The Vinland, Zeno and Buache Map Controversies

The map depicts the Atlantic Ocean with Iceland labeled 'Isolanda Ibernica,' Greenland labeled 'Gronelada,' and a large western landmass labeled 'Vinilanda Insula,' or Vinland Island, corresponding to northeastern North America. If it were genuine, it would be the earliest known European map to depict the Americas, predating Columbus by decades.

The map's parchment has been radiocarbon dated to about 1434 CE, give or take roughly a decade, by more than one independent laboratory. The skin it is drawn on is genuinely medieval. The trouble, as later work would show, is the ink.

One counter-argument held that trace amounts of anatase can occur naturally in some old inks. But the quantity found in the Vinland Map's lines, and the crystal shape of it, match a modern manufactured pigment far better than a stray natural impurity.

In 2021, Raymond Clemens of Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library announced that extensive new spectroscopic analysis had confirmed the ink contains synthetic 20th-century components. Yale officially declared the Vinland Map a modern forgery drawn on authentically old parchment.

The Zeno Map, or Carta da Navegar, was published in Venice in 1558 by Nicolò Zeno the Younger, who claimed it was based on letters written by his ancestors Nicolò Zeno and Antonio Zeno in the 1380s and 1390s, describing voyages to the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and possibly North America.

The map shows a recognizable but seriously distorted Greenland, complete with some interior detail, alongside Iceland and several mysterious islands, including one called 'Frislanda,' which may be a garbled rendering of the Faroe Islands or an outright invention.

Kirsten Seaver, in 'Maps, Myths, and Men' (2004), concluded that the Zeno narrative mixes genuine Norse geographical knowledge, already available from other sources by the 16th century, with fabrications by Nicolò the Younger meant to burnish his family's prestige.

Some researchers note that a few fjord placements on the map's Greenland line up with real geography. That can sound uncanny, but it more likely reflects Norse knowledge passed down through other 16th-century sources than any direct 14th-century observation by the Zeno brothers themselves. This particular point rests on general impression rather than a single firm citation, so we hold it loosely.

Erik Wahlgren, in 'The Vikings and America' (1986), argued that the Zeno narrative is largely a 16th-century fabrication assembled from available Norse saga material, and that the map's Greenland derives from existing charts such as the Claudius Clavus map of 1427.

Philippe Buache (1700 to 1773), Royal Geographer of France, published a map in 1737 titled 'Carte des Terres Australes,' showing a southern landmass in roughly the position of Antarctica, split into two separate masses by what looks like a waterway.

An alternative reading, advanced by Charles Hapgood and later by Hancock, holds that this two-part division resembles the true shape of Antarctica beneath its ice, where West and East Antarctica are separated by a deep sub-ice trough revealed only by modern radar surveys. On that reading, the map implies access to knowledge of Antarctica's sub-ice geography that was not otherwise mapped until the International Geophysical Year of 1957 to 1958.

The mainstream reading is far more ordinary. 18th-century geographers routinely hypothesized about a 'Terra Australis Incognita,' an unknown southern land, and Buache was doing exactly that. Overlaid on a modern map, his outline does not closely match the actual coastlines of Antarctica.

The strong claim, that the Buache Map proves ancient knowledge of Antarctica's shape under the ice, does not hold up. A careful comparison shows the landmass does not closely match the real continent, sub-ice or otherwise, and it is far better explained as speculative 18th-century cartography in the ordinary Terra Australis tradition.

Charles Hapgood's 'Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings' (1966) proposes that controversial maps, including the Buache Map, the Piri Reis Map, and the Oronteus Finaeus Map, descend from lost ancient source maps made by a pre-Ice Age maritime civilization that had charted the world's coastlines, Antarctica included, before it froze over. The idea requires three unproven things to all be true: that such a civilization existed before roughly 10,000 BCE, that it produced accurate maps, and that those maps survived thousands of years of copying to reach medieval and Renaissance cartographers. None of the three has direct evidence.

This is why cartographic historians handle the three maps one at a time rather than citing them together as a set. The Vinland Map is a demonstrated 20th-century forgery on old parchment. The Zeno Map is treated by most historians as an unreliable 16th-century fabrication. The Buache Map is better explained as hypothetical Terra Australis cartography than as a record of anything actually observed. Stacked together they can feel like a pattern. Taken one by one, each simply dissolves.