by Beauvois[1]), since "c" often resembles "t" in older forms of handwriting and might readily be misunderstood. The name may have been applied in the same spirit which has long affixed "Scotia" (Nova Scotia) to a lower part of the same Atlantic coast. That the name was ever really thus applied by the Norsemen seems very unlikely; but Nicol6 Zeno may have used it to help out his fisherman's yarn as readily as he certainly adapted "King Daedalus of Scotland" to help out his more mythical account of Icaria. Or "Estotiland" may be a modification of Estilanda or Esthlanda, a form sometimes taken by Shetland, for example on the map of Prunes, 1553[2] (Fig. 12). In casting about for a name,it would be an economy of effort on the part of Zeno or the fisherman to utilize one that was familiar. But I do not know that this derivation from Estiland has ever before been suggested.
The Estotilanders
Ortelius, in crediting the discovery of the New World to the Norsemen, seems to identify Estotiland with Vinland.[3] He was so far right that the fisherman's account of the people of Estotiland was evidently composed by some one acquainted with the mistaken ideal of Vinland, or Wineland, which pictured it a permanent Norse offshoot from Greenland, perhaps slowly deteriorating but still possessed of a city and library, letters and the ordinary useful arts of at least a primitive northern white civilization, trading regularly with Greenland though archaic enough to lack the mariner's compass, and in most respects fairly on a par with the Icelanders, Faroese, Shetlanders, or Orkneymen of the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. We know that such Estotilanders did not exist; that the ground was occupied by Beothuk Indians, possibly slightly influenced by Greenlanders' timber-gathering visits,
- ↑ Eugène Beauvois: La découverte du nouveau monde par les irlandais, Nancy, 1877, p. 90.
- ↑ Konrad Kretschmer: Die Entdeckung Amerika's in ihrer Bedeutung für die Geschichte des Weltbildes, 2 vols. (text and atlas), Berlin, 1892; reference in atlas, Pl. 4, map 5.
- ↑ A. M. Reeves: The finding of Wineland the Good, London, 1890, pp. 94-95.
