Man, or Mayda, is frequently a more southern and western companion of Brazil Island on the old maps and may stand for Bermuda or for some jutting point, like Cape Cod, on the American coast. Some indications connect it with the Bretons, some with the Arabs. It has borne divers names. We cannot tell who first found and reported it.
The Island of the Seven Cities derived its name from a very credible Spanish and Portuguese tradition of escape from the Moors by sea early in the eighth century. It may first have been localized as St. Michaels of the Azores, where a valley still bears the name. Afterward it was confused for a long time with Antillia and still later was distributed rather widely over sea and land, the Seven Cities not always insisting on being insular but appearing now just back of the American Atlantic coast line, now in the far and arid Southwest.
Of the Norse discoveries in America at the opening of the eleventh century, Helluland represents the northern treeless waste of upper Labrador and beyond; Markland represents the forested zone next below, notably Newfoundland, with probably southern Labrador supplying only timber and game; and Vinland, or Wineland, represents all that immense region where the climate was milder and wine grapes grew. Straumey was Grand Manan Island; Straumfiord, Passamaquoddy Bay with Grand Manan Channel; Hop, Mount Hope Bay, R. I., or some bay of the eastern front of southern New England; the Wonderstrands, some part of the prevalent American coastal front of unending strand and dune. It is needless to particularize further.
Antillia is Cuba; Reylla, Jamaica; Salvagio, or Satanaxio, Florida; I in Mar, one or more of the Bahamas. Early in the fifteenth century some Iberian navigator, probably Portuguese, visited these islands and made the report that resulted in the addition of these islands to divers maps. They, in turn, were among the inciting causes of the undertaking of Columbus.
