The name Markland, meaning Forest Land, must be, in one language or another, among the oldest geographical designations known among men. Nothing could be more natural to even the most primitive people than to distinguish in this way any heavily overgrown region which especially challenged attention, perhaps as a refuge or as a barrier. Its appearance in any form of record was, of course, very much later. As to Atlantic regions, the earliest instance other than Norse may be the “Insula de Legname” of certain fourteenth- and fifteenth-century portolan charts,198 evidently given by some Genoese or other Italian navigator to Madeira, the latter name being a translation of the former, substituted by the Portuguese199 after their rediscovery. Thus we might say that this island was the original western Markland, but for the fact that certain Greenland Norsemen had affixed the name long before to a region much farther west.
The earliest manuscript of the first distinct account of the Norse Markland is included in the compilation known as Hauk’s Book,200 from Hauk Erlendsson, for whom and partly by whom it was prepared, necessarily before his death in 1334, but probably after he was given a certain title in 1305. Perhaps 1330 may mark the time of its completion. Along with divers other documents, it copies from some unknown original the saga of Eric the Red, sometimes called the saga of Thorfinn Karlsefni, an ancestor of the compiler, whose adventures as an early explorer of northeastern North America constitute a conspicuous feature of the narrative. Some parts of the saga of Eric the Red as thus transcribed, especially toward its ending, cannot be much older than the time of transcription, but verses embedded in other parts have been identified as necessarily of the eleventh century; and the body of the tale is, for the greater part, manifestly archaic.
Beside Hauk’s Book, there is a corroborative, independent, but almost identical manuscript copy of the saga—No. 557 of the Arna-Magnaean collection at Copenhagen.
This saga201 tells us:
Thence they sailed away beyond the Bear Islands with northerly winds. They were out two daegr (days); then they discovered land and rowed thither in boats and explored the country and found there many flat stones (hellur) so large that two men could well spurn soles upon them [lie at full length upon them, sole to sole]. There were many Arctic foxes there. They gave a name to the land and called it Helluland.
Thence they sailed two daegr and bore away from the south toward the southeast and they found a wooded country and on it many animals; an island lay off the land toward the southeast; they killed a bear on this and called it Biarney (Bear Island); but the country they called Markland (Forest Land).
When two daegr had elapsed they descried land, and they sailed off this land. There was a cape (ness) to which they came. They beat into the wind along this coast, having the land on the starboard (right) side. This was a bleak coast with long and sandy shores. They went ashore in boats and found the keel of a ship, so they called it Kjalarness (Keelness) there; they likewise gave a name to the strands and called them Furdustrandir (Wonder Strands) because they were so long to sail by. Then the country became indented with bays [or “fiord-cut,” as Dr. Olson translates] and they steered their ships into a bay.... The country round about was fair to look upon.... There was tall grass there.
A very severe winter, however, drove them far southward to a warmer bay, or hop, where they dwelt for nearly a year among the characteristic products of Wineland; but at last withdrew after an onslaught of the Indians.
Probably it was from this narrative that Arna-Magnaean Manuscript 194, an ancient geographic miscellany, partly in Icelandic, partly in Latin, derived the following statement, generally ascribed202 to Abbot Nicholas of Thingeyri who died in 1159.
Southward from Greenland is Helluland, then comes Markland; thence it is not far to Wineland the Good, which some men believe extends from Africa, and if this be so there is an open sea flowing between Wineland and Markland. It is said that Thorfinn Karlsefni hewed a “house-neat-timber” and then went to seek Wineland the Good, and came to where they believed this land to be, but they did not succeed in exploring it or in obtaining any of its products.203
The foregoing view of the relative positions of these regions along the coast is also illustrated in the well-known map204 (Fig. 18) of Sigurdr Stefánsson (1570, or 1590, according to Storm) which was evidently based on surviving Icelandic traditions.
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 Cantino206 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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps the nearest approach thereto is a fifteenth-century Catalan map208 (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.
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 1325209 (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 Nicolay210 (1560; Fig. 6) and Zaltieri211 (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.
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 narrative213 (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 Beothuks214 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.