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 , was brought in for the transcription and translation of the Relation and the secrecy almost completely ruled out consultation with specialists. The book was published, and the map revealed to the world, the day before Columbus Day , Many academic reviewers of the book 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, who gave very straightforward and helpful answers; but, 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 s 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 s—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. Another point calling the map's authenticity into question was raised at the Conference: It seemed that either Jelic 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.

Handwriting experts at the 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 , the Keeper of Manuscripts having detected elements of handwriting style not developed until the nineteenth century. 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 Skelton's scientific colleagues at the British Museum made a short preliminary examination in and found that:.

In , 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 s, 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.

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A new investigation in the early s, by a team under Dr. 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. The McCrone team had also made mistakes, though none as fundamental as Cahill's. Revisiting his notes in 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.

In , McCrone visited Yale to take new microsamples from the map, partly to check his earlier results, and partly to apply new techniques. Photomicrographs taken at 1 micrometer intervals through the thickness of ink samples demonstrated that the manufactured anatase particles were not just sticking to the surface as Cahill's criticisms had implied, and Fourier transform spectroscopy identified the ink's binder as gelatin, probably made from animal skin.

Various scientists have formed their own theories to explain how the "20th century manufactured" anatase in the Vinland Map ink could have got into genuine medieval ink. The first was chemist Jacqueline Olin, then a researcher with the Smithsonian Institution, who in the s conducted experiments which produced anatase at an early stage of a medieval iron-gall ink production process. Examination of her anatase by a colleague, mineralogist Dr Kenneth Towe, showed that it was very different from the neat, rounded crystals found in the Vinland Map and modern pigments.

Olin published a paper that identifies the anatase in the Vinland Map ink as being truncated bi-pyramidal rather than rounded crystals [21] however, this is not vastly different from the McCrones' description of the crystals as "smooth, rounded rhomb shapes" [9].

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Radiocarbon dating , begun in by physicist Douglass Donahue and chemists Jacqueline Olin and Garman Harbottle, places the origin of the parchment somewhere between and The initial results were confusing because the unknown substance the British Museum had found across the whole map, effectively ignored by later researchers who were concentrating on the ink, turned out to be trapping tiny traces of fallout deep within the parchment from s nuclear tests.

Although there is none of this s substance on top of the ink, further tests, starting with a detailed chemical analysis, are needed to confirm whether the lines were drawn after it soaked into the parchment. In , Harbottle's attempt to explain a possible medieval origin for the ink was published, but he was shown by Towe and others to have misunderstood the significance of the various analyses, rendering his theory meaningless.

The expanded 30th anniversary edition of the official book, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation , was notable for its exclusion of most of the evidence against the map's authenticity, concentrating instead on vindications by George Painter, and Thomas Cahill with colleague Bruce Kusko in which they claimed specifically that they had not analyzed the loose particles they took from the map at the time of their PIXE research , but it did reprint a remarkable essay written in by the original book dealer Laurence Witten.

He stated that, when the McCrone investigation concluded the map to be a forgery in , he was asked by Yale to reveal its provenance as a matter of urgency, and to discuss the possible return of Mr Mellon's money. He replied that he had no idea where the map came from, beyond Ferrajoli who was convicted of theft shortly after the sale, and died shortly after release from prison.

On the subject of the money, he said he could not pay it all back because he had paid agreed shares of his profit to Ferrajoli and to another dealer who had introduced him.

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For his part, Mellon did not ask for the return of any money. The essay also revealed that Witten had, on Ferrajoli's recommendation, met with Irving Davis after buying the map volume in In , Kirsten A. Seaver published Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map , a wide-ranging review of the arguments and evidence presented to that date. Seaver was hailed as the Vinland map's "most thorough and outspoken critic in recent years" for her "exemplary interdisciplinary study".

However, subsequent research into the provenance of the Vinland map documents see below suggests that they are unlikely to have spent any time in Fischer's possession. A few months earlier, Kirsten Seaver had suggested that a forger could have found two separate blank leaves in the original "Speculum Historiale" volume, from which the first few dozen pages appeared to be missing, and joined them together with the binding strip.

For example, he experimented only with artificial wormholes, and did not follow up the observation made at the Conference, that live bookworms were a known tool of the fake antiquities trade. Similarly, he claimed that the anatase in the ink could have come from sand used to dry it the hypothetical source of the sand being gneiss from the Binnenthal area of Switzerland but his team had not examined the crystals microscopically, and Kenneth Towe responded that this was an essential test, given that crystal size and shape should clearly distinguish commercial anatase from anatase found in sand.

Members of the Danish team later joined with others to perform microanalyses of the remaining piece from the carbon dating sample. They found a significant quantity of monostearin Glycerol monostearate which is commonly used in the food and pharmaceutical industries, with additional aromatic compounds; if it is not purely localised contamination from handling by somebody using something like hand lotion, this is likely to be the mystery post chemical soaked into the parchment.

In June , it was reported in the British press that a Scottish researcher, John Paul Floyd, claimed to have discovered two pre references to the Yale Speculum and Tartar Relation manuscripts which shed significant light on the provenance of the documents. It is known that Enzo Ferrajoli, who offered the Vinland manuscript for sale in , was convicted of having stolen manuscripts from the Cathedral Library of La Seo, Zaragoza, in the s. As controversy has swirled around the map almost since its acquisition, authorities at Yale University chose not to comment on the authenticity of the parchment document, other than to say they watch the debate with unusual interest.

Tripp Professor of History, Paul Freedman , has stated that the map is "unfortunately a fake". At the Vinland Map Symposium, Yale conservation scientist Richard Hark revealed the results of new global chemical analyses of the Map and the Tartar Relation, which established, among many other things, that the ink lines of the Map contain varying amounts of anatase "consistent with modern manufacture". So too do two small patches on the first page of the Tartar Relation, where the original iron-gall ink appears to have been erased and replaced.

As a consequence, the U. Thus, the North American promontory at the approximate latitude of Gibraltar and which I therefore take to be Cape Hatteras is about degrees too far to the west. In Africa, Cape Verde is off by only a degree.

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However, the Cape of Good Hope not shown is 10 degrees too far east, and the Horn of Africa is a full 20 degrees too far east, making the Red Sea almost unrecognizably deformed. The southern tip of India is likewise about 18 degrees too far east. Johns, Newfoundland, this part of the island should be about 12 degrees further west than it is depicted on the Canerio map. Instead, it has, as McNaughton rightly points out, roughly the same visual location, relative to western Europe, that it does on the Vinland Map.

Note, however, that almost half of the spurious gap between Newfoundland and the Carolinas on the Canerio map is due to the longitudinal displacement of the latter, rather than the former. Furthermore, the Canerio map's "Mystery Island" lacks the distinctly northwest-to-southeast orientation of the true Labrador-Newfoundland coast. The northern tip of Labrador in fact lies an additional 12 degrees west of St. Instead the Canerio island erroneously shows the upright orientation of "Vinland" on the VM.

The worst longitudinal errors in the Atlantic portion of the Canerio map involve Greenland itself. Thus, the map depicts Cape Farewell at its southern tip at 62 degrees west of Jerusalem, or 27 degrees west of Greenwich, when in fact it lies a full 44 degrees west of Greenwich. If it were moved 17 degrees west on the Canerio map to its correct location, it would almost touch the northern end of the "Mystery Island," which in turn should lie another 24 degrees further west than it is depicted.

On the precise equirectangular projection of the Canerio map, east-west distances at northern latitudes should be expanded in proportion to the secant of the latitude. Instead, Cape Farewell inappropriately lies roughly as it is depicted, relative to Spain, Africa, and England, on the merely ad hoc layout of the Vinland Map.

Vindication for Vinland map: New study supports authenticity | EurekAlert! Science News

Furthermore, Greenland should be much wider than it appears on the Canerio map, because of the same required distortion of east-west distances on its projection. Thus, at the Arctic Circle the latitude of northernmost Iceland , Greenland spans 23 degrees and hence should appear to be two and a half times as wide as the Iberian Peninsula 9 degrees.

Instead, Greenland inappropriately has roughly the same width, relative to features in Europe far to the south, that it does on the Vinland map. McNaughton is quite correct to argue that the remarkable similarity between the layouts of Europe, Greenland, and Newfoundland-Labrador on the Vinland Map and the Canerio Map must betray a common origin. However, the layout is all wrong in terms of the precise equirectangular system of the Canerio Map, yet not unreasonable in terms of the ad hoc system of the Vinland Map. There is no reason to believe that a modern forger, who was clever enough to have found a parchment that could be positively dated to c.



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It would therefore be far easier to conclude that the layout on the Canerio Map derives from that of the Vinland Map, than vice-versa per McNaughton! Conceivably, this was the VM itself, but more likely it was one of several similar maps, now lost. When Corte-Real rediscovered Greenland and Newfoundland in , with a good idea of their latitudes but only a very imprecise notion of their longitudes, the cartographers, who probably had no idea what projection system was used on their source map, must have inappropriately copied these features as they appeared onto the Cantino map, whence they migrated to the Canerio map.

If McNaughton is right that Newfoundland on the Canerio map lies precisely where it does on the VM, relative to western Europe, it would not even have been necessary to have fudged it across the Papal Demarcation Line to justify a Portuguese claim. On the Vinland Map, "Vinilanda" is represented as a three-lobed island cut almost through by by deep inlets. It is generally assumed that these lobes represent "Helluland", a barren land of flat stones believed to have been Baffin Island, "Markland," a forested land identified with Labrador, and "Vinland," a land with grapes believed to have been Newfoundland.

The VM is therefore loosely using "Vinilanda" to include all three of the western lands. The lake or bay at the end of the northern inlet would then be Ungava Bay. The upright orientation of the island may just mean that the VM compiler was working from a written source that described them as running from north to south.

However, another possibility is that the source map actually turned the island clockwise somewhat in order to keep Helluland from getting inordinately far from Greenland, or Vinland too close to Brittany. Some such distortions of direction are required in all but cylindrical projections of the globe. Note that India and, I would argue, the east coast of Africa has similarly been turned a full 90 degrees counterclockwise in the Bianco Map, and almost as far in the VM, in order to improve the fit in Asia.

The coast of Norway has similarly been turned clockwise in both maps. On the Cantino and Canerio maps, the "Mystery Island" terminates at the latitude of Cape Farewell, and therefore also of the northern tip of Labrador. Evidently Corte-Real therefore did actually reach Hudson Strait, but not Baffin Island, before turning back, despite the erroneous lack of northwest-southeast drift to the "island" on the maps. Note that Corte-Real, like the Vikings, was greatly impressed with "Markland's" forestation.

He evidently took Belle Isle Strait for one of the numerous deep fjords portrayed on the maps. One innovation of the Canerio map over the VM is that whereas VM follows the medieval tradition whether based on conjecture or actual circumnavigation does not concern us here that Greenland is an island, Canerio incorrectly follows Clavus by trying to link it to Spitsbergen, and possibly even to Norway, at the very top of the map. These latitudes, which probably were indeed impassible in the 15th and 16th centuries, are not charted on the Cantino map.

In short, the Canerio map, far from demonstrating that the VM is a post-fifteenth century forgery per McNaughton, actually provides convincing evidence that the unusual information on the VM was employed by Renaissance cartographers, years before VM's modern rediscovery. For further discussion of McNaughton's paper, the reader is referred to Guthrie Saenger's Diphthong Objection Another recent discussion of the map, one that Tim Spalding finds particularly persuasive in his excellent website "Vinlanda: Saenger, the curator of rare books at the Newberry Library in Chicago, raises numerous objections to the edition of VMTR and its conclusion that the map is authentic.

Since Saenger's own field is paleography, his views in this area carry particular authority.

Saenger raises three specifically paleographic objections of his own. This issue is therefore one of Latin orthography , rather than of paleography per se as specified by Saenger.

Material Evidence: Donahue

Thus, the adjacent but well-established Azores and Canary Islands are identified on it as the "Desiderate insule" see Figure 5 above and the "Beate insule fortune," respectively, and caption 53 at the upper right refers to "Terre non satis perscrutate". Contrary to the impression given by Saenger, the VM does in fact exhibit numerous Italian influences in both its language and its cartography, if not in its script per se, and therefore might also in its cartographic orthography.

As we shall see in greater detail below, Eric Wahlgren had already in specifically proposed, on linguistic grounds, "that the unknown [VM] mapmaker was Italian" PVMC, p.