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The Vinland Map: Real or hoax?

By Simon Welfare

Is the Vinland Map a unique historical document, worth millions of dollars, or is it a fake?

Its possible importance and value reside in the depiction of a curious island named 'Vinland' on the western edge of the map, for this lies where North America appears on modern charts. Text nearby makes an astonishing claim: that two Viking sailors found their way to Vinland almost 500 years before Christopher Columbus, the explorer that history books credit with the discovery of the New World.

Some experts believe that the map was drawn in around 1440, and that the information it contains was passed down from Viking adventurers who had made landfall in Vinland. Others claim that the map is a hoax, forged in modern times.

Whether the Vikings and Christopher Columbus used a chart to find North America or not, the rest of us – after nearly 40 years of dispute – certainly need a guide to help us evaluate the arguments for and against the authenticity of the Vinland Map … and here it is.

The map is owned by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in the US and is kept in the Beinecke Library there. Pictures of it are posted on the website hosted by Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York – a scientist from there helped to carry out the carbon-dating of the map.

Could the Vinland Map have been based on information gathered by Viking seafarers? Kirsten A Seaver's fascinating and highly readable book The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the exploration of North America, c AD 1000-1500 (Stanford University Press, 1998) tells the story of the Viking voyages to North America. For more, see Vikings: The North Atlantic saga edited by William W Fitzhugh and Elizabeth Ward (Smithsonian Books, 2000).

At around the time that the Vinland map was first launched publicly in 1965, Norwegian archaeologists Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad announced that they had discovered the remains of a Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland in Canada. You can read more about it, and see pictures of the reconstructed buildings there, on the Parks Canada website.

While the Ingstads' discovery has left no room for doubt that the Vikings did beat Columbus to America by around 500 years, no evidence has been found to suggest that these Norse seafarers used or drew maps. So is the Vinland map a cunning hoax? Those who believe it is ask why nothing seems to be known about what happened to it between the date of its apparent creation – around 1440 – and 1957, when it was shown to experts at the British Museum.

Yale acquired the Vinland Map in 1957 from the noted American manuscript dealer Laurence C Witten II, who, in turn, had bought it from an Italian dealer, Enzo Ferrajoli. Witten's account of the deal and its consequences can be read in the second edition of a lavish book published by Yale University Press in 1996: The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation by R A Skelton, Thomas E Marston and George D Painter. The first edition was issued to coincide with Yale's 1965 announcement that it had acquired the map. Both books contain essays supporting the authenticity of the manuscript, while the second, revised edition acknowledges the doubts voiced by some experts. The Beinecke Library at Yale sells an offprint of Witten's article for $3, but although it is an entertaining read, it casts no clear light on the manuscript's origins.

In an article 'Vinland Re-read', published in 1998, Paul Saenger of the Newberry Library in Chicago, an authority on medieval books, points out the inconsistencies in Witten's recollections and raises other reasons to be sceptical.

Frustrated by the map's lack of a provenance, both doubters and believers tried a different tack: they wanted to see if science could solve the mystery of the map.

The map's supporters have taken heart from the findings of a team based at the University of Arizona who, in 1995, were allowed to cut a small sliver of parchment from it for radiocarbon dating. Their finding, published in Radiocarbon 2002 44 45-52, was impressively precise: the parchment on which the Vinland Map was drawn was made during the period 1423-1445 (that is, 1434 ± 11 years) – about 50 years or more before Columbus's voyage and approximately the date (1440) that Yale's experts had suggested. The doubters counter this by claiming that a forger could simply have taken two blank pages from a genuine medieval work and drawn on them.

Tests on the ink, however, have proved highly contentious. As long ago as 1967, an investigator at the British Museum noticed that there was something odd about the ink when it was placed under ultra-violet light. But it was Dr Walter McCrone, a world-famous expert on analysing the tiniest of particles, whose findings in the 1970s launched the Great Ink Controversy that has raged, unabated, for some 30 years.

McCrone claimed that the ink contained anatase, a form of titanium dioxide that occurs naturally as a mineral ore. The problem (for the believers) was that McCrone also argued that the particles of anatase on the map were not the jagged, irregular ones that are found in nature, but the rounded particles, all of a similar size, that denote the synthetic version. And synthetic anatase was not invented until the 20th century …

In the 1980s, believers took new hope from a study conducted by a team headed by Professor Tom Cahill at the University of California, Davis. Cahill had used a cyclotron to calculate how much of each element can be found in ancient inks. The results opened up the possibility that the Vinland Map might be genuine after all, for Cahill's team found hardly any anatase on the map.

Yet another analysis of the ink, using yet another technique, swung the argument back into the sceptics' favour in 2002. Then, Dr Katherine Brown and Professor Robin Clark of University College London announced that they, too, had found industrial anatase on the map. Professor Clark added, 'It was deliberately placed as part of the ink. We can see no option but that this must be a modern 20th-century forgery.'

You can read the scientific findings and arguments in the pages of the journal Analytical Chemistry: McCrone's in 1988, vol. 60, pp 1009-18; the Cahill team's in 1987, vol. 59, pp 829-33; and Brown and Clark's in 2002, vol. 74, pp 3658-61.

Or, more simply, you can go to the internet, where you will find comprehensive background information on the controversy and updates on the continuing debate. The two websites below are useful and often stimulating:

The Vinland Map: Some 'finer points' of the debate
www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/vinland/vinland.htm
'Toilet-roll' of a website by J Huston McCulloch, dated to February 2004, which contains fascinating information, arguments and images.

The Vinland Map: Your analysis of an infamous map
http://webexhibits.org/vinland
Excellent educational website that presents the evidence and then allows users to judge it – and the authenticity of the map.

But if you want a full overview of this strange and puzzling tale, you would do best to read two new books.

The first, already published by Past Presented (PO Box 80, Whitehaven CA28 6YB), is The Vinland Map: A short summary by the Vinland Map Study Group. It's succinct (only 56 pages), inexpensive, well-researched and occasionally eccentric.
Get this book

The second is by the experts' expert, Kirsten A Seaver. Maps, Myths and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map, published by Stanford University Press in July 2004, investigates the story in mesmerising detail and even names a possible forger. This promises to be the definitive work on this tantalising mystery – at any rate for now …
Get this book

Simon Welfare is executive producer at Granite Film & Television Productions, makers of the Vinland programme. He is also co-author of a number of books, including Red Empire: The forbidden history of the USSR (1988) and Days of Majesty (1993).

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