colonizing America, makes it plain that his followers believed Great
Ireland to be somewhere in that region, and it is explicitly located
near Wineland by the twelfth century Landnamabok. Also there were
specific tales afloat of a distinguished Icelander lost at sea, who
was afterward found in a western region by an Irish vessel long
driven before the storm. The version most relied on came through one
Rafn, who had dwelt in Limerick; also through Thorfinn, earl of the
Orkneys.

Brazil, the old Irish _Breasail_, was another name for land west of
Ireland--where there is none short of America--on very many medieval
maps, of which perhaps a dozen are older than the year 1400, the
earliest yet found being that of Dalorto, 1325. Usually it appears as
a nearly circular disc of land opposite Munster, at first altogether
too near the Irish coast, as indeed the perfectly well-known Corvo
was drawn much too near the coast of Spain, or as even in the
sixteenth century, when Newfoundland had been repeatedly visited,
that island was shifted by divers mapmakers eastward towards Ireland,
almost to the conventional station of Brazil. Also, not long
afterwards, the maps of Nicolay and Zaltieri adopted the reverse
treatment of transferring Brazil to Newfoundland waters, as if
recognizing past error and restoring its proper place.

The name Brazil appears not to have been adopted by the Norsemen, but
there is one fifteenth century map, perhaps of 1480, preserved in
Milan, which shows this large disc-form "Brazil" just below Greenland
("Illa Verde"), in such relation that the mapmaker really must have
known of Labrador under the former name and believed that it could be
readily reached from that Norse colony.