Lethal Legacy (23 page)

“Well, that’s another reason this map was so
controversial. Both men made several voyages across the Atlantic. Vespucci
enjoyed more popularity throughout Europe because he wrote many publications
that were read widely by intellectuals and explorers—he was a best seller in
his day—and he actually went farther down the coastline of South America,
convinced there was another ocean, entirely separate, on the western side of
that landmass,” Bea said. “Columbus, on the other hand, died in disgrace. Do
you remember your history?”

“Yeah, I guess he did the first Terra Nova perp
walk, didn’t he?” Mike said. “He was the governor of Hispaniola, and the king
had him arrested for mismanagement.”

“Right. He also maintained, till his dying day,
that he had reached Asia on one of his voyages. It was Vespucci who realized
that both he and Columbus had come upon another continent—not Asia, not the
Indies—that most Europeans didn’t know existed. So he got the credit,” Bea
said. “It’s kind of remarkable when you think that this single obscure
mapmaker—as great as he was—chose the name for the entire Western Hemisphere.”

“And that he named it for a man who was still
alive at the time, Amerigo Vespucci. No waiting for the verdict of history or
going the traditional route of naming it for a mythological figure,” Mercer
said, straightening up.

“Then he feminized it,” Bea said. “Don’t forget
that, Alex. Asia and Europa got their names from mythical women—so that
tradition of the feminine ending of a continent remained intact.”

“But it’s this little group of clerics and
geographers who were so taken by Vespucci’s writings that they placed his name
on this map?” I asked.

“No longer Terra Incognita or Terra Nova, as the
new world was called by the ancients. Martin and his team just went ahead and
christened these lands America—their very own idea,” Bea said, “and as soon as
this work was published, cartographers everywhere adopted that name for the
Western Hemisphere.”

“How many of these maps were printed at the time?”
Mercer asked.

“A very sizable run for those days, actually. One
thousand copies.”

“What became of them all, do you think?”

Bea smoothed her curly red hair with the back of
her glove. “Like many objects of intellectual interest in the sixteenth
century, part of the plan was to distribute them as widely as possible across
Europe, to spread the new knowledge that the explorers were acquiring with each
trip they made. That broad dissemination accounts for the loss of many things,
and makes the ones that made it through time, warfare, pillaging, and the usual
historical turmoil so very rare.”

“And its size?” I asked.

“Another problem indeed. The larger an old map,
the rarer it has usually become. The huge size and very inconvenience of form
of this one certainly quickened its destruction. It was so much greater than
many of the charts of the day, folded once—never bound—inside an elephant
folio. So the mere difficulty of keeping twelve large panels like this one in
pristine condition, and not allowing the dozen sections of it to be separated,
was an enormous obstacle to its survival.”

“What’s an elephant folio?” Mike asked.

“It’s the term for a very large book, Detective.
Usually greater than two feet tall. That Audubon in which you found the map is
actually a double elephant folio—easy to conceal your map in because it’s so
large. Let me show you something.”

Bea got up from the table and disappeared behind
the reference desk, returning minutes later with a volume of elephant-folio
size.

“This one is a book of reproductions of famous
maps,” she said, placing it beside the piece that Mike found inside the
Audubon. “It will give you an idea of how startling the real thing is when you
see all the panels joined together, as originally planned.”

She unfolded the enormous pages and spread them
before us. The dozen individual engravings came together as a gigantic
rectangular map of the world, separated by the seams of the individual pieces.
The portion that Mike had discovered in the library’s attic, stashed under a
water tank, was one from the top panel, in the third of four columns.

“It’s not only beautifully drawn,” I said,
scanning the continents and islands, oceans and seas, and their relationships
to one another. “But you’re right. It’s incredibly accurate for its time.”

“Men who’d never left their villages in Europe
combined their own dreams of the greater world with this outpouring of
information from the explorers,” Bea said. “Today, there is no more terra
incognita. From your handheld GPS you can pull up a satellite image of your own
backyard, or an atoll in the Pacific. These early maps charted the unknown, and
they’re remarkably exciting for that reason.”

“You say there’s a complete original of this one
at the Library of Congress?” Mike asked. “When was that found?”

“Don’t get too excited, Detective. More than a
century ago. This sheet you stumbled over this morning is the first fresh
sighting in a hundred years.”

“Tell us about the last one.”

Bea Dutton was as enthusiastic as she was
knowledgeable about her cartographic history. “Have you ever heard of a German
Jesuit priest named Josef Fischer?”

None of us had.

“A brilliant scholar and perhaps a bit of a rogue.
There’s a very rare piece at Yale called the Vinland Map, purchased for the
library there by the great philanthropist Paul Mellon. Had it been proved to be
authentic, it would have shown that the Vikings predated Columbus’s voyages to
this continent by fifty years.”

“Sounds like you don’t think it’s real,” Mike
said.

“Carbon-fourteen analysis dates the parchment to
the 1430s, Mike, but a chemical study of the ink puts us in the 1920s. It’s on
old paper—the kind you can slice right out of an ancient book, sad to say—but
the ink gave it away.”

“So Father Fischer’s a fraud?”

“Well, most of us in the field think the only
person he was trying to defraud—and embarrass—with his doctored map was the
führer.”

“Then I’m all for the old boy already,” Mike said.
“How’s that?”

“Hitler was using Norse history as Nazi
propaganda. He likened the Norse to Aryans by claiming that their territorial
ambitions were similar to his own empire-lust,” Bea said.

“So Fischer put the Roman Catholic Church in the
mix,” Mike said. “Didn’t want the Nazis to get away with their propaganda
without a little bit of religion thrown in.”

“There’s a lot of Catholic imagery in the Vinland
Map,” Bea said, pointing out notations with her white glove in the same book of
reproductions. “Father Fischer was so outraged by the Nazi persecution of the
Jesuits that he just teased Hitler by creating this fake document. If the
führer wanted to believe the Vikings led the way to the new world, Fischer
wouldn’t let him have that victory unless he accepted that the Catholic Church
was also along for the ride.”

“So what did Father Fischer have to do with
finding my map?” Mike asked.

“See, you’ve got the fever already,” Bea said. “
Your
map, is it?”

Mike smiled at her. “I’ve got a lot of empty wall
space in my crib. You tell me what I’m looking for and let’s go for the whole
dozen panels. I’ll let you come visit any time you’d like.”

“That’s a deal, Mike,” Bea said, continuing her
story. “Fischer was doing research in 1901, in a private library in a German
castle. As happens with so many important discoveries in history, Fischer
simply lucked upon something he’d never set out to find—in this case, a dusty
portfolio in an obscure corner of a nobleman’s home. Cartographers had been
searching for remnants of this particular lost map for so long that they had
begun to believe the great Vespuccian model never really existed as such.”

“A complete accident, then?”

“Exactly. Prince Waldburg’s ancestors had
collected maps for generations. While Fischer was studying papers of the early
Norsemen in Greenland—his own personal area of interest—he came across a large
manuscript that had been in the family for generations. It was a prize
collection of the famous sixteenth-century globe maker named Johannes Schöner
that had been acquired centuries earlier. Schöner, we figure, had purchased the
Waldseemüller map of 1507 in order to incorporate its new worldview in his work
so that he could use it to make his own globes more up-to-date.”

“What a find,” Mercer said.

“And especially because the twelve panels had
never been assembled. Each one was carefully concealed inside the pages of this
enormous folio, untouched for four centuries,” Bea said, shifting her attention
back to the segment that Mike had found just a couple of hours earlier. “I’d
say this looks just about faultless, too.”

“What became of the one that Father Fischer
found?” Mike asked.

“It stayed in private hands—at the castle—for
another hundred years. In 2003, one century and ten million dollars later, this
map became the crown jewel of the Library of Congress. The
universalis
cosmographia.
”

“What?” I asked.

“The world map of 1507 is how we know it as
librarians.
Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et
Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes.
That’s its formal name.”

“A map of the world according to the tradition of
Ptolemy and the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci,” Mike said, smiling at Bea, who
looked surprised by his translation ability. “You don’t think those nuns at
parochial school liked me for my good behavior, do you? My Latin wasn’t half
bad.”

She flipped back to the copy in her book of
reproductions and again unfolded it before us.

“What are the chances that Mike’s find is a
forgery?” Mercer asked.

Bea Dutton frowned. “Because of what I told you
about Father Fischer?”

More likely Mercer had asked that question because
of rumors about Tina Barr.

“Yeah.”

“The Vinland Map presented an entirely different
issue. The Vikings were the greatest explorers of the Middle Ages—nobody
disputes that. They just never made maps. Not a single one,” Bea said. “They
didn’t have a concept of the world that encouraged any of them to draw
diagrams, so lots of scholars were skeptical about its authenticity from the
get-go. Then there’s the ink. You know how ink is made?”

I’d never given it a thought. “Actually, I have no
idea.”

“It’s the reaction between iron in ferrous sulfate
and tannin from oak trees. Together they oxidize on a page and literally burn
the letters or drawings into the paper. Over centuries, the blackened mark
starts to turn brown.”

“And the Vinland Map ink?” Mercer asked.

“Document examiners subjected it to microprobe
spectroscopy, which yielded a synthetic substance—something called anatase—that
was in the ink. And that wasn’t manufactured until World War One. Heave-ho to
the Vikings.”

“And this?”

“Look closely at it, Mercer.” Bea pushed the tip
of the antique panel closer to us and started to explain it to us. “This is
exquisitely elaborate, do you see?”

There was a masterfully drawn portrait of
Vespucci, holding his navigational instruments, at the top of the large panel.
Below him was the upper portion of the map, representing an area that was
bordered by the Arctic Ocean, and below it a landmass with tiny writing that
described interior regions and portrayed the topography of the area. Behind
Vespucci was a chubby-cheeked figure—the northeast wind—blowing across the
frigid waters.

“The detail is astonishing,” I said.

“See the inset?” Bea asked. On the upper-left quadrant
of the panel was a small world map. “It’s actually different than the larger
image, if you were to see them all assembled. As Vespucci completed more
voyages, the latest descriptions were added to these smaller insets.”

“Too detailed to forge?” I asked.

“Not only that, Alex. The Vinland Map is just ink
on parchment. This one is a woodcut. It’s truly a work of art, and I’d say
impossible to re-create today. After all, we do have one original in Washington
against which any discoveries like the one you made this morning can be
compared.”

Mike was poring over the reproduction that Bea had
unfolded. “Every section of this map tells its own story, doesn’t it?”

“That’s one of the things that’s so magical about
it,” she said.

The margins of the twelve panels were festooned
with figures of the wind and sea, and cartouches that chronicled the most
important features of these newly charted territories.

“Could be the reason that this piece of the map
was stored in that particular book might point us to whatever Tina Barr—or her
killer—was looking for,” Mike said, nodding to Mercer. “Maybe something in one
of these images, or a link to the part of the world that’s portrayed in the
fragment we found, you know?”

“The section of the map featuring Amerigo himself
is stuck inside a book about American birds. Not a bad idea,” Mercer said.
“Bea, is there any way to get a copy of the full map that’s reproduced here in
your book?”