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SOPHIA OF WISDOM III - ZENO MAP
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SOPHIA OF WISDOM III
THE SOPHIA OF ALL SOPHIA OF WISDOMS
THE LIBRARY OF SOPHIA OF WISDOM III
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CAROLINE E. KENNEDY_____________________________
NOVEMNER 26, 2006
ZENO MAP
Earl Henry Sinclair's fictitious trip to America
by Brian Smith
This article appears in the New Orkney Antiquarian Journal, vol. 2, 2002. It appears here with a few amendments.
You can e-mail Brian Smith from here.
Henry Sinclair, an Earl of Orkney of the late fourteenth century, didn't go to America.[1] It wasn't until 500 years after Henry's death that anybody suggested that he did. The sixteenth century text that eventually gave rise to all the claims about Henry and America certainly doesn't say so. What it says, in so many words, is that someone called Zichmni, with friends, made a trip to Greenland. None of Henry Sinclair's contemporaries or near-contemporaries ever claimed that he went to America; and none of the antiquaries who wrote about him in the seventeenth century said so either, although they made other absurd claims about him. The story is a modern myth, based on careless reading, wishful thinking and sometimes distortion, and during the past five years or so it has taken new outrageous forms.
The main source that we must consult about this matter is a little book, with a curious map, published anonymously in Venice in 1558.[2] The part of it that gave rise to the modern fantasies about Henry Sinclair is a mere 7,000 words long. It was written by Nicoḷ Zeno, a Venetian, to honour two of his ancestors. I shall argue, as others have argued, that Zeno's tale is an elaborate practical joke. I begin by summarising its contents. They are different from what some of its modern expositors have suggested.
The text contains six main sections, linked by the author's explanatory comments. These sections allegedly derive from letters by Nicoḷ Zeno, the author's ancestor and namesake, and Nicoḷ's brother Antonio Zeno. These Zenos were real people: Venetian navigators of the second half of the fourteenth century. Some of the letters purport to be by Nicoḷ to Antonio, and the rest are supposed to be by Antonio to another brother: the famous Carlo Zeno, saviour of Venice in the war of 1380-1 with Genoa.
The first section describes how Nicoḷ Zeno set off on a voyage from Venice to England and Flanders in 1380. There is evidence that Nicoḷ made such a voyage, and came back again, in 1385.[3] In the text, Nicoḷ is shipwrecked on an island called Frislanda, which, the narrator says, 'is an island much larger than Ireland'. Frislanda (as will been seen from Zeno's map) is indeed large, and it doesn't exist. The place-names that Zeno has written on it are partly Faroese, and partly Icelandic.
'By chance,' says our narrator, 'a Prince with an armed following happened to be in the neighbourhood'. The prince had a curious name: Zichmni. He owned some islands called Porlanda, off the south coast of Frislanda, and ruled the duchy of Sorant, or Sorand, on the south-east of the same island. Just a year before, we learn, Zichmni had won a victory against the ruler of Frislanda, the king of Norway, and he is now engaged in conquering the island. Zichmni employs Nicoḷ as a pilot, and the Venetian refugee plays such a valiant part in the conquest of the island that Zichmni ennobles him.
After all this excitement Nicoḷ naturally writes home to his brother Antonio, and invites him north to the (imaginary) island. Antonio arrives, and stays for fourteen years. Zichmni makes Antonio his captain, and sends him to attack Estlanda, another island in the North Sea. Estlanda is clearly meant to be Shetland, as is obvious from its place-names: Brystund, for instance, an old form of Bressay Sound; Sumburgh Head; Scalloway (the latter wrongly depicted on the east side of the main island). But the king of Norway sends his fleet to defend Shetland, and Antonio retreats to an uninhabited island called Grislanda, off the south coast of Iceland.
Zichmni gives up his plan to attack Estlanda, and turns his attention to Iceland. But the main part of that island is too well defended, our narrator tells us, and Zichmni assails seven islands on its east side instead: Talas, Broas, Iscant, Trans, Mimant, Damberc and Bres. Like Frislanda, these islands do not exist. Zichmni builds a fort on Bres, and leaves Nicoḷ in charge there. Nicoḷ soon sets out on a voyage of discovery. He makes land in Greenland, and inspects a monastery there with central heating. But the cold is still too much for him. He returns to Frislanda and dies there. He has been in the far north for four or five years.
Soon afterwards word reaches Zichmni that some fishermen, presumably natives of Frislanda, have come home after an absence of a quarter of a century. They have been visiting previously unknown countries called Estotilanda and Drogeo in the far west. Once again, our author invented these names. In these lands they have had strange adventures: for instance, they had only avoided being eaten by cannibals by teaching the cannibals how to catch fish. Zichmni, fired up by these tales, resolves to follow in their footsteps.
The final two parts of Zeno's narrative describe Zichmni's voyage west with Antonio to look for Estotilanda and Drogeo. They don't make it. First they stop off at an island, apparently near Scotland, called Icaria. Then they land on the southmost point of Greenland, a promontory called Trin. Zichmni is delighted. He likes the climate and the soil, and although his sailors grumble, and eventually go home with Antonio, he stays on. He builds a town at Trin, and he explores the whole coast of Greenland. There we leave Zichmni, and that, more or less, is the story.
What can we say about this narrative, and the map that accompanies it? First, they are the work of someone who didn't know the North Sea very well. Apart from the fact that much of the action is set in islands that don't exist, another important island that does exist is missing. There's no reference at all, in text or map, to Orkney. If the Zeno map is the work of Venetian navigators who lived with the earl of Orkney for four and fourteen years respectively, they don't seem to have paid much attention to their surroundings.
My second point is that many of the commentators have been very careless, or worse, in their reading of the Zeno text and map. I'll deal at more length later with their mistakes and distortions, but I should stress that Zeno doesn't say that Zichmni, whoever he was, went to America. He says that he went to Greenland.[4]
Not surprisingly, it took a long time for anyone to suggest that Zichmni was the first Sinclair earl of Orkney. The lack of any reference to Orkney in the Zeno text, or any depiction of it on the map, might have seemed to rule Henry Sinclair out. It wasn't until the 1780s that a travel writer, John Reinhold Forster, tentatively suggested that Zichmni was Henry.[5]
Forster's arguments weren't impressive. At first he imagined that the fictitious Frislanda had 'been swallowed up since by the sea in a great earthquake'. Then he looked more closely at the name, and concluded that Frislanda must be one of the tiny Orkney islands called Faray. This is surprising because, you will recall, Frislanda was an island somewhat larger than Ireland, and Zichmni spent a long time trying to conquer it.
Forster then pondered on the name Zichmni, and, using the same type of reasoning, proposed that it was a corroption of 'Sinclair'. Finally, he asked what Henry Sinclair was doing in 1380, the date that Zeno assigns to these events in the north. Remember that, according to Zeno, Zichmni had defeated the king of Norway a year before his conquest of Frislanda. Forster noticed that, in 1379, Henry had beaten several other claimants to the earldom of Orkney, and had persuaded the king of Norway to make him earl of Orkney. 'It might with no great impropriety be affirmed,' he said, 'that [Henry Sinclair] had beat the king of Norway, viz. in the person of [the other claimants]'.[6] It would be difficult to imagine a more threadbare argument. Unsurprisingly, Forster's theory didn't attract many followers.[7]
Had Forster looked more closely at Henry Sinclair's career, or the careers of the brothers Zeno, he wouldn't have made his proposal. No contemporary document or commentator ever suggested that Henry Sinclair was an explorer, and there is no hint in any fourteenth century Italian record that the Zeno brothers had the adventures described in their descendant's narrative. Less than fifty years after Henry's death his grandson commissioned a genealogy of the Sinclair family, full of praise of his ancestors' achievements.[8] Did he mention his grandfather's alleged maritime exploits? He did not.
Even more tellingly, none of the antiquarians and biographers who wrote about Henry Sinclair, or the Zeno family, in subsequent centuries, made any reference at all to such adventures and explorations. Henry Sinclair had two enthusiastic seventeenth century biographers: a Dane called Van Bassan and a cleric, Father Richard Augustin Hay. These authors wrote pages of absurd praise about Henry: they credited him with military campaigns that took place before he was born, and with a marriage to a princess that never took place at all. They invented titles and dignities for him, including the title 'prince', that he never possessed.[9] The only thing they didn't mention was his alleged voyage of discovery.
My impression of Henry Sinclair, from looking at the documents that have survived about him, is that he was a minor figure. He played little or no part in the politics of his native country or of Norway. His name doesn't appear in the records of the Scottish parliament or exchequer, and he only figured in Norwegian affairs on a few ceremonial occasions.[10] One historian has claimed that he was 'a powerful earl of Orkney very much in the old tradition', and that he was 'very active in his northern earldom and integrated with the people of the earldom and their customs'.[11] I can find no evidence at all for such claims. Henry's tenure of the Orkney earldom was hedged around with a large number of royal restrictions: far more than Orkney earls like Thorfinn Sigurdsson would have brooked. And of course Henry's Orkney estates were far smaller than those of his Norse predecessors.[12] There is only one extant document by Henry signed in Orkney, from 1391, where he bargains with his brother to consolidate his lands in the north.[13]
The Zeno narrative portrays Zichmni at war against Frislanda and Iceland, with different degrees of success, and unsuccessfully waging war against Shetland. There is no evidence, or likelihood, that Henry had interests in Iceland, or in Faroe, if that is what Frislanda is meant to be.[14] Even Frederick Pohl, Henry's most devoted admirer, admitted that Henry's realm didn't stretch that far.[15]
The case of Shetland is even clearer. At his installation as earl of Orkney, in 1379, Henry promised that 'if any persons design to attack or invade hostilely the ... lands and islands of Orkney, or even the land of Shetland ... in any way', he would 'defend the said lands with the men which we shall be able to gather for this purpose ... not only from the said lands and islands but also with the whole strength of our kin, friends, and servants'.[16] Had Henry attacked Shetland, or any other part of her realms, Queen Margaret of Norway would have taken a dim view of such a breach of his obligations. But when Henry's son later got a feudal grant of Shetland, the then king praised Henry, by then dead, for his 'fealty and obedience'.[17]
My guess, and it can only be a guess, because there are so few documents extant about Henry, is that he spent much of his life at Roslin in Midlothian. His rents and revenues in Orkney would have been welcome additions to his patrimony, but there is no evidence that he spent much time there. There isn't even proof that he, as opposed to his son, built a castle in Kirkwall.[18] We know that, like many of his Scottish contemporaries, he participated occasionally in warfare against the king of England.[19] He may well have died in some such skirmish. The only reliable account of his death says that he was slain cruelly by enemies 'for the defence of his country'.[20] That might mean Orkney; it might mean Scotland.
Forster's theory that Zichmni was Henry Sinclair wasn't popular. Cardinal Zurla, who was impressed by the Zeno text, was unenthusiastic about the Henry Sinclair idea.[21] Admiral Zarhtmann, a Dane, tore it to pieces in the 1840s.[22] And there the story would have ended if a geographer and map librarian called Richard Henry Major hadn't taken it up, in an evil hour, in the 1870s.[23]
Major is the villain of this story. He made it his business to rehabilitate the Zeno text, and, following in Forster's footsteps, to prove that it was all about Earl Henry Sinclair. Obviously, he had to come up with something better than Forster. He discovered that the only way he could achieve these aims was to rewrite Zeno: by giving us what Zeno should have written, had he known what he was speaking about.
Major began by rewriting Zeno's date: 1380. Cardinal Zurla had already shown that Nicoḷ Zeno was in Venice throughout the 1380s, and that he couldn't possibly have been visiting Greenland then. But Zurla had unearthed a manuscript work in Venice, by a genealogist called Marco Barbaro, which seemed to give an alternative date. Marco (or someone else) inserted a note in his text that Antonio Zeno[24] 'wrote with his brother Nicoḷ the knight the voyages of the islands under the Arctic Pole, and of those discoveries of 1390, and that by order of Zichno, king of Frisland, he went to the continent of Estotilanda in North America. He dwelt fourteen years in Frisland, four with his brother, and ten alone.'
At first sight this looked convincing, or at least interesting. Zurla and Major claimed that Marco Barbaro had written his work in 1536, 22 years before Zeno's book was published, and that it was independent proof of the Zeno voyage. However, the date that Zurla and Major proposed for Marco Barbaro's work is wrong. Marco's manuscript was never finished, and there is evidence that he was still adding to it in 1569, eleven years after Zeno's book appeared.[25] The date 1536 on some copies of the manuscript is ambiguous: it may refer to the moment when Marco Barbaro started work, or to the date by which the families discussed in his text had been ennobled.[26] There is little doubt that he took his material from Zeno's published text - rather than vice versa - although, like others, he hadn't read that text very carefully.[27] The
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