96 GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND languages. Thus, to take a very late instance, the map of Coppo, 1528* (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 3 (Fig. 7), an unnamed cartographer, said to be Catalan, probably about 1480, delineates an elongated Ilia 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 Ilia 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 informa- tion. 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 Chapter IV, apparently intended to represent the Gulf of St. Lawrence region. These two islands strikingly resemble in general situation and arrangement the Greenland and Estotiland (Labrador) in a map (Fig. 14) illustrating Torfaeus' early eight-
- Konrad Kretschmer: Die Entdeckung Araerika's in ihrer Bedeutung fur die
Geschichte des Weltbildes, 2 vols. (text and atlas), Berlin, 1892; reference in atlas, PI. 14, map 5. 3 A. E. Nordenskiold: Bidrag till nordens aldsta kartografi, Stockholm, 1892, PI. 5. Also (reduced) in Nansen (Vol. 2, p. 285), and in T. J. Westropp: Brasil and the Legendary Islands of the North Atlantic: Their History and Fable, Proc. Royal Irish Acad., Vol. 30, Section C, 1912-13, pp. 223-260; see PI. 20, opp. p. 260.
