The controversy over the Vinland map – genuine artefact or forgery – has caused the most heated arguments ever generated by a map. Colleague has been set against colleague, friend against friend, and still the dispute rumbles on. Whether the evidence to prove its authenticity or disprove it will ever emerge it is hard to say. In the meantime Helen Wallis, retired Map Librarian of the British Library, London, who first saw the map thirty years ago, tells the story as she sees it. The map was on display recently at the British Museum in the exhibition 'Fake? The Art of Deception'.

WHEN THE VINLAND MAP was revealed to the world on October 11, 1965, it hit the headlines. Through a coincidence of timing (October 12 is Columbus Day in the USA), it caused a riot among the Italians of New York. The map was the subject of numerous articles, reviews, and cartoons. Its promoters claimed that it had a unique place in the history of cartography. In the north-west Atlantic it displays coastlines which are identified as representations of the Norse discovery of Vinland, now generally accepted as part of north-eastern America. The map thus records in graphic form the pre-Columbian discovery of America.[1]

For the rest, it comprises an oval map of the Old World, similar in type to Andrea Bianco's map of 1436. Its names, captions and geographic features, notably in eastern Asia, are apparently derived from the 'Tartar Relation', the manuscript with which the map is bound. This manuscript records the mission of Franciscan Friar John dc Piano Carpini to Tartary, 1245-1247. It constitutes a hitherto unknown account of Mongol history dictated by Carpini's companion, Friar Benedict the Pole, taken down and edited in 1247 by Friar C. de Bridia. This friar is otherwise unknown. Bridia has not been identified as a place name, and C. dc Bridia is a curious form of medieval personal name.

The map is drawn on two pieces of thin parchment mounted on a 'guard' which forms the fold whereas the 'Tartar Relation' is on paper which has been dated to about 1440 from the bulls' head watermark. The parchment has eight patched wormholes which do not match the wormholes of the 'Tartar Relation', a problem which was only resolved when a second manuscript, the 'Speculum Historiale' of Vincent de Beauvais, came to light.

The press announcement about the map was accompanied by the launch of a book, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation, which had been prepared in strict secrecy by the Yale University Press for publication on the same day. The book comprises an authoritative account of the manuscripts, commissioned by Yale University Library (who now owns the Vinland map) and written by R. A. Skelton, my predecessor as Superintendent of the Map Room of the British Museum (now Library), Thomas E. Marston, Manuscript Librarian at Yale University Library, and George Painter, Assistant Keeper in the Department of Printed Books of the British Museum. The manuscript was identified as a map and text copied about 1440 by an unknown scribe from lost earlier originals and inserted into a manuscript of Vincent de Beauvais' 'Speculum Historiale' (Mirror of History). In his 'Foreword', Alexander O. Victor of Yale, describes the documents as 'of dramatic novelty.' In The Geographical Magazine Skelton wrote that they were 'of so arresting a character as to prompt scepticism, if not incredulity.'[2]

Critics did indeed express varying degrees of scepticism and incredulity in the months which followed. The map has certain curious features apart from the delineation of Vinland. Its oval shape and northern orientation, for example, are unusual for a medieval map. The Latin of the captions and the nomenclature contain some errors: Iceland, for example, is named 'isolanda Ibernica'. Among the geographic features, the most remarkable (apart from Vinland) is the shape of Greenland, which is shown as an island. To most eyes its outline appears too good to be true. The Tartar Ocean in the Far East is not found (I believe) on any other map. The reviewer in the The Times Literary Supplement[3] characterised the maps as having, in a geographical sense, 'no ancestors, no close relations, and no descendants.' It was an unicum.

At the centre of the argument in the 1960s were two basic questions: was the map authentic and, if so, was it correctly dated to c. 1440? Was it really a pre-Columbian map of America? The manuscript containing the map and the 'Tartar Relation' was described by the dealer Laurence C. Witten of New Haven, Connecticut, who had purchased it 'as being from a private collection in Europe'. He declined to reveal the manuscript's provenance and the map has no known history before 1957.

As one of the few people who knows the history from the start I feel qualified to set out the facts as briefly as possible. I first saw the map and 'Tartar Relation' in 1957 when it was brought to the British Museum for comment by Enzo Ferrajoli, an Italian bookseller long resident in Barcelona. He was escorted by Joseph Irving Davis of Davis and Orioli, Hampstead. Ferrajoli also showed the map to booksellers in London, Paris, and Geneva. At Geneva in September of that year, in the office of Nicholas Rauch, Laurence Witten was told about the manuscript. He said later that he visited the owner, saw his library and bought the manuscript for US$3500, paying Ferrajoli a commission. On returning to the United States, Witten showed the volume to Marston and Vietor at Yale. Victor asked Witten to give Yale the first refusal should he decide to sell. Witten then withdrew the volume from his stock and gave it to his wife.

Witten was still investigating the authenticity of the manuscript when by chance Marston ordered (from a catalogue of Davis and Orioli Ltd) a fragment of Vincent de Beauvais' 'Speculum Historiale', offered at £75. He showed this to Witten, who made the remarkable discovery that the volume physically matched the Vinland map and the 'Tartar Relation,' and that the wormholes of the 'Speculum' matched those of the Vinland map. Thus, by what has been described as 'a process of mingled accident and deduction'[4] – some called it, more bluntly, a 'miraculous reunion'[5] – the 'Speculum' had arrived on the scene and helped to authenticate the map. The three documents had come from the same library where previously they had evidently been bound together in a different order. i.e. Vinland map, 'Speculum' and 'Tartar Relation.' An inscription on the recto of the first leaf of the map which reads (in translation) 'Delineation of the first part, the second part [and] the third part of the Speculum,' now made sense.

Marston gave the 'Speculum' to Mrs Witten, on the understanding that if she sold it, Yale would have the first refusal. In the Spring of 1959, Witten offered the manuscripts to Yale University Library which was unable to buy them. However, Victor and Marston referred Witten to an anonymous Yale benefactor who purchased them for a sum reported to be £100,000. 'Mr Witten, I think you got the greatest bargain in all the world,' the American librarian John Parker said to Witten in 1966. He answered, 'I thought so.'[6] The manuscripts passed into the custody of Yale and the anonymous benefactor entrusted Dr Skelton, Tom Marston and George Painter with the task of making a definitive study. Their book was in galley proof in 1965 when the benefactor donated the manuscripts to Yale University Library.

It was clear that the authors and the Yale authorities had done a great deal of work in private to satisfy themselves of the map's authenticity. Skelton said that at first he had taken on the role of devil's advocate, doubting the map's genuineness. Nevertheless, reviewing the conduct of the debate in the years from 1965 to 1970, and rereading The Vinland Map, it could be suggested that the authors asked their audience to accept the argument of the map's authenticity on trust since the map so far had not undergone a rigorous physical examination.

The map was subject to extensive public scrutiny in November 1966, when a number of experts from all over America, and a few from Europe, were invited to a symposium at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, for face-to-face discussions with the principal persons involved.[7] The proceedings of this conference were not published until 1971.

Early in 1967 the manuscripts were brought to Europe to be exhibited in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and London. At the British Museum the manuscript spent a few days at the Research Laboratory where A. D. Baynes-Cope and Dr A. E. Werner examined it by the use of simple optical methods such as ultraviolet light illumination and low-power binocular microscopy. Their investigation showed that the ink of the map was unlike any medieval ink known to them, and raised the first serious doubts about the map, a fact which found its way into the press.[8 ]The report was sent in due course to Yale, but remained confidential. Information about these doubts was not publicly revealed until February 1974, when Baynes-Cope contributed to a symposium held at the Royal Geographical Society.

Yale University Library (with the full co-operation of the British Museum) had initiated its own investigation in 1968 commissioning the firm of McCrone Associates of Chicago, specialists in small particle analysis. By 1972 the firm developed the appropriate equipment and techniques for carrying out the work. When Walter McCrone came to London in November 1973 and reported that he and his colleagues were getting results, the RGS invited him to take part in their symposium, 'The Strange Case of the Vinland Map', arranged for February, 1974. Yale agreed to this and promised to announce McCrone's findings a week before the symposium took place. Thus the timing of the RGS symposium explains the press announcement on January 26, 1974.

Once again the map was front-page news, now as an alleged forgery. The McCrones' investigations showed that the map had to be redated post c. 1920. As the ink of the other two manuscripts had proved to be the usual iron gallo-tannate, these did not come into the same category of being suspect documents.

The essence of the McCrones' report was that they found in the ink of the map the compound titanium dioxide. The globular particles in the ink, examined by scanning and transmission electron microscopy, matched in chemical composition, crystalline structure, shape and range of particle size, commercially-produced, anatase titanium dioxide paint pigment (crystalline in this context refers to the arrangement of the atoms in the crystal, not to the visible shape). This pigment was not available until about 1920.

The next stage may be described as the attempted rehabilitation of the document. In 1985 the two volumes (the Vinland Map and 'Tartar Relation' and 'Speculum') were sent to the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory, University of California, Davis, for examnation. The Crocker Historical and Archaeological Projects team and representatives from Yale University subjected the documents to two days of study and analysis. T. A. Cahill and his colleagues published their results in Analytical Chemistry, 1987. They used the PIXE milliprobe (Proton Induced X-ray Emission Milliprobe), a technique unavailable to forensic research in the early 1970s. A total of 159 multi-elemental PIXE milliprobes were performed, including spatial analyses of the parchment. The results appeared to show that titanium and the other medium and heavy elements are present only as trace elements in the inks, with titanium reaching no more than about 0.0062% by weight. In the light of these results they contested the claim that the map was a twentieth-century forgery.

Walter and Lucy McCrone did not accept this conclusion and published their rebuttal in Analytical Chemistry, 1988.[11] They pointed out that Cahill was analysing both ink and parchment, for PIXE is an effective tool for examining macro-samples, not particles and it cannot detect compounds, only elements. 'It is difficult therefore to relate the data in the two papers because of the gross difference in procedures and instrumentation…All of us at McCrone Associates and the Research Institute rest easy with our conclusion that the Vinland map is a forgery.'

In 1990 Kenneth M. Towe, a mineralogist of the Department of Paleobiology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, published comments on the Cahill results in Accounts of Chemical Research.[12] Under the title 'The Vinland Map: Still a Forgery', he argued that the re-examination of the map by Cahill et al did not invalidate the basic McCrone Associates findings. Towe concludes: 'The clear disparity between the microscopical descriptions made of the Vinland map and those of the indisputably genuine documents must be explained in any argument that the map is a genuine fifteenth century document.'

Mr Baynes-Cope accepts the conclusion of the McCrones and Towe, but emphasises a feature that the other investigators appear to have missed; the one which gave him and Werner the vital clue back in 1966. The Vinland map inklines do not appear black under ultra-violet, unlike all known medieval inks except some primitive inks known to have been used in the Balkans and Iceland. Mr Baynes-Cope made comparisons with reputable manuscripts not written in classical iron gallo-tannate ink but in traditional old inks which are water based. Some tests were done in Iceland, others in Yugoslavia. No inks were found to match the Vinland map ink which appears to be a paint medium dissolved in a solvent which is not water and what more natural bearer of a paint pigment could there be.

The physical analysis suggests that the Vinland map inklines were formed by successive applications of two inks, producing a broad brownish yellow line, partly covered with a black line. The yellow inks have calcium and titanium as major elements. Iron is conspicuously absent in the yellow, except as traces. The black ink samples on the other hand have a large percentage of iron. Since the ink (not the black line) of the map comprises a small amount of inorganic Ti02 in a mainly organic medium, what is needed now is an analysis of this which should be possible by modern methods.

So the essence of the McCrones' proof was that they found a modern artefact in the ink. This has not been overturned by Cahill et al. Secondly Mr Baynes-Cope makes the major point that no medieval ink is known which is comparable to the Vinland map ink. Both investigations lead us to the conclusion that the map dates to the twentieth century and is probably a forgery. If this is the case, then its creation was a clever operation possibly by more than one person.

However, if the map is not strictly a forgery, another possibility is that it might have been drawn as a jeu d'esprit on a blank parchment leaf of the manuscript. There was a Serbo-Croat priest Luka Jeli?, who died in 1922, and was writing articles about the Norse 'evangelisation' of North America before Columbus. He might have drawn the map. Some of the legends are similar to the wording in Jeli?'s transcriptions of early documents in the Vatican. Some paint made of pigment anatised titanium dioxide came into use in about 1920 and so it is a possibility. It is more likely, however, than an unidentified forger used Jeli?'s work, and that this explains the similarities.

Such debates over the content of the map and whether it is consistent with a suggested date of 1440 have been muted in recent years. Attention has focussed on the physical evidence. Another argument against the map's authenticity is the lack of evidence of provenance. Witten recently made some further disclosures.[13] He revealed that Ferrajoli gave him the impression (or did not deny the suggestion) that the manuscript of the Vinland map and 'Tartar Relation' came from the collection of Don Luis Fortuny, a collector still living in Barcelona, and now of advanced years. Witten gave this information to Marston and Vietor of Yale University Library and left them to follow it up but there is no indication that they did so. Although Fortuný is still alive, the others - Ferrajoli, Marston, Vietor and Skelton – involved in the history of the Vinland map, are now dead.

Fake, forgery, or jeu d' esprit; or a true map of the 1440s? Despite the attempts to rehabilitate the map, the weight of evidence supports (in my view) the verdict of fake or forgery. Further scientific investigations should be undertaken, however, to resolve this fascinating enigma once and for all.

References:

1. R. A. Skelton. Thomas E. Marston and George D. Painter, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965) p.223.
2. R. A. Skelton, 'The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation,' Geographical Magazine, 1966, pp.662-68.
3. The Times Literary Supplement, November 25, 1965.
4. Skelton, Marston and Painter, 1966, p.662.
5. John Parker in Wilcomb E. Washburn, Proceedings of the Vinland Map Conference (Chicago, 1971) p.20.
6. Washburn, 1971, p.27.
7. Washburn, 1971, p.x-xi.
8. The Observer, February 5, 1967.
9. 'The strange case of the Vinland Map,' Geographical Journal 140 (1974), p.183-214.
10. 'The Vinland Map revisited: new compositional evidence on its inks and parchment', Analytical Chemistry, 59 (1987), pp.829-33.
11. Walter C. McCrone, 'The Vinland Map' Analytical Chemistry 60, (1988) pp.1009-18.
12. Kenneth M. Towe in Accounts of Chemical Research 23, (1990) pp.84-87.
13. Laurence Witten, 'Vinland Saga recalled' in Yale University Gazette 64 (1989) pp.10-37.

Further Reading:

Robert McGhee. 'The Vinland map: hoax or history'? The Beaver 67 (2) April-May 1987, 67 (2), pp.37-44.

Acknowledgements:

I express my thanks to A. D. Baynes-Cope for invaluable help on the physical evidence.

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COPYRIGHT 1990 Helen Wallis, All rights reserved.
No portion of this article nor the accompanying illustrations can or may be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.

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