Abstract
AT the present day the name “Greenland” is limited to the great island lying to the east of Arctic America. Formerly, however, it included an undefined territory of Arctic and sub-Arctic Europe, extending eastward, according to some estimates, into north-western Siberia. Sir William Martin Conway has shown (Hakluyt Series, 1904) that during the seventeenth century, in Britain and the neighbouring countries, “Greenland” primarily denoted Spitsbergen. Even in the year 1812 the leading London publishers were selling a school-book which, ignoring the word “Spitsbergen ” altogether, applied to that group of islands the sole name of “Greenland.”
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MACRITCHIE, D. Greenland in Europe1. Nature 106, 647–648 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/106647a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/106647a0