Some have conjectured that the "White Man's Land" and "Great Ireland," which the Norsemen of Iceland professed to have seen in 983-4, 999, and 1029, was a name for the Canaries, rather than for any point of America, but this appears entirely conjectural--though it is probable enough that some of the Vikings in their wanderings may have visited these islands. In 1108-9, King Sigurd of Norway meets a Viking fleet in the Straits of Gibraltar ("Norva Sound");[154] and in the course of their many attacks on the "Bluemen" or Moors of "Serkland" (Saracen-land) the Northern rovers who reached the New World, Greenland, and the White Sea, may well have sighted and ravaged the Fortunate Islands of the Atlantic, beyond Cape Non. [Footnote 154: "Saga of King Sigurd" (in _Heimskringla_), ch. vi.] No further reference, even conjectural, to the Atlantic Islands is known until the later thirteenth century, when the Mediæval revival in Christian lands, finding its expression in the Crusades and in the Asiatic land-travels of John de Plano Carpini, Simon de St. Quentin, Rubruquis, and the Polos, among others, led to attempts in search of a maritime route to India from the Mediterranean ports. The earliest of these followed immediately on the return of the elder Polos from Central Asia (1269). In 1270 the voyage of the Genoese, Lancelot Malocello, already referred to as a possible reconnaissance on the African coast route to the Far East, resulted in a re-discovery of some of the Canaries. At any rate, he stayed[155] long enough to build himself a "castle" there; and the recognition of this island, as well as of the adjoining "Maloxelo," as Genoese on maps of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries,[156] was probably due to this. During Béthencourt's "Conquest," some of the followers of his colleague, Gadifer de la Salle, stored barley, we are told, in an old castle which had been built by Lancelot Maloisel. It has been supposed that Petrarch, writing _c._ 1335 A.D., and referring to the armed Genoese fleet which had penetrated to the Canaries a generation before (_a Patrum memoria_), was thinking of Malocello's venture, but the expression is better suited to the Expedition of 1291, led by Tedisio Doria and the Vivaldi. [Footnote 155: In Lançarote island?] [Footnote 156: Cf. especially the _Conosçimiento_ of early fourteenth century; the Laurentian Portolano of 1351; the Soleri Portolani of 1380 and 1385; the Combitis Portolan of early fifteenth century; the so-called Bianco of 1436. On a Genoese map of 1455, executed by Bartholomew Pareto, is a more explicit legend over against Lançarote Island: "Lansaroto Maroxello Januensis." See also the _Conquest of ... Canaries_, by De Béthencourt's chaplains, ch. xxxii; and Major's note, pp. 55-6 of the Hakluyt Society's edition of this Chronicle.]