VMs: OT: Still No Rest for Vinland

["Barbara Barrett" <barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Guys,
I thought this article on the Beinecke's other infamous  posession might be
of interest.
Barbara

----- Original Message -----
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44387-2004Feb15?language=printer


washingtonpost.com

Norse Map or German Hoax? Still No Rest for Vinland

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 16, 2004; Page A12

When it surfaced in 1957, it was too good to be true: a purported
15th-century world map depicting an island to the far west labeled
Vinilandia Insula -- the fabled Vinland -- proof positive, it seemed, that
Norse explorers had reached North America long before Columbus.

Thanks -- but no thanks -- the British Museum told the intermediary who
offered to sell it to them. It's a phony.

Later that year, however, New Haven, Conn., book dealer Lawrence Witten
bought the map and an accompanying medieval manuscript for his wife, paying
$3,500. Soon after, he visited Yale University Library to view a seemingly
unrelated manuscript fragment purchased by Thomas E. Marston, the library's
curator of medieval and renaissance literature. Witten asked to borrow it.

That night, Marston got an excited call from Witten. Marston's manuscript,
Witten's manuscript and the map were all written in the same hand, Witten
said. Furthermore, worm holes in all three works matched up. They
apparently had been bound together, with Marston's manuscript as the meat
in the sandwich. The map had to be real.

Thus began the affair of the "Vinland Map," a 13-by-19-inch sheet of
parchment depicting not only Vinland, but also remarkably detailed
renderings of Iceland and, especially, of Greenland, which -- if the map is
real -- is portrayed as an island for the first time in history.

Forty-five years after the map's "discovery," its authenticity remains a
subject of fierce debate. In the last two months, the journal Analytical
Chemistry has published two articles by front-line combatants in the
dispute.

One, by retired Smithsonian research chemist Jacqueline Olin, argued that
the presence of anatase, or titanium oxide, in the ink did not mean the ink
was modern, as had been alleged in earlier research. She suggested the ink
may well have been medieval, made from a simple leaching process from the
titanium-rich mineral ilmenite.

The other, by Kenneth Towe, also a retired Smithsonian analyst, reminded
readers that the map's anatase had a crystalline structure identical to
commercial anatase, a ubiquitous synthetic compound used to enhance colors
in paint. Olin's analysis, Towe charged, was "a 'rehash' that is too often
biased, misleading or inaccurate."

In May, Danish businessman Jorgen Siemonsen, a well-known debunker of
Viking frauds who is agnostic on the map, will sponsor a debate between
believers and skeptics as part of a conference on the "Dynamics of Northern
Societies."

And coming a month later will be a book-length study titled "Maps, Myths
and Men, the Story of the Vinland Map," which will make the case that it is
a 1930s forgery by a German Jesuit priest intent on making the Nazis look
like fools.

At this juncture, a preponderance of evidence points toward forgery, but
the argument is not over, and the stakes are high. If it is authentic, the
map is priceless, the oldest known depiction of North America. Yale's
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the map's current resting place,
at one point reportedly insured it for $25 million. If it is not authentic,
however, it is an amusing curiosity -- worth what Witten paid for it,
perhaps, but not much more.

The Yale library refused a request to discuss the map except to say that it
takes no position on its authenticity.

"It's going back and forth, and it will continue going back and forth,"
said William W. Fitzhugh, director of the Smithsonian Institution's Arctic
Studies Center. "The people who made the studies are defending them, and I
don't think it will ever be solved."

For 15 years after the Witten phone call, belief in the map's authenticity
was ascendant. The British Museum's skeptics became believers.
Philanthropist Paul Mellon bought the map and gave it to Yale. Then in 1960
a Norwegian husband and wife team discovered remains of a Norse encampment
in Newfoundland, proving that Greenlanders had, in fact, reached North
America.

There was dissent, however. Researchers were furious with Yale for keeping
the map out of sight until Columbus Day 1965, choosing public relations
pizzazz when orthodoxy called for prompt publication of scientific
analyses. A team of British investigators questioned whether the ink was
medieval. Paleographers questioned the handwriting.

And then there was the fact of the map itself. "The Norse never made maps,"
said Norwegian-born historian Kirsten Seaver, author of "Maps, Myths and
Men." "When you are Norwegian and you see something like that, you say it
is so fake, there's no use bothering with it. And how would a 15th-century
mapmaker know Greenland was an island?"

"There was a medieval warm period" that may have allowed the Icelanders to
colonize Greenland in the 10th century, but "it wasn't that much warmer"
than today, Seaver said. "You'd be hard put to sail around Greenland today."

Still, the debate did not turn until 1973, when chemist Walter C. McCrone
analyzed the map with polarized light microscopy and found that the yellow
"aging stain" seeping from beneath the map's lines was made of synthetic
anatase, a substance patented in 1917.

"That seemed to put it in the grave," Fitzhugh recalled.

But others disagreed. Olin made anatase from ilmenite, using a process that
would have worked for medieval scribes. "There have been too few medieval
inks analyzed" to make categorical statements about them, Olin said in an
interview, responding to criticisms by McCrone, and later, Towe, that her
anatase did not match the map's.

The case for authenticity was strengthened in 1987, when a University of
California at Davis team led by Thomas Cahill reanalyzed the map using
X-rays and concluded that titanium was present, but only in minute
quantities, calling into question McCrone's analysis. Yale trumpeted these
results in a 1995 revision of its original report on the map.

McCrone, who died in 2002, never wavered in dismissing it as a fraud. And
that year a British team from University College, London, used laser
analysis of the stain to draw conclusions identical to McCrone's. "I'm not
taking any glamour away from McCrone," said chemist Robin J.H. Clark,
co-author of the British study. "We used a completely different technique
to obtain the same conclusion. I think the matter is over."

Not quite. At the same time, an Olin-led team published results from
radiocarbon testing that dated the parchment to 1434 A.D. -- proof that the
paper was old enough, even if the map wasn't.

And it isn't, Seaver said. Fascinated, she read everything written about
Norse exploration since the 18th century and gradually homed in on the Rev.
Josef Fischer, a German Jesuit cartographer and prolific Norse historian
who died in 1944, as her chief suspect.

Seaver theorizes that Fischer, upset at Nazi persecution of the Catholic
Church, drew the map in the late 1930s and deliberately larded it with
religious references. "The Nazis loved to talk about a Nordic heritage, and
the map was great for them," Seaver said, "except that it also told the
story of how the Roman Church had been there from the start. It presented
them with a wonderful dilemma."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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