History books did not say how Henry responded to this act of open hostility by his cousin. But I thought this was a case in which the Zen narrative fit well with the record and could actually help to fill in the blanks. Nicolò the Younger wrote that Zichmni made Messer Nicolò a commandant of his fleet and they sailed north “in full military regalia” to take control of Shetland. According to my reading of the Zen narrative, the Shetland campaign started in the spring of 1384 or 1385 at the latest—roughly the time of Malise’s takeover of the Hafthorsson estates.
Estlanda (Estland on the map) is almost certainly the old Norse dominion of Hjaltland (Shetland). However, Nicolò Zen the Younger seems to have removed most of the islands surrounding Mainland. (illustration credit 4.1)
With a good wind, it was possible to sail in just one day from North Ronaldsay, the northernmost Orkney island, to Sumburgh Head, on the southern tip of Mainland, the largest of the Shetland Islands. But the crossing was often rough, especially between Fair Isle and Sumburgh Head, where the Atlantic Drift collided with the North Sea current, creating the turbulent tide-race the Vikings called the roost. It was a terrifying sight, that endless line of sea mountains crashing furiously against one another. The waves seemed to beat on an invisible reef barrier in the open sea. But unless an inexperienced seaman got trapped in the roost, the danger was largely illusory. The Vikings knew how to sail in it. The Picts, on the other hand, were so afraid of the roost they never fished offshore. I was told that when the Vikings first raided Shetland they used to take the trembling Picts out into the roost just for laughs.
The storm that hit Zichmni’s fleet during the passage to Shetland, on the other hand, was real enough. Several vessels were lost and the remaining ships were wrecked on an island called Grislanda. My guess is that Grislanda was Fair Isle, the only substantial island between Orkney and Shetland, known for its shipwrecks and its wide-open heather moors (grisla). But Nicolò the Younger made a notable blunder: he confused Eslanda/Estlanda (Shetland) with Islanda (Iceland). He therefore breezily placed Grislanda below Iceland on his map rather than below Shetland. As a result, his narrative became terribly twisted. For example, he wrote that once Zichmni, Messer Nicolò and the rest of the survivors had repaired their few remaining ships in Grislanda, they continued their journey, not to nearby Shetland (Estlanda), where they were actually headed and where Malise was waiting for them, but to Iceland (Islanda)!
MY OWN passage from Kirkwall to Lerwick on the overnight ferry was smooth—the roost no more than a low rumble against the heavy iron keel of the ferry. In the bar lounge, two fiddlers, an accordion player and a guitarist on their way to a folk festival sang Celtic ballads through the night. At dawn we passed Sumburgh Head and arrived in Lerwick, a town of grey buildings and surprisingly wide avenues built in the days of the kelp boom of the late nineteenth century.
It was a beautiful, clear day and the wet pastures of Shetland glistened in the early morning sun. I observed the coastline with Zichmni’s beleaguered fleet in mind. The great slabs of reddish sandstone seemed hardly impregnable. Open coves and wide sandy beaches would have made for an easy landing. But Zichmni’s men were “few and poorly armed” after the shipwreck. The assault was repelled and they gave up the plan to take Mainland, the largest island of the Shetlands, choosing instead to raid some of the smaller ones of the archipelago. Nicolò the Younger mentioned seven: Talas, Broas, Iscant, Trans, Mimant, Damberc and Bres. The last two were easily identifiable: Damberc comes from Danaberg, a sound near Lerwick, and Bres was clearly the island of Bressay. The others were more difficult to identify, but their number was roughly equivalent to the islands facing the eastern coast of Mainland (Unst, Yell, Fetlar, Whalsay, the Out Skerries, Mousa, Bressay).
Of course Nicolò the Younger was still operating on the assumption that the campaign was taking place in Iceland rather than Shetland. In drawing the Zen map he bunched up those seven islands and placed them next to Islanda rather than Estland, only adding to the confusion.
I ARRANGED to meet Smith at his office in the archives building in Lerwick, a glass and steel structure set in a nineteenth-century cityscape. I suspected he would not be thrilled to see me but I wasn’t quite ready for the cold reception in the hall. He came toward me stiff and unsmiling, pushing back the long black bangs that framed his boyish face.
He led me to his office at a brisk pace by way of a back staircase. “I hear you are skeptical about the Zen voyages,” I blithely said to break the ice as we climbed the stairs. Smith turned to me and I thought for a moment he was going to pin me to the wall. “I am certainly not a skeptic,” he hissed. “I believe the story is pure rubbish.” In his office I made several useless efforts to revive the conversation. He had no interest in exploring the possibilities the Zen story offered and seemed entirely immune to that special Zen vibration that had carried me all the way from Venice to the cramped office I was sitting in. Clearly he was irritated by my presence.
“You have been sent by Niven, haven’t you?” Smith suddenly asked. I told him that I had indeed met Niven but assured him I was not his secret agent and was paying for my own expenses. “There is no point in arguing,” Smith answered curtly. “My job after all is to help people find the books they are looking for.”
With that, he got up and led me to the reading room. And true to his word, he transformed himself into the most obliging librarian. “I hope these will be useful,” he said, handing over a pile of documents on local history. “I look forward to reviewing your book,” he said with a grin, and with that he disappeared.
THE NARRATIVE said that at the end of the summer, following his unsuccessful campaign in Estlanda, Zichmni returned to Frislanda with “what remained of his army.” Messer Nicolò did not go with him for he wanted to sail north to Iceland the following spring. Before leaving, Zichmni gave orders to build a fort on Bressay, presumably to protect the few ships he was leaving behind with Messer Nicolò.
I had brought with me to Lerwick a snapshot of a pile of reddish sandstones in shallow waters that Niven had taken several years before and had given to me when I had gone to see him.
“Here is the Fort of Bressay,” he had told me with great assurance.
I took the ferry across to Bressay to look for Niven’s pile of stones. The island, no more than ten square miles, was dominated by Ward Hill, one of the highest points in Shetland (742 feet). Vikings used to send smoke signals from the summit; on a clear day, one can see the entire archipelago from its summit. I found no villages on the island, only a few scattered farms. Long-abandoned croft houses stood in the meadows like tired old ghosts. Sheep grazed in the pastures that sloped to the sea. Swooping curlews and arctic skimmers peeped and sang to their heart’s content. At low tide, large families of seals came to lie on the wet sand to enjoy the sun.
In medieval times, a low-lying promontory known as Leira Ness stretched out into Bressay Sound forming a natural haven from western gales; it was the only place on the island where vessels could easily be beached or anchored for the winter. Over the centuries the rising sea submerged the promontory. Only the southern tip remained above water: the holm of Leira Ness, with its tumble of sandstones wreathed by strands of soggy kelp. Niven was sure those stones were the remains of the Fort of Bressay.
ON THE edge of the water, facing the holm of Leira Ness, was an old whitewashed farmhouse with three chimneys. Jonathan Wills, a marine biologist and nature guide, lived there with his family. I knocked on the door and introduced myself as a friend of Niven’s. Jonathan and his wife, Leslie, welcomed me with a glass of red wine and kindly added a plate at the table.
After dinner, glass still in hand, Jonathan walked me over to the holm, which could be reached in waders at low tide. Leira Ness looked indeed like the perfect place to build a fort for the commanding view it afforded of Bressay Sound. But Jonathan chafed at the idea, adding that Niven, whom he had met on several occasions to discuss the Fort of Bressay, got easily carried away. “If ever a fort
was built on Bressay it would have been in this bay,” he conceded. “But there is no archaeological evidence there ever was one.” I made the rather weak point that the rectangular stones piled on the holm certainly appeared to be old ruins. “Bressay sandstone splits naturally into blocks that look like old building material,” Jonathan replied impatiently. “The local masons call it ‘freestone.’ ”
We walked back home through his gale-battered vegetable garden. I could see he was far more keen to talk about his epic battle to grow onions, asparagus, potatoes and strawberries in such a difficult climate than about the elusive mystery of the Fort of Bressay. And after a while I saw his point. A light breeze was bringing an aria from Verdi’s Il Trovatore from the house. The air was rich with the smell of black earth and dried algae. Standing in his onion plot, Jonathan turned to the northern sky, still luminous despite the late hour.
“From here,” he said, sweeping the air with his raised glass, “it is a straight line to Iceland.”
As he spoke it occurred to me that at these latitudes a traveler from southern Europe ceases to look back with yearning to the Mediterranean because the pull of the Great North becomes irresistible.
Messer Nicolò must have felt a similar attraction; I pictured him settling down for the winter, his thoughts already busy with plans for the following spring.
Life in Shetland hadn’t changed much since the days of the Vikings. The last of the peat was cut at the end of the summer and stacked and carried by pony—the famous Shetland ponies!—to the farmsteads. Soon it was time to churn butter and make cheese. Wool was washed, teased and dyed with herbs and mosses. Cod and herring were set out to dry in the wind. The men went seal hunting. Later in the autumn, the grain was milled. Cows that wouldn’t survive the winter were slaughtered; their meat was salted, the hides tanned, the bones shaped into tools. During the long winter months there was not much to do except repair boats and mend fishing nets and lines.
By early spring the cycle started anew. The cows that had survived the winter were put to pasture, pigs and hens were let out to roam and barley was planted. In May the fishing season began and the men went out to sea. As for Messer Nicolò, “he rigged up his three ships and sailed north” to explore other lands.
* * *
1 Like so many others before me, I puzzled over the fact that Nicolò the Younger did not draw the Orkney archipelago on his map. After all, even the Romans were familiar with the Orcades, as they were known in Latin, and the islands certainly appeared on most Renaissance maps of the North Atlantic. After a closer look at the Zen map, however, I realized that in fact he had drawn the Orkney Islands, albeit a simplified, miniaturized version of them, which he set (correctly) between Scotland and Frislanda. He did not call them the Orcades, as Renaissance mapmakers generally referred to them, but Podanda—clearly a misspelling of Porlanda.
2 I learned that the ghost of Bishop William shared the premises with another, older and more famous ghost. The great King Haakon IV, returning home aboard his flagship Krossuden after his defeat in the Hebrides (with the Treaty of Perth of 1266 Norway renounced all claims on the Isle of Man and the Hebrides while Scotland agreed that Orkney and Shetland would remain a part of Norway), stopped in Orkney, fell ill and died in the Bishop’s Palace.
CHAPTER FIVE
Islanda
IT TOOK no less than two weeks to reach Iceland from Shetland following the old Viking route: four or five days of navigation to the Faroes, a brief stop to stock up on supplies before sailing out into the North Atlantic, and then another week of steady sailing on a northwestern course toward the Arctic. Seamen used to say that on a clear day they would catch their first glimpse of the shimmering glaciers—a tiny white speck on the northern horizon—a good one hundred miles before reaching the black shores of Iceland.
The shallow waters of the southern coast were notoriously treacherous. Searching for a safe landfall, Messer Nicolò navigated carefully between sandbars until he sailed into a wide fjord and reached a sheltered bay with a good harbor. Several foreign vessels were anchored there—English and German merchant ships loading their cargoes of fish. The waterfront was busy with seamen, dockhands, traders and craftsmen going about their daily business. And at the center of all that bustle, overlooking the bay, was a large monastery with thick walls and vaults and domed roofs. It turned out the monastery was run by industrious monks who spoke Latin among themselves. All around it were small round farmhouses. Sulfurous springs kept the air and the soil and the seawater warm, and an active volcano loomed in the background, at the end of great lava fields. “The place was a wonder to behold,” Messer Nicolò wrote home, unable to conceal his surprise.
After spending the winter in Shetland, Messer Nicolò “rigged up his three ships” and sailed north to Islanda. Nicolò the Younger drew a set of islands off the eastern coast of Iceland that appear to belong to Shetland. (illustration credit 5.1)
. . .
IN PREHISTORIC times, only birds and fish and a few species of wild animals lived on this pristine island on the roof of the world. They say Pytheas of Marseille was the first European to reach the shores of Iceland while exploring the Atlantic around 400 BC. He called it Thule—the last island before the great sea lung of mist and ice and water that extended beyond the known world. The name Thule lived on throughout antiquity and was resurrected by cartographers in continental Europe during the Renaissance. But in northern Europe the island was known by its old Norse name, Islanda, the Island of Ice.
After Pytheas’s foray, no other European came to Iceland for another thousand years. At the end of the eighth century a few Irish monks arrived in their sturdy little currachs, but they left few traces of their presence. Thus the official history of Iceland began in 874, the year Ingólfur Arnarson, the first settler, sailed from Norway and built a farmstead near present-day Reykjavik. Other Viking families followed in Ingólfur’s wake during the reign of King Harald Finehair. They came from Norway but also Ireland, Shetland and Orkney. During this early period, known as the Age of the Sagas, the settlers established a pagan society run by chieftains who met in their open-air parliament (Althing) in Thingvellir (Pingvellir).
This hallowed valley, still revered today as Iceland’s birthplace, is where the American and the European tectonic plates collide to form a choppy, fractured landscape of lichen-covered boulders. A clear stream of glacial water, filled with darting trout, rushes through the rocky divide into a peaceful lake dotted with a hundred grassy islets.
THE EARLY settlers lived in large farming communities scattered around the island and prospered in relative tranquillity. The population grew steadily and by AD 1100 it reached 100,000. But peace broke down in the thirteenth century as tensions between the clans devolved into a spiral of vengeful killings. Norway took advantage of the strife and brought Iceland under its control in 1264. The new colony was forced to trade exclusively through the Norwegian port of Bergen. Every year, six ships sailed from Norway loaded with timber, grains and cloth, which the Icelanders purchased in exchange for dried fish, hides and whalebone.
The Icelandic economy, already suffocating under the effect of these commercial restrictions, was devastated by major volcanic eruptions in 1308, 1321 and 1339. The country was spared the Black Death in midcentury (it came fifty years later). But Norway, already in decline, suffered the plague’s full, devastating impact. Terribly weakened, it lost its hold on Iceland. Trade between the two countries dwindled to a trickle, and by the time Messer Nicolò made his voyage to Iceland around 1385 or 1386, not one of the six ships that were supposed to sail every year from Bergen was making the journey anymore. Indeed, the ties between Iceland and the mother country had loosened to the point that, as Messer Nicolò duly noticed upon his arrival, the Crown was no longer able to keep foreign merchants from trading with Icelanders.
MESSER NICOLÒ wrote a long letter home about his stay in Iceland. According to Nicolò the Younger, only a portion of that letter survived—the portion
in which he described the monastery and the life the ingenious monks had organized for themselves. Still, his observations were so detailed, his language so precise, that I felt they brought to his nebulous journey a moment of clarity and truth.
What most fascinated Messer Nicolò were the clever ways in which the monks used the hot springs to keep the monastery warm at all times. “For example, scalding water is brought to the rooms of the elders in large containers made of copper, tin or stone,” he wrote. “These containers become so hot they are like moveable heating stoves. And somehow,” he added with a note of pleasant surprise, “the water does not leave a bad smell in the room.”
All around the monastery, the ground was warm enough that the chapel and the cells stayed well heated through the winter, “and if it gets too hot, they simply let in the cold by opening the window.”
The cloistered garden was in full bloom during the summer. But plants grew in the winter as well because the air was kept moist thanks to a small aqueduct that brought hot water to a large copper container placed in the center of the cloister. The monks grew vegetables and fruits and herbs during much of the year in their winterized patches. “For this reason, too, the local inhabitants hold them in great awe and bring poultry and meats and other gifts to the monastery.”
The monks were able to cook without lighting a fire. They baked bread by simply placing the dough in a copper pan and sliding it in a cooking hole. “The dough rises just like it does in one of our wood-burning ovens,” Messer Nicolò noted in amazement.
Irresistible North Page 9