Page:Legendaryislands00babcuoft.djvu/132

 CHAPTER VIII MARKLAND, OTHERWISE NEWFOUNDLAND The name Markland, meaning Forest Land, must be, in one language or another, among the oldest geographical designa- tions 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, 1 evidently given by some Genoese or other Italian navigator to Madeira, the latter name being a translation of the former, substituted by the Portuguese 2 after their rediscovery. Thus we might say that this island was the original western Markland, but for the fact that certain Green- land 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 1 Portolano Laurenziano-Gaddiano, 1351; see PI. 5 of facsimile in Portfolio 5 of Theobald Fischer: Sammlung mittelalterlicher Welt- und Seekarten italienischen Ursprungs, i vol. of text and 17 portfolios containing photographs of maps, Venice, 1877-1886. Catalan atlas, 1375. Pis. 11-14 in A. E. Nordenskiold: Periplus: An Essay on the Early History of Charts and Sailing-Directions, transl. by F. A. Bather. Stock- holm, 1897. Pareto map, 1455, PI. 5 in atlas accompanying Konrad Kretschmer: Die Ent- deckung Amerika's in ihrer Bedeutung fur die Geschichte des Weltbildes, 2 vols. (text and atlas), Berlin, 1892 (our Fig. 21). 1 M. A. P. d'Avezac: Notice des decouvertes faites au Moyen Age dans 1'Ocean Atlantique anterieurement aux grandes explorations portugaises du quinzieme siecle, Paris, 1845, pp. 8-9. See "I de Madera" on Benincasa map, 1482, in Kretsch- mer. atlas, PI. 4 (our Fig. 22).