The simple line map of the world, sketched in faded brownish ink on a single small (about 11 in. by 16 in.) sheet of patched and worm-eaten vellum seems humdrum. In reality, it is by far the most important cartographic discovery of this century. It is the first map (see below) ever found that shows any part of the Western Hemisphere before the voyage of Columbus.
Drawn about 1440, probably by a monk in a Swiss scriptorium, the map's startling features are a strikingly accurate delineation of Greenland in the upper left-hand corner and a representation of "Vinland" (the name Vikings from Iceland and Greenland in the 10th century gave a portion of the coast of North America). There, crudely drawn but unmistakable, are Hudson Bay and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Above Vinland is a cartographic legend noting that "Eric, legate of the Apostolic See and bishop of Greenland . . . arrived in this truly vast and very rich land . . . in the last year of our most blessed father Pascal, remained a long time in both summer and winter . . ." Since Pope Paschal II died in January 1118, this would presumably fix the time of Eric's arrival at 1117. Taken together with the depiction of Vinland, this indicates that as early as the 12th century, the rest of Europe knew about the Viking voyages. While it is possible that detailed knowledge of the voyage may not have been generally available by the 15th century, discovery of the map still forces a reappraisal of the entire age of exploration, from the year 1000, when Leif Ericsson and his men were blown ashore on the North American coast, to the late 16th century, when Europeans were exploring the waters of Asia, Africa and America. The map throws further doubt on the legend that Columbus was sailing into completely mysterious and uncharted seas when he set out with his small fleet in 1492. Instead, it appears possible that the Viking voyages may have served as an incentive to Columbus and Cabot and other rediscoverers of America in the 15th century.
Scholarly Detection. Proudly put on display this week by the Yale Library, the map and its accompanying text have been annotated and explicated in a scholarly book published concurrently by the Yale University Press, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation, which describes the eight years of elaborate detective work that were needed to date and authenticate it.
As related by Thomas E. Marston, Yale University Library's curator of medieval and Renaissance literature, in the gruffly deprecatory language of scholarship, the discovery of the map is quite a dramatic yarn in itself. It began in October 1957, when a New Haven antiquarian bookseller, Laurence Witten, dropped by the Yale Library to show Marston and Map Curator Alexander O. Victor a slim volume that Witten had acquired from a private collection in Europe. The book included the map and 21 pages of text, which were a transcription of an account of the expedition led by Friar John de Piano Carpini across Central Asia in 1245-47. Friar Carpini himself wrote a well-known account of his trip in 1247, but the version in Witten's book was transcribed by another Franciscan friar, identified only as C. de Bridia, who had heard of the expedition secondhand.