Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. Simon WinchesterЧитать онлайн книгу.
island men had placed them there as lambs, early in the spring. The island shepherds had climbed up the cliffs — fixed ropes could be seen, spun between a network of pitons and karabiners that glinted against the rocks when the sun was right —and men in Faroese rowing boats would hand up the lambs to them, one by one, and each climber would sling a mewing lamb across his shoulders and then heave himself, hand over hand, boots sliding on the wet rock face, up to the tiny and precipitous pasture.
With one hand he would hold on to the rope, and with the other unclasp the frightened and warm-wet animal from around his neck and place it as firmly as possible on solid ground. A thousand feet below the boat looked tiny, the occupants barely visible, just craning faces gazing up to make certain everything was still all right. The young sheep would stagger for a moment, bewildered, would then sniff the air and look with amazement at the drop - and finally would realise how best to stand, foursquare, in order to survive. The animal, by now more calm, would tuck its nose into the rich grass that had been long fertilized with the guano from the whirling puffins, and remain there, nervously content, for the rest of the year.
From down below I could see them, hundreds of wool-white dots, shifting slowly behind their noses and always ohmygod about to fall, but never apparently doing so, even in the gales and when the rains made the grass as slick as oilskin and blubber.
St Brendan, if he had voyaged to the Faroes at all, sailed almost due northwards from the Hebrides. But after his visit (where his Navigatio reports encounters with others similar to him, suggesting he was not the first Irishman to get there), the prospect of continuing north was quite bleak: to do so would mean cold, and then intense cold, and then ice. Eastwards, too, was no picnic: the expedition would have ended on the known and dangerously rockbound coast of Norway. So westwards was the only way to go; but the small boat had to brave seas and storms and winds and currents possibly entirely beyond the competence of even the most navigationally expert of this group of innocent and most likely discalced Clonfert friars.
When Tim Severin took a replica boat across the Atlantic in the summers of 1976 and 1977 (arguing that since it had taken St Brendan fully seven seasons to cross the ocean, he could legitimately take two), he made landfall in the Faroes, in Iceland, and eventually, after weathering ferocious storms in the Denmark Strait, in Newfoundland. His expedition proved it was entirely possible to cross the Atlantic in a leather boat, providing (as the Irish curragh builder had earlier told him) the crew was good enough. But while he showed that such a journey could have been made, Severin did not prove that such a journey had been made, nor that Irish monks had ever done such a thing, had been to any of these three countries at the time suggested. Nor has any firm evidence ever been adduced either that Irishmen visited or settled, or, more crucially, that they ever completed a crossing of the ocean. No early Irish artefact has ever been found in North America.
So the Irish were almost certainly not the linear antecedents of Christopher Columbus. Moreover, even though many Italians claim to this day that Columbus had no predecessors at all, and that 1492 was a true historical watershed for transoceanic contact, a discovery in the middle of the twentieth century changed everything. An archaeological find in northern Newfoundland in 1961 proved that the first ocean crossing had been made four hundred years after the supposed evangelising mission of the Irish, and fully four hundred years before the commercial expedition of Columbus, but neither by an Irishman nor a Genoese.
The first European to cross the Atlantic and reach the New World was a Norseman, a Viking, and probably from a family born in the fjord lands south of the coastal towns of Bergen and Stavanger, in Norway.
7. ARRIVALS
Four years before these archaeologists announced their discovery, a group of antiquarian booksellers piqued public interest in the possibility that Columbus had been completely outdone.
In 1957 a young dealer in New Haven, Connecticut, Laurence Witten, approached Yale University with an extraordinary offer: he had bought, by way of a dealer in Italy, what appeared to be a fifteenth-century map of the known world, but with one crucial feature that had never before been seen: the presence of a large island, with two elongated indentations on its east coast, situated on the left side of the map to the west of Greenland. The island was identified on the map as Vinlanda, and the rubric above it, written in Latin, said that it had been visited in the eleventh century, first by “companions Bjarni and Leif Eriksson,” and later by a legate from the Apostolic See.
It was eight years before the discovery of the map was announced - mainly because Paul Mellon, the banking millionaire who had eventually acquired it from Witten and offered it as a gift for his alma mater, decided he would hand it over only once it had been authenticated. Eight years of tests later, a team of British Museum specialists finally declared it to be genuine, and Mellon allowed Yale to release the news. It sparked a sensation - as if it had been an arm of the True Cross, a fresh revelation about the Shroud of Turin or the rudder from Noah’s Ark. It was “the most exciting cartographic discovery of the century,” said the university’s curator of maps, “the most exciting single acquisition in modern times,” said the head of the Beinecke Library, “exceeding in significance even the Gutenberg Bible.” It made the front pages everywhere.
What thrilled the world - or at least most Americans (though not Italian-Americans) and all Norwegians - was that the map appeared to be final cartographic confirmation that the “Vinland” famously mentioned in two of the best-known thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas was in North America. The map appeared to prove once and for all that Leif Eriksson — Erik the Red’s peripatetic Iceland-born son - had indeed, and in the very precisely remembered year AD 1001, landed somewhere on the American continent.
Here was documentary confirmation of something all red-blooded Italians had long feared - that it was not Columbus who had first crossed the Atlantic, but an eleventh-century Norseman. Adding insult to this injury to Genoese pride was the fact that Yale, with magnificently self-evident cheek, chose to display its Viking treasure by throwing a lavish celebration dinner featuring a Viking longboat carved from ice and the normally owlish university librarian wearing an iron helmet flown over by the King of Norway - and held the party on Tuesday, 12, October, that year’s Columbus Day. It was hardly the most appropriate moment to suggest that a Norwegian made the first American landfall, and it caused much huffing.
“Twenty-one million Americans will resent this great insult,” said the then president of the Italian-American Historical Society.
The only problem was that the fragile and yellowing little parchment document, eleven inches by sixteen, has turned out to be a tissue freighted with all manner of uncertainties and bitter argument. The book dealer had lied about where and how it had come to be his. The Italian (an irony not lost) who had sold it to him (for $3,500) and who had previously tried in vain to sell it to the British Museum turned out to have been both a fascist and a convicted thief. Tests on the map’s ink showed high levels of chemicals that had not been invented at the time the map was said to have been made - and although the parchment itself was proved to be fifteenth century, it appeared to have been coated with an oil made in the 1950s. The fold down the map’s middle turned out not to be a fold at all, but a splice, with traces of curious chemicals at its edges. And the map’s Latin text was peppered with the æ ligature, a lexical form seldom used at the time of the map’s supposed creation.
It all became too much for Yale, and in 1974 the exasperated librarian declared their costly treasure to be a forgery. This was not, however, to be the end of the story. Further tests were conducted in the mid-1980s, and these suggested that the tests of the previous decade had been botched - and so in 1987 Yale changed its mind once more, said it now had confidence in the document and had it insured for $25 million, just in case. At the time of writing the sceptics and the believers were still endlessly swapping the ascendancy: more chemical and spectroscopic and subatomic tests have raised ever more complicated doubts, and the name of a curious anti-Nazi forger12 who might have had a powerful though complicated motive for forging such a map has come to light, even though the most senior of all Danish conservators was as recently as 2009 still insisting that the map was true.