106 GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND
Chapter IX, and the same is true of an accompanying narrative
of experiences in Greenland about 1400.
Another map of somewhat later date, by Sigurdr Stefansson,
probably I59O 30 (Fig. 18), is a quite honest presentation of the
traditional views of Icelanders at that time and is distinctly more
modern than the Zeno map in the complete severance of Green-
land from Europe and its union with the great western land mass
which included Helluland, Markland, and Vinland, supposed to
be divided by a fiord from "America of the Spaniards." Of course,
that union with the Western continent is not precisely accurate
and the eastward trend which he gives his great peninsula is still
less so; but his map, often copied, remains a peculiarly interesting
production.
LIFE OF THE ICELANDIC COLONY
To hark back to Adam of Bremen, the charges of special cruelty
and predatory attacks on seafarers in the middle of the eleventh
century awaken some surprise. The life of the people seems
simple and innocent enough, as disclosed by their relics and
remnants, which have been unearthed with great care. As seal
bones predominate in their refuse piles, this offshore supply
must have been their greatest reliance for animal food; but they
had also sheep, goats, and a small breed of cattle. They spun
wool and wove it; they carved vessels of soapstone, sometimes
with decoration; they milked cows and made butter; they
exported sealskins, ropes of walrus hide, and walrus tusks; they
paid tithes to the Pope in such commodities; they boiled seal fat
and made seal tar; they gathered tree trunks as driftwood far
^Thormodus Torfaeus: Gronlandia Antiqua, seu veteris Gronlandiae descriptio,
Copenhagen, 1706, Tabula II, after p. 20. Also reproduced by Gustav Storm:
Studies on the Vineland Voyages, MBmoires Soc. Royale des Antiquaires du Nord
(Copenhagen), N. S., 1884-89, pp. 307-370 (map on p. 333); by Fridtjof Nansen:
In Northern Mists, Vol. 2, p. 7; and by W. H. Babcock: Early Norse Visits to North
America, Smithsonian Misc. Colls., Vol. 59, No. 19, Washington, D. C. t 1913, map
facing p. 62; by Hovgaard, op. cit., opp. p. 118. These are two versions, the one
appearing in Torfaeus (1706), reproduced herewith (Fig. 18) and by Nansen, the
other a copy of about 1670 belonging to Bishop Thordr Thorlaksson, now preserved
in the Royal Library of Copenhagen (Old Collection, No. 2881, 4to), of Stefans-
son's original map, which was lost. The earlier version is reproduced by Storm,
Babcock, and Hovgaard.
