﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA — BABCOCK 21 



refers to Antillia as possibly part of another continent. 1 The facts 

 above presented seem to me to point to the region of the Greater 

 Antilles, as we very appropriately call them now, perhaps with a part 

 of the neighboring mainland and lesser islands outlying at sea, but 

 there is no need to work out this suggestion more particularly. The 

 names of the chief upper island have puzzled geographers, but if 

 savages were there and acted after their kind we need find no great 

 difficulty in accounting for Salvagio or The Hand of Satan ; and all 

 later forms apparently grew out of these. 



Nansen's In Northern Mists condenses from Diodorus a tale already 

 mentioned, of a Phenician ship driven by tempests to a region opposite 

 Africa, which had both mountains and lowland tracts, and abounded 

 in the lavish gifts of nature. This description would fit the West 

 Indian region above mentioned, though hardly anything above it on 

 the American side. However, it may equally well have been developed 

 out of the reported facts of a traditional accidental visit to Madeira. 

 Nordenskjold will not say as much for Brazil (the original one) 

 as for Antillia, yet it has a case that cannot be ignored. The former 

 island of the map rarely, if ever, wanders into southern waters, 

 and is nearly always west or south of west of Limerick in the early 

 maps, at an apparent distance which is absurdly small. But the four- 

 teenth and fifteenth century cartographers had a cautious habit of 

 minimizing distances, the perfectly well known Corvo, for example, 

 being generally shown (with that name as Corvi Marini, Corvis 

 Marinis, or Corvo Marinis), very much nearer Spain than it should 

 be. The Piziganis (1367) show both, also Brazil in the usual form 

 and place besides the more southerly " Ysole Brazir " apparently Man, 

 to judge by its crescent form and location, though farther out than 

 usual and doubly puzzling by the approximate repetition of the upper 

 name and the use of the Italian plural where but one island is shown. 

 This part of the map shows a dentapod kraken dragging a seaman 

 from a ship, a dragon heart and an angel warning navigators back ; 

 with a frantic though obscure inscription denouncing the dangers of 

 sailing westward. 



The original circular Brazil, west of southern Ireland, is said some- 

 times to have been called " great," by the medieval Irish, 2 reminding 

 us of " Great Ireland," which was in the same quarter or near it ; and 

 it was believed to be of such promise and importance that numerous 

 expeditions were sent forth in search of it by the merchants of Bristol 

 during the period between Botoner's failure in 1480 and Cabot's 



1 E. J. Payne : The Age of Discovery. Cambridge Modern History, vol. 1 p. 20. 

 - See note 2, p. 176. 



