“The people who live there are very ingenious, they have much the same skills we have and have developed the same crafts: indeed it is believed that at some earlier time they traded with Norsemen. The fisherman says the king had several books in Latin, which none of the natives could understand. Their language and alphabet are quite peculiar. They mine different kinds of metals, including gold, which they have in great supply. They trade with Greenlanders, importing furs, hides, sulfur and pitch. It is said that to the south there is a great country, very populous and very rich in gold. They grow wheat and make beer, a common beverage among northern people, as wine is with us. They have extensive woodlands and they are skilled in the art of stonemasonry and there are many communities and defensive fortifications. They are shipbuilders and sail the oceans but they do not have the use of the magnet and cannot locate the north with a compass.
“The six fishermen were much appreciated by the king; he sent them with twelve of his own boats down the coast to a country called Drogio. They were assailed by a storm and thought to be lost at sea. They had, in fact, survived, although having escaped a cruel death, they ended up suffering an even crueler one: they were captured and eaten by a ferocious indigenous people who not only fed on human flesh but considered it a very savory dish. Only one fisherman was spared, so he could teach them the secret art of fishing with nets. Every day the fisherman went out with his nets, at sea or up rivers. He caught plenty of fish and gave his catch to his captors, who became more friendly. In time, he was much honored and beloved. Indeed his fame spread to nearby populations. One chieftain grew so desirous of having him by his side to witness his wondrous skill with his fishing nets that he declared war on the other chieftain. He was more powerful and better armed, and so prevailed, and the fisherman was sent to him. In the course of the thirteen years he spent in the region, the fisherman claims he was sent to no less than twenty-five chieftains, for they made war on one another just for the privilege of having him on their side. So the fisherman moved from place to place and he came to know the land well. He says the country is big, a new world as it were, but it is inhabited by very primitive people who lack most of our finished goods and go about naked despite the bitter cold—indeed they have not learned to cover themselves properly with the furs of the animals they hunt. They do not use metals of any sort, they live off game and carry arrows made of wood with sharpened points and bows the strings of which are made of hide. These are ferocious people who fight one another to death and even eat one another. They have priests who enforce the laws, which change from tribe to tribe. But the more one travels south the more one sees signs of civilization. The climate is more temperate and there are cities and temples to the idols where men are sacrificed and eaten. Gold and silver are highly valued in these southern regions, where goldsmiths and silversmiths are very skillful.
“Many years passed. His companions had given up hope of ever seeing their country again3 but the fisherman yearned to return home. He bade them farewell, fled into the woods and headed back toward Drogio. At first he stayed with a neighboring chief, who knew him and held him in great esteem and so treated him well. Going from one chief to the next, he made his way back and after a long time and many travails he eventually reached Drogio. He lived there for three more years, until one day several boats arrived from abroad. He went to the shore and asked where they came from and was told they came from Estotiland. He asked to go back with them and they were glad to take him on board. He was useful as an interpreter for he knew the language of Drogio well. For some time after that he traveled between Drogio and Estotiland. He became wealthy and so was able to build himself an oceangoing ship. Finally one day he rigged it up and sailed back to Frislanda, bringing back news of this rich country.”
THE FISHERMAN’S tale intrigued historians and geographers as soon it was published. Some praised it as one of the earliest descriptions of the New World and others ridiculed it as pure fiction cleverly assembled by Nicolò the Younger with material pilfered from travel narratives circulating in Venice during his time.
Despite the fabulous tone of the story, the central premise—that a group of fishermen was storm-driven across the Atlantic Ocean and shipwrecked somewhere along the North American coast—was not in itself remarkable. In late medieval times fishermen from Portugal, the Basque region, France and England began to sail across the ocean to harvest cod off the banks of Newfoundland. Storms were frequent and fishing vessels were lost at sea as a matter of course. A shipwreck along the coast of North America was certainly a possibility.
In rewriting the fisherman’s tale for contemporary readers, Nicolò the Younger no doubt ennobled the text with references to antiquity—an element of style that was typical of the Renaissance. He transformed the fisherman into a Ulysses-type hero who, characteristically, lost his way in a storm and survived the strangest adventures before finding his way back home. It seemed to me the story was bathed in an early version of magical realism, brought into fashion by the narratives of discovery of the mid-sixteenth century.
Frederick Lucas, a nineteenth-century critic who denounced Nicolò the Younger as a shameless liar, was convinced that the fisherman’s tale was an adaptation of Jerónimo Aguilar’s vivid account of his shipwreck in Jamaica in the early sixteenth century,4 a copy of which would have been available in Venice.
It is possible Nicolò the Younger took a look at Aguilar’s story. There were other sources of inspiration as well. Benedetto Bordone’s Isolario, a book on the geography of islands published in Venice in 1528, included, in addition to information on the cannibalistic practices of native Americans, a specific reference to “a very high mountain from which four rivers flow into the plain dividing the country”—a landscape suspiciously similar to the one mentioned in the fisherman’s tale.
Nicolò the Younger was certainly not shy about embellishing, adjusting, rewriting and even plagiarizing other texts in order to make the fisherman’s tale more credible. The concept of plagiarism we have today did not exist in the sixteenth century. There were no copyright laws and “importing” material was simply one of many accepted narrative techniques. And Nicolò the Younger would certainly have felt compelled to insert a few elements to bring the story up-to-date. For example, the passing evocation of the Aztec Empire to the south—where the climate was warmer and civilization more advanced, where there were cities and temples and where men were sacrificed and eaten, where gold and silver were highly valued—seems lifted straight from the conquistadors’ reports on the land of Montezuma.
Despite the evident tampering on the part of Nicolò the Younger, the fisherman’s tale contained exciting new information. The place-name “Estotiland,” for one. The exact origin of the word was unclear; it may simply have been Nicolò’s sloppy transcription of the word “Escotiland”: a land discovered or claimed by Scots. But the mistake was never corrected and Estotiland survived as a geographical entity well into the seventeenth century. One finds it marked in clear capital letters on all the important maps, usually across the maritime provinces of present-day eastern Canada.
Nicolò the Younger placed Estotiland on the western edge of the Zen map, three degrees to the south of the tip of Engronelant. Did he see it as an island along the North American coast or as a part of the American continent? Even among the strongest believers in the authenticity of the Zen map there has never been a consensus about the true identity of Estotiland. The English geographer R. H. Major (1873), for one, was convinced it was Newfoundland because its description “fairly agrees” with the latter and its size is “a little less” than Iceland. But Giorgio Padoan, a Renaissance scholar in Venice, more recently concluded (1988) that Estotiland was in fact Nova Scotia, just south of Newfoundland, because it was the only place in the region which was both heavily wooded and rich in gold fields.
Whether it was Newfoundland or Nova Scotia or even other parts of Labrador, the “natives” encountered on Estotiland do not appear to have been an indigenous peo
ple. As the fisherman reported, they had European skills, they traded with the Norse colonies of Greenland, they extracted minerals and they were familiar with the craft of masonry. They sowed wheat, brewed beer, built ships and, tellingly, had never seen a magnet compass.
Was the fisherman describing a vanishing Norse community on the North American coast?
Twentieth-century archaeologists have brought to light much valuable information about the Norse presence in North America during pre-Columbian times. Today the fisherman’s description of the people living in Estotiland seems more intriguing than outlandish. But in 1558, when Nicolò the Younger published his book, the memory of the Greenland colonies and the Norse expeditions to North America had been erased. No one living in Venice in the mid-sixteenth century was aware that since early medieval times Viking settlements in Labrador, Newfoundland and possibly Nova Scotia were the farthest outposts of a transoceanic trade route that stretched from Norway to Iceland to Greenland, and all the way to the North American coast.
The Icelandic sagas tell the epic story of the Greenlanders’ journeys to North America in pre-Columbian times. Around AD 1000 Leif the Lucky, son of Erik the Red, sailed up the coast of Greenland and then across the Davis Strait. He reached Helluland—the Land of Rock Slabs (Baffin Island?); sailed down to Markland—the Land of Forests (Labrador?); and eventually reached Vinland—the Land of Wild Grapes (Newfoundland?). He spent the winter on the North American shore before returning to Greenland. In 1960, Helge Ingstad, a Norwegian explorer and archaeologist, discovered a Norse site in L’Anse aux Meadows,5 on the northern tip of Newfoundland. The settlement was built around AD 1000 and may well have been where Leif and his companions spent the winter.
The Greenland Vikings failed to colonize the region, possibly because of the hostility and overwhelming force of indigenous tribes. But they continued to cross over to North America in the summers to stock up on precious timber with which to build their houses and ships back home. They were also on a quest for iron—indeed, they may have obtained their crude iron blooms by refining bog iron directly in North America (a pit furnace was found at L’Anse aux Meadows). And the Greenlanders took advantage of the mild summer climate and the rich wildlife on the North American coast to hunt black bear, lynx and marten, which they skinned to make warm furs for the freezing winter months back home. With time, they probably ceased going as far south as Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and limited their expeditions to Labrador and Baffin Island. In 1972 Deborah Sabo, an archaeologist excavating Thule Inuit ruins on Baffin Island, dug up a haunting little ivory figure depicting a Norseman wearing a long tunic and a cross on his chest. It was carbon-dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, when Viking “commutes” to North America were slowing down. Their last recorded trip across the Davis Strait took place in 1347, when a ship left North America, lost its way in a storm and weeks later reached the coast of Iceland, having missed Greenland entirely. It is conceivable, however, that one or more small Viking communities in North America not unlike the one described in the fisherman’s tale survived a few years after communications between North America and Greenland had effectively ceased.
In this scenario, the presence of a Latin Bible on Estotiland was not an absurdity. Greenlanders were Christianized around AD 1000 and clergymen joined a number of Viking expeditions to North America. Bishop Eirik Gnupsson, Greenland’s first bishop, crossed the Davis Strait in 1121 to bring comfort and spiritual guidance to stranded members of his flock.
What could have worried Bishop Eirik so much that he should embark on such a daring mission? In those days, the Church was obsessed with the issue of consanguinity, and the problem of intermarriage was clearly very acute in isolated Norse settlements. The issue was so serious that the archbishop of Trondheim reported to Pope Alexander III that on an island “some twelve days away from Norway” parishioners were so closely related that they could not marry according to canonical rules. The archbishop wanted to know what he was to do about it.
Although in the thick of his struggle with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Alexander III, the “lawyer-pope,” took time out from his daily woes to craft a carefully worded response to the archbishop. He was willing, he wrote, to give dispensation in cases of fifth, sixth and seventh degree consanguinity, but in no way should it be extended to the fourth degree, i.e. between first cousins. And only if the archbishop was “absolutely certain that the people are in such great difficulty on this account.”
The pope and the archbishop did not name the place, but they were probably referring to an island or region settled by Norse people on the North American coast. Had they been speaking of either Iceland or Greenland, they would naturally have used the Latin names for those islands, both of which had tax-collecting bishoprics and were well known to the Roman Curia. But in speaking of an island “twelve days away from Norway,” they probably meant twelve days away from the Norse realm, which extended to Greenland. And since it took approximately twelve days to sail up the coast of Greenland to Disko Bay, cross the Davis Strait and follow the current down the coast of Labrador, it is possible that the “island” that worried the archbishop and the pope may indeed have been Newfoundland.
THE LAND of Drogio, like Estotiland, made its first appearance in cartography by way of the fisherman’s tale quoted in the Zen narrative, and was soon a fixture in all the major maps of North America of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The etymology of the name has remained a complete mystery. Geographers can usually be counted on to offer their bit of wisdom on the origin of names, but not in this case. A baffled Richard Henry Major told the Royal Geographical Society in 1873, “Subject to such sophistications as the word may have undergone in its perilous transmission from the tongues of Indians via the Northern fisherman’s repetition, to the ear of the Venetian, and its subsequent transfer to paper, Drogio appears to have been a native name for an extended tract of North America.” What the original native name might have been, Major did not say. More recently (1974), Frederick Pohl wrote that “Drogio” was more likely to be the Italianized form of a Scots Gaelic word. He suggested droch, meaning evil, or drogha, a hand fishing line.
The fisherman said Drogio was a “country,” not an island; how large a country he did not say. Nor did the Zen map, drawn by Nicolò the Younger a century and a half later, clarify the size: only Drogio’s notched contour protruded from the left side of the chart, below Estotiland. Geographers generally associated the term with the coastal region of New England. The fisherman—they speculated—could have been taken in by some Algonquin tribe along the coast and then forced to move inland, from one warring tribe to another, deep into Iroquois territory, before eventually making his way back to the coast.
The tale made much of the natives’ taste for human flesh, and indeed most tribes in northeastern America engaged in some form of cannibalism. Also, coastal tribes fished mostly with hooks and lines—while nets and net sinkers did not appear until the fifteenth century and may have been introduced by European fishermen. But Nicolò the Younger, writing in Venice in 1558, would not have had any contemporary source to rely on for information about the northeastern tribes: the first reports did not appear until after Samuel de Champlain’s travels in the region in the early seventeenth century. Therefore some of his information may well have come, as he claimed, from Antonio’s letter home.
Indeed, if the fisherman’s tale remains so compelling it is precisely because it reflects Nicolò the Younger’s ingenuous attempt to blend two visions of the world, one medieval (drawn mostly from his damaged family papers) and one the product of the Age of Discovery (drawn from the reports of Renaissance explorers and navigators). In the medieval vision, which is vividly apparent in the Zen map, Estotiland and Drogeo (sic) are the farthest appendices of the known world. In the more modern vision, perhaps better captured in the narrative, Estotiland and Drogio have become the gateways “of a country very large, a new world as it were.”
No med
ieval writer would have used the expression “new world”—a catchword of the Age of Discovery. Clearly it was planted in the text by Nicolò the Younger.
THE NARRATIVE says Antonio’s imagination was fired up by the fisherman’s tale. After spending close to a decade in Zichmni’s service in Frislanda, he longed to set up an expedition to the mysterious regions on the other side of the ocean. So he was understandably excited when Zichmni suggested that he should lead such a party. He set about planning the expedition, assembling the fleet, making sure the ships were in good order, stocking provisions for a long journey. He wrote to his brothers in Venice that the enterprise was generating such anticipation that he did not expect any difficulty in recruiting good hands: “Many are those who wish to come aboard for the sheer novelty of the voyage. I believe we shall assemble a strong crew of volunteers without having to spend public monies to hire men.”
The old fisherman himself was meant to come along as chief guide, but he died a few days before departure—“a bad omen,” Antonio commented. He was replaced by other mariners who had sailed back with him from Estotiland. With a hint of disappointment, Antonio also informed his brothers that Zichmni had decided to lead the expedition himself, while he had been relegated to second in command.
At last the fleet departed, setting a northwestern course. It paused in the Faroes to stock up on water and dried fish. Zichmni avoided further stops and sailed directly out in the open sea to take advantage of favorable winds. But very quickly a great storm gathered strength and the ocean turned “into a sea of gloom.” The tempest was relentless. Day after day the ships were “battered and thrown about.” They drifted apart in the maelstrom until they lost sight of one another. Many ships went down. The others battled on in furious winds, crashing against towering sea walls. The sky loomed over them so dark and menacing that the men could not distinguish day from night, “and we never knew where we were.” After eight long days of “great torment” (travaglio), the mighty storm finally subsided. Part of the original fleet managed to regroup and continue on its journey westward until it sighted land.
Irresistible North Page 12