It was only in 1585, seven years after the collapse of the Company of Cathay, that another great seaman, John Davis, finally sailed in Frobisher’s wake. Davis was a very different kind of explorer, well educated and with a keen knowledge of geography. He landed in Greenland and identified it correctly (as Greenland, not Frislanda!). After establishing friendly relations with the Inuit, he sailed up the western coast to Disko Bay and then over to Baffin Island, across what is known today as the Davis Strait.
I came across this map of the New World in a friend’s library in Venice. I was struck by the fact that even as late as 1688, when the map was published, Estotilanda was still very much part of the geographical landscape. The script (see arrow) reads: Estotilanda—Scoperta da Antonio Zen nel 1390 (Estotilanda—Discovered by Antonio Zen in 1390). It was an extravagant claim to make at the end of the seventeenth century but also a testament to the enduring influence of the Zen narrative in the world of cartography. (illustration credit 8.6)
By then, war had broken out between Spain and England, putting another temporary stop to major expeditions across the Atlantic. But after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the English presence in North America expanded rapidly throughout the early decades of the seventeenth century. As the coastal regions came into focus, the charts ceased to be a matter of conjecture and became increasingly accurate. The Zen map no longer had any practical use for mariners sailing west. So I was surprised to find that it continued to influence the cartography of the North Atlantic during the seventeenth century.
Of all the Zenian islands, mythical Icaria was the first to disappear from the major maps. Then it was Drogio’s turn to fade away as other names replaced it along the coast of New England. Frislanda, on the other hand, stuck around for another hundred years; cartographers moved her about like a piece of old furniture one no longer has any use for but one is loath to throw away. It disappeared during the last decades of the seventeenth century, but it suddenly bobbed back to the surface on a 1701 map, off the coast of southern Greenland. Most remarkable of all was the longevity of Estotiland, a name that remained emblazoned across maps of Eastern Canada even into the eighteenth century. My own favorite was one by Vincenzo Coronelli, a Venetian mapmaker: ESTOTILANDA covered a large swath of land which included Labrador and Baffin Island, and under the finely drawn capital letters, it said: “Scoperta da Antonio Zen”—“Discovered by Antonio Zen,” which was a bit of a stretch.
* * *
1 Mercator’s sea-lane flowed immediately below the polar region, which was formed by four symmetrical islands, each separated from the other by a fast-flowing river that rushed into a circular polar sea. According to Mercator, the whirling water was sucked from the polar sea into the bowels of the earth through a giant plughole, much like an emptying bathtub. A huge, glistening black rock signaled the location of the plughole. When John Dee asked Mercator what his source for the mapping of the polar region was, he told him he had relied on a written account given to him by “a friend in Antwerp.” It was a convoluted story: a fourteenth-century Flemish traveler, Jakob Cnoyen, had heard “from a priest who served the king of Norway” that a Franciscan minorite from Oxford, a mathematician and astronomer of some repute, had traveled to Greenland and beyond around 1360. Later he had “put into writing all the wonders of those islands and presented the book, which he called in Latin Inventio Fortunatae, to the English King [Edward III].” The book, if it ever existed, was lost, and the young friar’s identity has remained a mystery. When, years later, the English geographer Richard Hakluyt again pressed Mercator about his source, he replied rather lamely: “I required it again of my friend [in Antwerp] but he had forgotten of whom he had borrowed it.”
CHAPTER NINE
Venetian Puzzle
Mr Konochie 1
Secretary to the Royal Geographical Society
21 Regent Street 18 January 1832
Dear Sir,
I have the honour to acknowledge the reception of your communication of my having been elected a foreign member of the Royal Geographical Society of London.
I request you, Sir, to express to the Royal Society in my name how much I feel myself honoured by the distinction and how eager I shall be to size [sic] any opportunity which might present itself to contribute my share to the attainment of those noble scientific tasks which the society proposes to fulfil …
Your obedient servant,
Cpt. Christian Zahrtmann
Hydrographical Office
Copenhagen
I WAS passing through London on one of my Zen pilgrimages to the north and I made a stop at the archives of the Royal Geographical Society—that hallowed temple of the Victorian Age. There I found this letter by Captain Christian Zahrtmann, a Danish admiral and geographer who played a central role in the controversial history of the Zen voyages.
True to his word, Captain Zahrtmann did not wait long before contributing his share, as he put it in his letter of acknowledgment. Maconochie received in the mail an English translation of some “remarks” Zahrtmann had delivered in Copenhagen and that he now urged the board members of the RGS to publish at the earliest opportunity in the society’s journal. To Maconochie’s astonishment, the “remarks” turned out to be a scathing attack against the Zen voyages and the integrity of Nicolò the Younger.
Zahrtmann was not the first to raise questions about the reliability of the Zen narrative. Scholars and amateurs had debated the issue for nearly three centuries—the eighteenth-century English antiquarian John Pinkerton called Nicolò the Younger’s book “one of the most puzzling in the whole circle of literature.” But no one had yet accused the author of being an out-and-out liar. Zahrtmann, on the other hand, asserted Nicolò the Younger “reared his fabulous structure” by stringing together nothing but a series of “fabrications.” He noted angrily “[how] difficult [it was] to select one passage in preference to another for refutation, the whole being a tissue of fiction.” The vivid details about enterprising monks using hot springs for heating and cooking and growing vegetables, he said, were “not worth a refutation.” He scoffed at the notion that the Zens might have joined up with the earl of Orkney to explore the old Norse dominions. If they ever did sail to the North Atlantic in the fourteenth century, he wrote dismissively, they probably joined the Vitalian Freebooters, an infamous band of marauders that in those days terrorized the coasts of the Faroes, Iceland and even Greenland.
“It is not from the south,” Zahrtmann quipped unpleasantly, “that we can expect elucidations on the older north.”
I WONDERED what could possibly have gotten into Zahrtmann that he should display such raw animosity toward a Venetian nobleman who had been dead for nearly three hundred years. True, reactions to the story of the Zen brothers tended to be extreme, the field divided between staunch supporters and dedicated denigrators. But in this case the abusive tone toward Nicolò the Younger seemed entirely out of character.
Zahrtmann was a first-class geographer with a number of ground-breaking maps to his credit, and that alone would have been reason enough to welcome him as a member of the Royal Geographical Society. But his induction was also an overdue gesture of courtesy toward a man who had worked ceaselessly to improve the safety of navigation in the North Sea. As head of the Hydrographical Office in Copenhagen and, from 1826 onward, as the director of the Archives of Danish Maritime Maps, he provided a steady flow of new charts and data to the British Admiralty at a time when free access to the Baltic Sea was a key component of British foreign policy. Ironically, Zahrtmann had fought against the British as a young Danish officer during the Napoleonic Wars. But he believed very strongly that reliable nautical information should be available to all, including former enemies, and he acted upon this principle even if it often put him at odds with his colleagues at the Danish Admiralty.
However, after a little more digging on my part, I discovered Zahrtmann had a fiercely nationalistic side as well. He belonged to a new generation of Danish geographers who had been influenced by Ca
rl Christian Rafn’s groundbreaking work on the Viking voyages to America and were reconnecting with their Norse heritage and the history of the early colonization of the North Atlantic. Zahrtmann himself had launched an ambitious mapping expedition to Greenland, led by his close friend Captain Augustus Graah. In Copenhagen, the question of who had discovered what and when was becoming increasingly relevant. Zahrtmann and his friends had little patience with the notion that two Venetian brothers had been poking around Norse territory in the fourteenth century, in the company of a Scottish laird to boot!
Yet the story of the Zen voyages was enjoying a strong revival. John Reinhold Forster, the Scots-Prussian naturalist, had been the first to reignite the debate as early as 1784 with his History of the Voyages and Discoveries Made in the North. Eight years later a prominent Danish geographer, Heinrich Peter von Eggers, had underscored the importance of the Zen narrative in a speech in Copenhagen of all places. And in 1808, Placido Zurla published Dissertazione intorno ai viaggi e scoperte settentrionali di Nicolò ed Antonio fratelli Zeni, a widely read essay on the journeys and discoveries of Messer Nicolò and Antonio. Zurla, a Venetian, was of course partial to the Zens. But as the editors of The London Journal summed up in the early 1830s, “The great majority of geographers have admitted the reality of the voyages of the Zeni and the general truth of the relation.”
There remained one person whose immense prestige could still tip the balance the other way. But in early 1835 Alexander von Humboldt, the most influential naturalist and geographer of his time, announced he had “reviewed with impartiality” the narrative of the Zen brothers and had found in it “a candour and detailed descriptions of objects about which nothing in Europe could have given them an idea … and which remove all suspicion of imposture.” He also pointed out that “the extreme confusion in the data … seems to confirm the sloppiness of the writing and the sorry state of the original manuscripts.”
The favorable consensus that was building up around the Zen voyages cannot have pleased Captain Zahrtmann. But I suspect there was something more than mere national pride behind his attack against Nicolò the Younger. In the 1830s, the memory of Lord Nelson bombing Copenhagen and then capturing the entire Danish fleet during the Napoleonic Wars was still very vivid (Zahrtmann himself had participated as a young officer in the defense of the city). Denmark had emerged from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 humiliated and much reduced in size. It had lost Norway to Sweden and had barely managed to hold on to Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes—its old sea dominions. And across the North Sea, it now faced the most powerful nation in the world.
Plans for a British takeover of Iceland had been discussed at length during the war—Sir Joseph Banks, the influential president of the Royal Society, who had traveled to Labrador as a young man before sailing to the Pacific with James Cook, was the principal supporter of a British annexation of Iceland. In truth, those plans had been more or less shelved by the 1830s, but the Danish government remained very sensitive about British assertiveness in the North Atlantic. And it is possible that Zahrtmann’s animosity toward Nicolò the Younger was stoked in part by geopolitical concerns. After all, Britain had made use of the Zen voyages once before to make imperial claims in a region the Danes considered their backyard.
ZAHRTMANN’S ARGUMENTS turned out to be rather weak despite his superior tone. He made, essentially, two points. First: the Danish expedition to Greenland (1828–31) had established that there never existed an island of Frislanda. Second: Captain Graah had tried to explore the eastern coast of Greenland but had found it so inhospitable that Nicolò Zen could not possibly have visited a monastery there.
The mapping of the North Atlantic had made such considerable progress in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that Zahrtmann’s insistence, at such a late date, that “there never existed an island of Frislanda” was nothing short of pusillanimous. The point had already been made by others, most notably by Buache and Eggers, who had concluded that Frislanda was the Faroese archipelago (a conclusion that, incidentally, Zahrtmann agreed with!). It was also strange that he should single out the improbability of finding a monastery on the eastern coast of Greenland, without wondering whether it might not have been a mistake on the part of Nicolò the Younger. As Humboldt had already observed, “This monastery, heated by running hot water, where the gardens were free of ice and snow because of warm subterranean springs, seems to belong to Iceland, which abounds in thermal waters, rather than Greenland.”
After some foot dragging, the Royal Geographical Society board decided that in light of Zahrtmann’s fame and impeccable credentials it would go ahead and publish his paper, which appeared in the society’s journal in the spring of 1835.
In the age of rising empires, geography was again, much like it had been during the Renaissance, a very popular field. The impact of Zahrtmann’s essay was considerable, and not just in the rarefied world of scholars. The editors of The North American Review, one of the most influential literary magazines of the time, declared the Zen voyages had suffered a drubbing at the hands of a “most formidable assailant.” They praised “the effort from the pen of so profound a scholar” but made the point that the attack was not without weaknesses. And this, they said, left “a ray of hope for the sanguine admirers of Venetian prowess.”
The stage was set for a battle royal among champion geographers. But who was going to pick up the gauntlet? Zahrtmann’s prestige was such—he was, after all, one of the most celebrated hydrographers in Europe—that it was not until four decades later that a challenger finally stepped into the ring and announced, with typical Victorian bombast, that “the ray of hope” mentioned by the editors of The North American Review “has expanded into noon day light.”
RICHARD HENRY MAJOR is a forgotten figure today, but in the heyday of the Victorian Age he was regarded as one of Britain’s top geographers. An orphan at the age of three, he was a largely self-educated man with a passion for cartography and the history of travel and discoveries. At twenty-six he gave up his job as a clerk in a Spanish mercantile house and joined the British Museum Library as the assistant to the principal librarian. He quickly rose through the ranks of the geographical establishment, obtaining important assignments at the Hakluyt Society and the Royal Geographical Society and was appointed the first keeper of the maps at the BML.
His essay on the Zen voyages was to be his last work in a long career that included major studies on Christopher Columbus and Prince Henry of Portugal. It was also the one that brought him the greatest recognition and personal satisfaction.
Major had long been intrigued by “the peculiar phenomenon of a most true and authentic narrative having been the subject of so much discredit as to have been finally condemned as a tissue of fiction.” He felt it was “[his] duty” as an editor at the Hakluyt Society “to track the causes of such misconception and to free the document of discredit.”
To do so he turned Zahrtmann’s argument on its head: the fallacies in the narrative were not an indication of forgery, he wrote, but evidence of the text’s authenticity and the author’s good faith. He dwelt on errors and mistakes, he said, “because I claim the argument, advanced here for the first time, [that they are a] demonstration of the truth of the original document.”
Major was convinced Nicolò the Younger was an honest man, if something of a muddler. He found “good geography in advance of its period side by side with the most preposterous blunders … The good part was in the fourteenth century, gathered by the ear on the spot, the bad was the sixteenth century, unapprehended from the ancient narrative.” It was up to professional geographers like himself to separate the wheat from the chaff. “Ignorance of the geography of the north cannot be looked upon as a reproach to [Nicolò the Younger].”
Unwilling to wait for the reviews of his peers, Major delivered his own verdict of the match: “The result has been to prove Admiral Zahrtmann wrong on every point and to convict him of throwing upon an honourable man, occupying no
less distinguished a post as that of the Council of Ten, a series of aspersions of the most ungenerous kind.”
Respectability was important to Major—in this he was rather typical of the Victorian establishment. And this included an unquestioned respect for the upper classes. Casting “aspersions” on a member of the nobility, albeit a Venetian noble living in the Renaissance, was simply not done. Fortunately, he had cleansed Nicolò the Younger’s name: “The honour of a distinguished man, whose only fault as regards this ancient story was that he did not possess the geographical knowledge of today and indulged in the glowing fancies and dictions of his sunny country, has been vindicated.”
Tony Campbell, the author of a biographical study on Major and an eminent geographer himself—for many years he headed the maps department at the British Library—told me when I met him in London that Major’s fascination with the story of the Zens probably stemmed from his deeper interest in the Norse discovery of America. It was easy enough to agree with him—in a way I felt my own obsession with the Zens had a lot to do with the way their story had opened up the Norse world to me. But I also felt that Major had developed a warm and genuine sympathy for Nicolò the Younger and his “glowing fancies.”
MAJOR NEVER traveled to Venice. Everything he knew about the Zen family he owed to an Englishman who spent much of his life sifting through dusty old documents in the Venetian archives—the last in the long and eclectic list of characters I came across in my rambling quest.
Rawdon Brown, tall and slim, his face framed by short silvery hair and a neatly cropped beard, was a very familiar figure in Venice during the middle decades of the nineteenth century—certainly the best-known English resident in town. He lived in a palazzo on the Grand Canal,2 and when he was not “grubbing in the archives” or rowing Venetian style in the lagoon, he played host to prominent English tourists, regaling them with his anecdotes about Venetian history. John Ruskin’s wife, Effie, observed after being chaperoned by him around the city, “The curious Mr. Brown continually talks of people who, living four or five hundred years ago, seem to have been his particular friends or guests.”
Irresistible North Page 18