first fresh sighting in a hundred years.”
“Tell us about the last one.”
Bea Dutton was as enthusiastic as she was knowledgeable about her cartographic history. “Have you ever heard of a German Jesuit priest named Josef Fischer?”
None of us had.
“A brilliant scholar and perhaps a bit of a rogue. There’s a very rare piece at Yale called the Vinland Map, purchased for the library there by the great philanthropist Paul Mellon. Had it been proved to be authentic, it would have shown that the Vikings predated Columbus ’s voyages to this continent by fifty years.”
“Sounds like you don’t think it’s real,” Mike said.
“Carbon-fourteen analysis dates the parchment to the 1430s, Mike, but a chemical study of the ink puts us in the 1920s. It’s on old paper-the kind you can slice right out of an ancient book, sad to say-but the ink gave it away.”
“So Father Fischer’s a fraud?”
“Well, most of us in the field think the only person he was trying to defraud-and embarrass-with his doctored map was the fuhrer.”
“Then I’m all for the old boy already,” Mike said. “How’s that?”
“Hitler was using Norse history as Nazi propaganda. He likened the Norse to Aryans by claiming that their territorial ambitions were similar to his own empire-lust,” Bea said.
“So Fischer put the Roman Catholic Church in the mix,” Mike said. “Didn’t want the Nazis to get away with their propaganda without a little bit of religion thrown in.”
“There’s a lot of Catholic imagery in the Vinland Map,” Bea said, pointing out notations with her white glove in the same book of reproductions. “Father Fischer was so outraged by the Nazi persecution of the Jesuits that he just teased Hitler by creating this fake document. If the fuhrer wanted to believe the Vikings led the way to the new world, Fischer wouldn’t let him have that victory unless he accepted that the Catholic Church was also along for the ride.”
“So what did Father Fischer have to do with finding my map?” Mike asked.
“See, you’ve got the fever already,” Bea said. “
Mike smiled at her. “I’ve got a lot of empty wall space in my crib. You tell me what I’m looking for and let’s go for the whole dozen panels. I’ll let you come visit any time you’d like.”
“That’s a deal, Mike,” Bea said, continuing her story. “Fischer was doing research in 1901, in a private library in a German castle. As happens with so many important discoveries in history, Fischer simply lucked upon something he’d never set out to find-in this case, a dusty portfolio in an obscure corner of a nobleman’s home. Cartographers had been searching for remnants of this particular lost map for so long that they had begun to believe the great Vespuccian model never really existed as such.”
“A complete accident, then?”
“Exactly. Prince Waldburg’s ancestors had collected maps for generations. While Fischer was studying papers of the early Norsemen in Greenland -his own personal area of interest-he came across a large manuscript that had been in the family for generations. It was a prize collection of the famous sixteenth-century globe maker named Johannes Schoner that had been acquired centuries earlier. Schoner, we figure, had purchased the Waldseemuller map of 1507 in order to incorporate its new worldview in his work so that he could use it to make his own globes more up-to-date.”
“What a find,” Mercer said.
“And especially because the twelve panels had never been assembled. Each one was carefully concealed inside the pages of this enormous folio, untouched for four centuries,” Bea said, shifting her attention back to the segment that Mike had found just a couple of hours earlier. “I’d say this looks just about faultless, too.”
“What became of the one that Father Fischer found?” Mike asked.
“It stayed in private hands-at the castle-for another hundred years. In 2003, one century and ten million dollars later, this map became the crown jewel of the Library of Congress. The
“What?” I asked.
“The world map of 1507 is how we know it as librarians.
“A map of the world according to the tradition of Ptolemy and the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci,” Mike said, smiling at Bea, who looked surprised by his translation ability. “You don’t think those nuns at parochial school liked me for my good behavior, do you? My Latin wasn’t half bad.”
She flipped back to the copy in her book of reproductions and again unfolded it before us.
“What are the chances that Mike’s find is a forgery?” Mercer asked.
Bea Dutton frowned. “Because of what I told you about Father Fischer?”
More likely Mercer had asked that question because of rumors about Tina Barr.
“Yeah.”
“The Vinland Map presented an entirely different issue. The Vikings were the greatest explorers of the Middle Ages-nobody disputes that. They just never made maps. Not a single one,” Bea said. “They didn’t have a concept of the world that encouraged any of them to draw diagrams, so lots of scholars were skeptical about its authenticity from the get-go. Then there’s the ink. You know how ink is made?”
I’d never given it a thought. “Actually, I have no idea.”
“It’s the reaction between iron in ferrous sulfate and tannin from oak trees. Together they oxidize on a page and literally burn the letters or drawings into the paper. Over centuries, the blackened mark starts to turn brown.”
“And the Vinland Map ink?” Mercer asked.
“Document examiners subjected it to microprobe spectroscopy, which yielded a synthetic substance-something called anatase-that was in the ink. And that wasn’t manufactured until World War One. Heave-ho to the Vikings.”
“And this?”
“Look closely at it, Mercer.” Bea pushed the tip of the antique panel closer to us and started to explain it to us. “This is exquisitely elaborate, do you see?”
There was a masterfully drawn portrait of Vespucci, holding his navigational instruments, at the top of the large panel. Below him was the upper portion of the map, representing an area that was bordered by the Arctic Ocean, and below it a landmass with tiny writing that described interior regions and portrayed the topography of the area. Behind Vespucci was a chubby-cheeked figure-the northeast wind-blowing across the frigid waters.
“The detail is astonishing,” I said.
“See the inset?” Bea asked. On the upper-left quadrant of the panel was a small world map. “It’s actually different than the larger image, if you were to see them all assembled. As Vespucci completed more voyages, the latest descriptions were added to these smaller insets.”
“Too detailed to forge?” I asked.
“Not only that, Alex. The Vinland Map is just ink on parchment. This one is a woodcut. It’s truly a work of art, and I’d say impossible to re-create today. After all, we do have one original in Washington against which any discoveries like the one you made this morning can be compared.”
Mike was poring over the reproduction that Bea had unfolded. “Every section of this map tells its own story, doesn’t it?”
“That’s one of the things that’s so magical about it,” she said.
The margins of the twelve panels were festooned with figures of the wind and sea, and cartouches that chronicled the most important features of these newly charted territories.
“Could be the reason that this piece of the map was stored in that particular book might point us to whatever Tina Barr-or her killer-was looking for,” Mike said, nodding to Mercer. “Maybe something in one of these images, or a link to the part of the world that’s portrayed in the fragment we found, you know?”
“The section of the map featuring Amerigo himself is stuck inside a book about American birds. Not a bad idea,” Mercer said. “Bea, is there any way to get a copy of the full map that’s reproduced here in your book?”
“You want the four-by-eight-foot version, I guess.”
Mike was right. If the stack of books deposited under the water tanks in the last twenty-four hours was
