ioo GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND represent Y Verde west of Vlaenderen in the region north of the Azores. In the eighteenth century it still held its ground west of France in the eastern Atlantic as Isla Verde, Isla Verte, lie Verte, Ilha Verde, and Green Island. By the early part of the nineteenth century it had, after its kind, dwindled to Green Rock Brazil Island similarly becoming Brazil Rock as dubious rocks became easier to believe in than dubious islands. Perhaps the well-known actual instances of Rockall and the Virgin Rocks may have prompted credence in other spears and knolls of the earth crust here and there reaching the surface. The Hydrographic Office does not believe in any such Green Rock or Green Island but supplies, in a letter to the writer, a mariner's yarn which is not without interest and may be evidence for the rock as far as it goes. "Captain Tulloch, of New Hampshire, states that an acquaint- ance of his, Captain Coombs, of the ship Pallas, of Bath, Maine, in keeping a lookout for Green Island actually saw it on a remarkably fine day when the sea was smooth. According to the story, he went out in his boat and examined it and found it to be a large rock covered with green moss. The rock did not seem much larger than a vessel floating bottom upward, and it was smooth all around. The summit was higher than a vessel's bottom would appear out of the water, being about twenty feet above the surface of the sea. Captain Coombs added that if the object had not been so high he would have thought it to be a capsized vessel. A sounding taken near this spot shows that a depth of 1,500 fathoms exists there." So Greenland, misunderstood and carried southward, dwindles to what may be taken for a capsized vessel's hull, the existence of which is denied by those who best should know. Or, to take it the other way about, the traditions of Green Island, dwindling, prompted the mariner's fancy to develop a Green Rock; and Green Island is in numerous instances derived mainly, even if remotely, from Greenland, reinforced sometimes by implications of attractiveness.
