Vikings in America (16 page)

The Latin of the Vinland Map passes examination. There are no faults in the mediaeval Latin. The form used for Iceland is
Isolanda
, which is the Italian word for Iceland, and which suggests an Italian scribe. Leif Eiriksson appears on the map as
leiphus erissonius
, which is an acceptable Latin formation, but seems to suggest that the scribe was unaware that the
-son
is a patronymic. Vinland appears as
Vinilanda
rather than being translated (as ‘Land of Vines',
Terra Labruscarum
). There is no ready explanation for the intrusive
-i-
in
Vinilanda
. The language is consistent with a scribe who is familiar with Latin, probably an Italian, and who does not know Icelandic, therefore exactly what we would expect.

The map shows Greenland and Vinland as islands. This is, of course, accurate for Greenland, and wrong for America. The coast of Vinland is imperfectly drawn – as would be expected at the time. However Greenland is seen by some as very accurate, perhaps too accurate. That Greenland is an island was not known until the late eighteenth century, and no-one has ever suggested that the Vikings could have known this. This issue is subject to an easy solution. The mediaeval mind conceived of the land as islands floating in the ocean. The three old-world continents of Europe, Africa and Asia were seen as centred on Jerusalem, more or less where they joined, and completely surrounded by ocean. Lands off the coast of these three continents, as Britain and Iceland and the Azores and Japan, were clearly
shown as islands. To the mediaeval mind, Greenland and Vinland had to be islands, and showing them as such is wholly appropriate. The Vikings had knowledge of the coast of west Greenland and part of the east Greenland coast. In effect the map shows these two coasts and draws a hypothetical line to the north – by chance sketching out something close to the real shape of Greenland. The whole of the map, with the exception of the inclusion of Vinland, is what we would reasonably expect for a world map of that date. Were the Vinland Map without Vinland it would have been accepted as a
bona fide
map of the world.

Traditional disciplines do, therefore, favour the case for the Vinland Map being genuine. Though in the 1960s the British Museum refused to give a view on the issue, numerous respected bodies at that time confidently asserted that the map was genuine – and with good reason. The parchment is contextualised with two other manuscripts, the palaeography, cartography and language all correct. The great problem is the lack of a proper provenance for the map – the underlying reason for the British Museum's caution – yet there is nothing implausible about a manuscript lying unopened and unclassified in a European archive, and coming to light through the disruption of the Second World War.

In the past 20 years numerous scientific examinations have alternately proved the Vinland Map genuine and a fake. The parchment was dated in the early 1990s by carbon-14 using an 8cm strip cut from the bottom right-hand corner of the map, providing a sample with a surface area of about 2cm
²
, with the results published in 2002 after the scholarly community had kept silent about them for nearly a decade. The result of carbon-14 dating is that the parchment dates to 1425, with just a small margin for error, which is exactly the date it should be if the map is genuine. However the test was conducted three times, with two of the results obscured by contaminants from the 1950s. What carbon-14 tells us is that we have a parchment which dates from around 1425, but which has undergone a process in the 1950s which has created considerable contamination. Indeed the weight of the 1950s contaminant is somewhat greater than the weight of the original fifteenth-century parchment, so that more than half by weight of the Vinland Map today is these contaminants.

In the long silence maintained by the academic community before releasing these results a hint can be seen of the political dimension that the Vinland Map has developed. A lobby in America wants it to be fake, as if genuine it undermines the claim that Columbus was the first European in
America, and therefore offends Hispanic sensibilities. The scientists failed to gain a simple answer from carbon-14 dating of the parchment, and this was perhaps the most unwelcome result. We have a 1420s parchment with a thick layer of 1950s contaminants, and whether this proves it genuine or a fake is simply not clear.

Dating the ink has proved even more of a problem. In theory, carbon-14 could date the ink, but there is too small a quantity of ink to enable this test to be carried out. Conventional understanding suggests the type of ink. In the early fifteenth century two sorts of black ink were commonly used: India Ink and Iron Gall. India Ink has soot as its main ingredient, producing an ink which is black when first applied and which remains black over the centuries. This is not the ink used on the Vinland Map – or indeed on the
Tartar Relation
or
Speculum Historiale
. Rather the ink appears to be Iron Gall, made from the burls on oak trees, which is black when first applied, but which yellows over the years as the ink degrades, effectively rusting to Fe
₂
O
₃
. Typically, old Iron Gall ink shows today as a light brown line with yellow edges, and may corrode the parchment even to the extent of making the parchment brittle or producing holes. There does not seem to be a process for accelerating the decay of Iron Gall ink from many centuries to a very few years, and therefore no way of artificially ageing Iron Gall ink. The Vinland Map appears to use Iron Gall ink which has aged, and therefore appears to be genuine. This was once seen as one of the primary claims to the authenticity of the document. However, spectrographic analysis of the ink has produced a surprising result: the ink of the Vinland Map is not Iron Gall ink at all, but rather anatase, TiO
₂
, leading to the suggestion that the Vinland Map is a forgery with an anatase-based ink used to imitate Iron Gall ink. Synthetic anatase was first produced in the 1920s, and is today used as a pigment, especially in paint. It was readily available in the 1950s. Thus the spectrographic analysis seemed to prove that the map was a forgery.

The case is not quite so simple. The high profile of the Vinland Map meant that it was one of the first mediaeval manuscripts to undergo spectrographic analysis of its ink. Subsequently many other manuscripts have been analysed, and many early fifteenth-century manuscripts which had previously been thought to use Iron Gall inks have been found to be written with inks which are based on anatase. While first synthesised in the 1920s, anatase is also a naturally occurring material, and in the light of the many manuscripts now found to use an ink made from it, anatase now has to be
accepted as an early fifteenth-century ink. Yet even this is not a conclusion. Anatase is a crystalline material. When produced synthetically the crystals are of a relatively even formation; when produced naturally the crystal shape is variable, but tends to be less even. A transmission electron micrograph can distinguish the shape of the crystals in the anatase of the Vinland Map, and report the result that they are relatively even, though not quite as even as most synthetic anatase. Indeed, it is possible for such even crystal structure to be found in natural anatase. The balance of probability therefore is that the anatase on the map is synthetic, but there remains a significant possibility that it is natural anatase.

If the Vinland Map is forged, it is a superb forgery. The starting point for the forgery would be to identify a manuscript of the right period with a large, blank piece of parchment bound within it. This is perhaps possible, but is not easy, as parchment was expensive and the mediaeval binders were not in the habit of including blank sheets. Additionally, a forger would need to source his parchment within a volume to which a map could plausibly be added. The actual work of forgery requires an ability to copy convincingly the handwriting of the early fifteenth century, and to produce convincing Latin for the period. It also requires a detailed knowledge of the world map of the early fifteenth century. Enzo Ferrajoli did not have the skills needed to forge it himself. Plausibly he employed a forger; plausibly he came across a forgery which he passed off as a real map, perhaps even ignorant of its real status. Very few individuals had the skills needed to make such a forgery. The skills are so rare that we might even hope to identify a possible forger. A thesis by Kirsten Seaver suggests that the forger may be Josef Fischer (1858–1944), a German Jesuit priest who had an interest in maps of this period, an interest in the Viking world, good Latin, and perhaps access to an appropriate manuscript. If the Vinland Map comes to be accepted as a forgery then Fischer is certainly the most likely suspect. By a process of complex reasoning (which I find incomprehensible), Seaver argues that Fischer may have produced the map to frustrate Hitler. It seems to me that the effect would have been the opposite. Germany in the 1930s saw the biggest-ever promotion of academic studies of the Germanic languages, literatures, cultures and histories, with a view to glorifying the achievements of the Germanic peoples, and the story of Viking – and therefore Germanic – presence in America before Columbus was of considerable interest to the Third Reich. In the 1930s – before the discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows and most of the Greenland archaeological sites – the Vikings in America
lacked proof. The Vinland Map would have offered that proof, and Fischer had the skills to fake it. The weakness with this argument is, of course, one of date, for a Vinland Map faked for this reason would have been expected to be presented to the world in the 1930s.

The doubts expressed about the Vinland Map make it hard to accept as genuine. Yet when the evidence against it is considered there is only one truly telling argument, and that is in the composition of the ink. That it should be anatase is surprising; that the anatase shows a regular crystalline structure most often encountered in synthetic anatase is problematic. Nevertheless, natural anatase is now accepted as an ink used in the early fifteenth century, and the possibility that an ink was made using a natural anatase with a particularly regular crystalline structure does exist. The presence of contaminant from the 1950s on the manuscript presumably attests to interventions made by Ferrajoli, who had no concept of preserving the integrity of the artefact, as can be seen by his decision to divide it and sell it in separate lots. Quite what he might have done to the manuscript in the 1950s to introduce so much contaminant seems not to have been adequately explored. Whatever it was, it was unfortunate, but does not in itself prove the map to be a fake. The jury remains out on the Vinland Map, and while an observer of the court case will predict a guilty verdict, it is within the bounds of possibility that it will one day come to be accepted as genuine.

On an August day in 1978 I was excavating an ancient house ruin on a small island on the central east coast of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic. The collapsed sod house had been built more than 700 years ago by Thule culture Eskimos, ancestors of all present-day Inuit in Canada and Greenland.

I was removing floor debris near a stone-lined meat pit when my trowel struck a hard object. Carefully I brushed away the dirt and lifted the find up to have a closer look. I could hardly believe my eyes – in my hand I held a lump of rusted, interwoven iron rings – pieces of mediaeval chain mail! Later in the day I was about to reach the bottom of the meat pit when the trowel once again struck iron – a Viking ship rivet in a thirteenth-century house ruin in the High Arctic.

T
HIS
is archaeologist Peter Schledermann's account of his sensational Viking discovery.
¹

No-one in their wildest dreams could have expected to find the Vikings on Ellesmere Island. This is the world's northernmost island. It is not just in the Arctic, but rather in the High Arctic, in a region which experiences nearly six months of polar night and the full severity of Arctic winter storms. From Ellesmere it is a mere 500-mile walk across the sea-ice to the North Pole. No land on earth is closer to the Pole than is Ellesmere Island. It seems incredible that the Vikings were here. Yet archaeological remains prove just that.

Ellesmere Island lies just 15 miles from north-west Greenland across the Smith Sound. On a map it is coloured red as part of Canada, and Canada
indeed asserts sovereignty over it. Yet the right of Canada – or anywhere else – to claim ownership of this remote island is dubious. Uninhabited in the mid twentieth century and today with just a tiny, introduced population, it could be argued that it belongs to no-one. Indeed, the United States does not recognise Canada's claim to this and many other Arctic islands. Between Ellesmere Island and Greenland lies Hans Island, a sliver of land disputed by Canada and Denmark. Each year both these countries send a naval patrol boat to Hans Island, and raise their national flag. Recently the crews from the two nations have taken to leaving a cache of alcohol for their rivals to collect on their next visit. It is the very politest of border disputes, but nonetheless it is a dispute, in a land so remote and deserted that it seems beyond ownership.

Ellesmere Island is truly the end of the world. Once it was the bridge used by many of the peoples who populated Greenland on their journey from the central Canadian Arctic, but now it is simply the northernmost of the Canadian islands, the ultimate reach of supply boats and light aircraft, the northern point of the American continent. It is the historic gateway to Greenland for mankind and for animals, with a solid ice sheet across Smith Sound for most of the year, which in colder summers remains unbroken through the whole year. The island is enormous – the world's tenth largest island, almost as big as Britain, and with an area of over 75,000 square miles. Today Canada administers it through the province of Nunavut, and has designated much of the island a Canadian National Park. There is even a Canadian Mounted Police base there.