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120 MARKLAND Greenland and Iceland, to find so few subsequent references to the name or indications of a knowledge of the region. There is a well-known and often cited instance recorded in Icelandic annals in one instance nearly contemporary of a small Greenland vessel storm-driven to Iceland in 1347, after having visited Markland, the latter name being presented in a matter- of-course way, much as though it were Ireland or the Orkneys. This has sometimes been taken as evidence of a regular timber traffic between Greenland and Markland during the preceding three centuries and more. It shows at least that acquaintance with the more southwestern country had been kept really alive thus long, and that it was not a half-mythical figure on the frontier of knowledge, to be doubtfully sought for, but territory that one might visit without claiming the reward of new and daring exploration or causing any extreme surprise. What Markland had to offer was so decidedly what Greenland needed, and the repetition of Karlsefni's voyage thus far was at all times so feasible, that one must suppose the trips to and fro were not wholly intermitted between 1003 and 1347. Only they have left no clear and unquestionable trace. Perhaps the nearest approach thereto is a fifteenth-century Catalan map 11 (Fig. 7) preserved in the Ambrosian library in Milan, which as we have seen in Chapter IV, presents Green- land (Ilia Verde) as a great elongated rectangle of land in northern waters, having a concave southern end. Below this, beyond a narrow interval of water, appears a large round island, the direction certainly calling for Labrador or Newfound- land, probably the latter. The minimizing of the distance between these land masses may indicate some report of the .ease with which the crossing was effected. At any rate, unless we are prepared to set aside the testimony of the map altogether as mere fancy work, we must acknowledge that some one had a "A. E. Nordenskiold: Bidrag till nordens aldsta kartografi, Stockholm, 1892, PI. 5. Also (reduced) in Nansen: In Northern Mists, Vol. 2, p. 280, and in T. J. Westropp: Brasil and the Legendary Islands of the North Atlantic: Their History and Fable (Proc. Royal Irish Acad., Vol. 30, Section C, 1912-13, pp. 223-260), PL 20, facing p. 260.