The Vinland Map is a 20th-century forgery purporting to be a 15th-century mappa mundi with unique information about Norse exploration of North America. The map first came to light in 1957 and was acquired by Yale University. It became well known due to the publicity campaign which accompanied its revelation to the public as a "genuine" pre-Columbian map in 1965. In addition to showing Africa, Asia and Europe, the map depicts a landmass south-west of Greenland in the Atlantic labelled as Vinland (Vinlanda Insula).
The map describes this region as having been visited by Europeans in the 11th century. Although it was presented to the world in 1965 with an accompanying scholarly book written by British Museum and Yale University librarians, nonetheless historians of geography and medieval document specialists began to suspect that it might be a fake as soon as photographs of it became available. Later chemical analyses identified one of the major ink ingredients as a 20th-century artificial pigment.
In 2018, after several investigations and many years of debate, specialists at Yale declared that the latest scientific and historical research had conclusively established that it was a modern forgery. The map remains in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as part of its collection.
Acquisition by Yale and publication The Vinland map first came to light in 1957 (three years before the discovery of the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland in 1960), bound in a slim volume with a short medieval text called the Hystoria Tartarorum (usually called in English the Tartar Relation), and was unsuccessfully offered to the British Museum by London book dealer Irving Davis on behalf of a Spanish-Italian dealer named Enzo Ferrajoli de Ry.Ferrajoli de Ry had been convicted of stealing 700 volumes, printed and manuscript, from the La Seo de Zaragoza, a cathedral at Saragossa, Spain Shortly afterwards, Ferrajoli sold the volume, for $3,500, to American dealer Laurence C. Witten II, who offered it to his alma mater, Yale University. It was initially treated with suspicion, partly because wormholes in the map and the Relation did not match. In early 1958, however, Witten's friend Thomas Marston, a Yale librarian, acquired from London book dealer Irving Davis a dilapidated medieval copy of books 21–24 of Vincent of Beauvais's encyclopedic Speculum historiale ("Historical Mirror"), written in two columns on a mix of parchment and paper sheets, with initial capitals left blank, which turned out to be the missing link; the wormholes showing that it had formerly had the map at its beginning and the Relation at its end. All traces of former ownership marks, except for a small part of a bright pink stamp which overlapped the writing on folio 223 of the Speculum, had been removed, perhaps to avoid tax liability for the former owner (although as historian Kirsten Seaver noted many years later, stamps on random book pages indicate institutional, not private ownership).
Yale was unable to afford the asking price and was concerned because Witten refused to reveal the provenance of the map, ostensibly because of the former private owner's tax concerns. Yale contacted another alumnus, Paul Mellon, who agreed to buy it (for a price later stated to be about $300,000) and donate it to the university if it could be authenticated. Recognizing its potential importance as the earliest map unambiguously showing America, Mellon insisted that its existence be kept secret until a scholarly book had been written about it. Even the three authors of the book were chosen from among the small number of people who had seen the map before Mellon bought it—two British Museum curators and Marston. Only one of them, Raleigh Ashlin Skelton, keeper of the Museum's map collection, had significant expertise relevant to the problems posed by the map. (His colleague George Painter, the first person to whom Davis had shown the map in 1957, was brought in for the transcription and translation of the Relation.) The secrecy almost completely ruled out consultation with specialists. Witten did his best to help during this period, answering the authors' questions and offering suggestions of his own.Tyacke, Sarah Sandars Lectures 2007, 1 , Cambridge University, 2007, page 16 After years of study, the proofs of the book, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation, were ready by the end of 1964, and Mellon donated the map to Yale. The book was published, and the map revealed to the world, the day before Columbus Day, 1965.
Controversies and investigations 1966–2018
Vinland Map Conference 1966
Many academic reviewers of The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation took the opportunity to point out evidence that called the map's authenticity into question. So a year later, a Vinland Map Conference was held at the Smithsonian Institution, during which further significant questions were asked, particularly of Witten. However, the proceedings were not published for another five years.
There were questions about the actual content of the map. Witten had pointed out that it bore strong resemblances to a map made in the 1430s by Italian mariner Andrea Bianco, but others found some of the similarities and differences very strange—the map cuts off Africa where Bianco's map has a page fold, but distorts shapes, and includes major revisions in the far east and west. The most surprising revision is that, unlike, for example, the famous Cantino World Map, the Vinland Map depicts Greenland as an island, remarkably close to the correct shape and orientation (while Norway, of which Greenland was just a colony, is wildly inaccurate) although contemporary Scandinavian accounts—including the work of Claudius Clavus in the 1420s—depict Greenland as a peninsula joined to northern Russia. For practical purposes, Arctic sea ice may have made this description true, and Greenland is not known to have been successfully circumnavigated until the 20th century. Skelton wondered also whether the revisions in the far east were meant to represent Japan—they seem to show not only Honshu, but also Hokkaido and Sakhalin, omitted even from Oriental maps in the 15th century.
In addition, the text uses a Latin form of Leif Ericson's name ("Erissonius") more consistent with 17th-century norms and with transmission through a French or Italian source. The Latin captions include several usages of the ligature æ; this was almost unknown in later medieval times (a simple e was written instead), and although the ligature was revived by Italian humanist scholars in the early 15th century, it is found only in documents of deliberately classicising humanist minuscule produced by Italian scribes, and never in conjunction with a Gothic style of script such as is seen in the map.
Another point calling the map's authenticity into question was raised at the 1966 Conference: that one caption referred to Bishop Eirik of Greenland "and neighboring regions" (in Latin, "regionumque finitimarum"), a title known previously from the work of religious scholar Luka Jelić (1864–1922). An essay by British researcher Peter Foote for the Saga Book of the Viking Society (vol. 11, part 1), published shortly after the conference, noted that German researcher Richard Hennig (1874–1951) had spent years, before the Vinland Map was revealed, fruitlessly trying to track Jelić's phrase down in medieval texts. It seemed that either Jelić had seen the Vinland Map and promised not to reveal its existence (keeping the promise so rigidly that he never mentioned any of the other new historical information on the map), or that he had invented the phrase as a scholarly description, and the Vinland Map creator copied him. In practice, because Jelić's work had gone through three editions, Foote was able to demonstrate how the first edition (in French) had adopted the concept from the work of earlier researchers, listed by Jelić, then the later editions had adapted the anachronistic French scholarly phrase "évêque régionnaire des contrées américaines" into Latin.
Handwriting experts at the 1966 Conference tended to disagree with Witten's assessment that the map captions had been written by the same person as the Speculum and Relation texts. This had also been a major reason why the British Museum had rejected the map in 1957, the Keeper of Manuscripts having detected elements of handwriting style not developed until the nineteenth century.
Analysis of ink
Complaints were made at the Conference that no scientist had been permitted to examine the map and its companion documents in all the years of study since 1957. Skelton's scientific colleagues at the British Museum made a short preliminary examination in 1967 and found that:
In 1972, with new technology becoming available, Yale sent the map for chemical analysis by forensic specialist Walter McCrone whose team, using a variety of techniques, found that the yellowish lines contain anatase (titanium dioxide) in a rounded crystalline form manufactured for use in pale pigments since the 1920s, indicating that the ink was modern. They also confirmed that the ink contained only trace amounts of iron, and that the black line remnants were on top of the yellow, indicating that they were not the remains of a penciled guide-line, as the British Museum staff had speculated.
A new investigation in the early 1980s, by a team under Thomas Cahill at the University of California, Davis, using particle-induced X-ray emission (PIXE) found that only trace amounts (< 0.0062% by weight) of titanium appeared to be present in the ink, which should have been too little for some of McCrone's analyses to detect. The Cahill team acknowledged, however, that titanium was the only element within their technique's measurement capability which was significantly more concentrated in the ink than on the bare parchment (other elements such as iron and zinc were found concentrated in some inked samples, but only a minority). One member of the team, Gregory Möller, also analyzed loose particles retrieved from the split down the middle of the map by a different method, finding that most of them were rich in titanium (though a few black particles were rich in chromium and iron).Gregory Möller, "Preliminary Report on the Scanning Electron Microscope Analysis of Particles from the Vinland Map", unpublished Because they were the first to apply PIXE to ink analysis, nobody at the time could explain the difference between the Cahill and McCrone figures. Attempting to reconcile the conflicting results, the Cahill team suggested that the high concentrations found by McCrone were due to a combination of contamination from modern dust, and poor sample selection (i.e. choosing contaminant particles like those in the split);Skelton et al. (1995) pages xxix-xxxix however, they also chose not to publish or publicise Möller's loose particle study. The accumulation of large amounts of PIXE data from other laboratories around the world in the ensuing decades was sufficient by 2008 to show that the Cahill figures for all elements in the inks of the map and its companion documents are at least a thousand times too small, so the discrepancy is due to a problem with their work.
The McCrone team had also made mistakes, though none as fundamental as Cahill's. Revisiting his notes in 1987 to draft a detailed reply to the abbreviated public version of Cahill's report, Walter McCrone chose the wrong sample to illustrate a "typical" black ink particle, selecting one which had been found only loosely attached to the ink. By focusing on this contamination, rich in chromium and iron, he gave Cahill the opportunity to re-emphasise his case in an essay for an expanded version of the 1965 official book, a few years later.