LATER DERIVATIVE RECORDS 117 LATER DERIVATIVE RECORDS There is great verisimilitude in the Karlsefni narrative and these later derivative records. Their geography agrees con- vincingly with the facts of the actual coast line from north to south namely, first a desolate region, cold, bare, and stony, the appropriate home of Arctic foxes; secondly, a game-haunted and very wild forest land, untempting to settlement, unhopeful for agriculture, but a hunter's paradise; thirdly, the warmer country to the south, well suited to cultivation and even produc- ing spontaneously various kinds of edibles, notably the large fox grapes from which wine might be made. Helluland, the first, remains, as Labrador and perhaps Baffin Land, nearly un- changed excepting some uplift of the shore line; Markland has suffered great inroads of the lumberman's axe, but still as Newfoundland contains much heavy timber in its western part; Wineland, the third, has become the chief seat of American civilization east of the Appalachian Mountains. But in the time of the Norsemen and long afterward Newfoundland was a veritable Markland, a land of woods, down to its eastern front. 8 Its rediscoverers and earliest settlers found it so; and the maps of Cantino 9 and Canerio, 10 both attributed to 1502 and certainly not much later, exhibit the great island pictorially, under different names, as a mass of woodland with tall trees standing everywhere, apparently thus commemorating the most distinctive and conspicuous natural feature of the land. LABRADOR AS MARKLAND Some have urged that the southern part of Labrador may have been Markland; but its trees of any considerable size are to be found only by following up inlets far into the interior where 8 Fridtjof Nansen: In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times, transl. by A. G. Chater, New York, 1911, 2 vols.: reference in Vol. j, p. 323. Cf. R. Whitbourne: A Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland, London, 1622. 9 E. L. Stevenson: Maps Illustrating Early Discovery and Exploration in Amer- ica, 1502-1530, Reproduced by Photography from the Original Manuscripts, text and 12 portfolios, New Brunswick, N. J., 1906; reference in Portfolio i. 10 E. L. Stevenson: Marine World Chart of Nicolo de Canerio Januensis, 1502 (circa), 2 vols. (text, 1008, and facsimile in portfolio, 1907), Amer. Geogr. Soc. and Hispanic Soc. of Amer., New York, 1907-08.
