MARKLAND, OTHERWISE NEWFOUNDLAND
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 Portuguese[199] 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.
FIRST NORSE ACCOUNT, IN HAUK’S BOOK
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.
ANOTHER ACCOUNT, IN THE ARNA-MAGNAEAN MANUSCRIPT
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 saga[201] 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 ascribed[202] 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 map[204] (Fig. 18)
of Sigurdr Stefánsson (1570, or 1590, according to Storm) which was
evidently based on surviving Icelandic traditions.
LATER DERIVATIVE RECORDS
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
Cantino[206] 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.
LABRADOR AS MARKLAND
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.
NOVA SCOTIA AS MARKLAND
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.
INTERCOURSE BETWEEN GREENLAND AND MARKLAND
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
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.