GREENLAND AS A PENINSULA 105 GREENLAND AS A PENINSULA We must remember, though, that during the earlier part of this period there were not many maps extant which included the Atlantic, and of these the greater number were more concerned with theological conceptions and figures of wonder than with the sober facts of geography, especially in remote places. About 1300 a remarkable series of navigators' portolan maps, revolutionizing this attitude, began to add to the delineation of the Mediter- ranean, which they had already developed with considerable minuteness, something definite of the outer European coasts, islands, and waters. Step by step they advanced into the unknown or little known, but perhaps none of them, before the fifteenth century, can be confidently relied on as indicating Greenland. This remained for the Nancy map of Claudius Clavus (Schwartz), 1427" (Fig. 16). Greenland is, however, made dis- tinctly continuous with Europe, being connected thereto by a long land bridge, far north of Iceland, in accordance with an hypothesis then prevailing. The second half of the same century saw this conception of Claudius Clavus greatly popularized. Divers maps 18 appeared, some showing Greenland as a prodig- iously elongated peninsula of Europe, having its tip in the correct location (Fig. 17), while others ran up a perverse trapezoidal Greenland from the north coast of Norway. Probably one or more of the former kind suggested in part the memorable Zeno map of I558 19 (Fig. 19), professing to be a reproduction of a map prepared by the Zeni of a past generation and carelessly damaged by the final editor in boyhood. If not a total forgery, it is at least untrustworthy, as we shall see in " A. E. Nordenskiold, Facsimile- Atlas, p. 49. Also copied by Joseph Fischer: The Discoveries of the Norsemen in America, With Special Relation to Their Early Cartographical Representation, transl. by B. H. Soulsby, London, 1903, p. 70. 18 Joseph Fischer, Pis. 1-8. See also the map of Henricus Martillus Germanus (1489) in E. G. Ravenstein: Martin Behaim, His Life and His Globe, London, 1908, p. 67. The name Greenland does not appear on the latter map, but the peninsula is there. 19 Kretschmer, atlas, PI. 4, map 4; better facsimile reproductions in the works by Major and Lucas cited in footnotes i and 2, Ch. IX.
