﻿62 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



is surely even more so. Perhaps the conspicuous out-jutting elbow 

 of America, barely insular, which includes Newfoundland, was 

 alternately visible and not visible to the knowledge of northern 

 Europeans during several centuries, getting a new name — as Brazil, 

 Forest-land, New-land, Escociland — every time it was brought again 

 especially to attention, although the older name might also be used, 

 as for another region. 



This was a common phenomenon in old geography. Some early 

 maps give Greenland a minor duplicate in " Grocland," off its west 

 coast yet not so far as America ; and the Faroe islands called Fris- 

 land, while retaining their place, gave birth in cartography to a 

 fictitious great Frisland far away over the ocean. The name " feather 

 islands " was applied later in substance to divers bird-crowded 

 islets (for example Funk Island, Cartier's Bird Island) along our 

 northeastern shore. On the whole it is likely that the latter was 

 touched at some point, probably Newfoundland or near it, by these 

 thirteenth century discoverers who effected so little. At any rate 

 some such episode was currently related. 



Arngrim Jonsson, 1 one of the few Icelandic authors who mentioned 

 Wineland in the gray dawn of modern life, had for disciple and 

 coadjutor young Sigurdr Stefansson, a grandson of Bishop Gisli Jons- 

 son of Skalholt, Iceland. Sigurd afterward took charge of the dioces- 

 nal school at that place, unhappily being soon drowned in a neighbor- 

 ing river at 25 years of age. His chief memorial is a map of the 

 northern regions, which has been copied by Torfaeus, Higginson, 

 Wiess, Vining, and others, but not always quite accurately. Although 

 it is a late document (probably 1590, though marked 1570) both its 

 cartography and notes bear valuable witness to the tradition of his 

 country, where national memory has always been most tenacious and 

 at its best. This map shows a mountainous or hilly peninsula, marked 

 Promontorium Winelandium, with its tip nearly opposite southern 

 England, a tapering gulf behind it, and irresistibly suggesting by 

 position and appearance a more slender Cape Breton Island — say 

 the long, thin part beyond Bras D' Or. The narrow Gut of Canso, 

 which now barely separates this area from the mainland, was of 

 course unknown or disregarded, as by some of the European voyagers 

 and map-makers of the sixteenth century. But this promontory was 

 not considered the whole region or country of Wineland, for a note 

 near the inner end of the Gulf behind it — hence also near the region 

 about the head of the Bay of Fundy — states that Wineland is not far 



G. Storm : Studies on the Vineland Voyages, before cited. 



