland. The people there are blue (“cerulei”, bluish-green)
from the salt water; and from this the region takes its name.
They live in a similar fashion to the Icelanders, except that
they are more cruel and trouble seafarers by predatory attacks.
To them also, as is reported, Christianity has lately been
wafted.

It was in fact about seventy-five years since Leif, son of Eric the Red, according to the sagas, had effected that wafting from the Christian court of Norway to the still pagan Norsemen of his father’s far-western domain. For Adam clearly means these white people and not the Eskimos, with whom they had not yet come in contact and of whom no whisper had yet reached the European world unless it related to relics of former occupancy discerned on first landing. It is surely matter for astonishment to find the ruddy followers of hot-blooded Eric described as bluish-green and so conspicuous in this complexion that it gave their region its name. Perhaps there is no more curious instance to be found of the inveterate human tendency to read into any unfamiliar name some meaning that seems plausible.

It is not clear where Adam supposed Greenland to be located; perhaps he, too, was not clear about the matter. The earlier of his two passages on the subject seems to call for something like the true location in the far west; but the later mention of the mountains of Sweden has been understood by the most learned commentators to indicate a site directly north of Norway. King Sweyn perhaps had a fairly good idea of the sailing courses for Iceland and Greenland, but his guest may have assimilated the information rather confusedly. Adam seems convinced that Greenland was a distinctly oceanic island, with no suggestion of any near relation to any continent. In this respect he differs from certain maps of the fifteenth century with which we shall presently have to deal. We know now that the truth lies between these views; that the highly glaciated mass which we name in its entirety Greenland is, indeed, an island and probably the largest of islands but an island with the aspect and attributes of a peninsula, being barely severed from that polar archipelago which crowns our American mainland and being not very remote at one point from the mainland itself.

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