On 9 October 1965, Yale University released to public view a map that caused a media frenzy "akin to the detonation of a small bomb". The so-called Vinland map was a crude creation on vellum, 27.8cm high by 41cm wide, with a vertical fold through the middle, a few worm holes, and purporting to date from the mid-15th century. What was so devastating about the map? It showed a "startlingly accurate" representation of "Vinland" (Wineland) the name given by the Vikings to North America including part of Newfoundland or Labrador: "almost certainly the result of original exploration".
As Simon Garfield explains in On the Map, his rollick through the history of western map-making, the Vinland map indicated not only that there was "European knowledge of Norse sailings to North America some 50 years before Columbus", but also that, "according to an explanation on the map ... the discovery itself had occurred between 985 and 1001." Let loose into the world just before Columbus Day, the map incensed Italians and Italian-Americans with its claim to "assail the priority of Columbus's discovery of the New World". Everything we had learnt in school was, apparently, wrong.
The Vinland map was unearthed in autumn 1957 by Laurence Claiborne Witten II, a New Haven rare book and map dealer, as he rummaged through a fellow dealer's stock in Geneva. Witten was acutely aware of the map's controversial nature, and the strong possibility of forgery, but instinct told him it was authentic. One detail niggled, however: the placing of the worm holes on the map didn't match those on its accompanying document, throwing the map's provenance into question. But in winter 1958, Witten chanced on an undoubtedly genuine medieval manuscript whose watermark and, crucially, worm holes exactly matched those of the map. "My adrenaline began to flow," Witten recalled. This "seemingly made it nearly incredible that [the Vinland map] could be a modern forgery". Certainly the wealthy Yale alumnus and philanthropist Paul Mellon was convinced: he bought the map for $300,000 (85 times the sum Witten had originally paid), donating it to Yale, where it was displayed in the recently opened Beinecke Library.
But in the ensuing decades, with advances in microscopy the spectre of forgery was resurrected. Examinations of the map in the 1970s found large traces of a pigment that was only available commercially from 1920, and in 2004 a map historian even surmised the identity of the hoaxer responsible for the map's creation. Josef Fischer was an Austrian Jesuit, and an expert in medieval cartography and the history of Nordic exploration. In the mid-1930s, "Fischer and fellow Jesuits had fallen foul of the Nazis", and the Vinland map may have been a kind of revenge it realised a Nazi dream about Aryan Vikings but, crucially, the map is laden with Catholic imagery. Despite its ambiguous nature, the Vinland map has nevertheless been valued at $20m, and Garfield concludes that "even if it is a fake (and we may never know for sure), its true and lasting value goes beyond its authenticity or fraudulence. Its value is in the narrative."
These days, maps are no longer the preserve of the geek. Through various recent TV series, exhibitions and map-minded histories and memoirs, old maps and the stories of their creation and dissemination are enjoying a robust popularity (in no small way indebted to a widespread nostalgia for folded paper maps in the face of sat navs and other digital navigational technologies). Garfield's account of the Vinland map episode encapsulates his fascination with the most alluring aspects of cartographical history. Its deliciously ambiguous tale of hoaxing and forgery throws into relief the conflict between truth and lies that defines all map-making endeavours. Beneath maps' veneer of authority and power lies the inevitable reality of selectivity, omission and error. No map can show everything: Jorge Luis Borges described the absurdity of the intention to make a map on the scale of 1:1, whose "size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it". But some maps such as the influential surveys of Africa produced in 1798 by the map-maker James Rennell, on which an entire mountain range, the Mountains of Kong, were conjured out of thin air owe even less of a debt to reality than others.
An exhibition of maps at the British Library in 2001 and 2002 was punningly entitled Lie of the Land: The Secret Life of Maps, and Garfield intends On the Map to be something similar. He conceives of the book as "a journey around an exhibition", in which a plethora of stunning and important cartographical artefacts are held up for our persual, but in which our attention is also drawn to the untrustworthy face of maps, their intriguing blank spaces and deliberate distortions. He is enthralled by the reciprocal rapport between maps and fiction: the presence of mythical beasts on old charts, the dangerously captivating qualities of treasure maps, and the multifaceted use of maps in games, from jigsaw puzzles and Risk! to Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto 4. Garfield is particularly excited by the relationship between maps and films, and the idea that "a large proportion of the advances in digital cartography that we now take for granted ... all happened first in the movies, where the technology prefigured and inspired real-life cartographic possibility."
If On the Map is intended as a cartographical exhibition, then it is a boisterous and bustling one. Garfield is at his best when describing the human face of map history, the "boastful dealers, finicky surveyors, guesswork philosophers, profligate collectors, unreliable navigators, whistling ramblers, inexperienced globe-makers, nervous curators, hot neuroscientists and lusting conquistadors" responsible for the creation, publication and usage of some of the western world's chief cartographical landmarks. And as one might expect from the author of Just My Type, he is also fascinated by print culture, by maps as physical objects and by stories of their printing and dissemination through a rarefied world of dealers, curators and collectors.
There is less room in On the Map for the surveyors themselves, particularly their methods and instruments. And although Garfield's definition of "map" is admirably expansive (he turns his attention to guidebooks, written itineraries and globes, as well as nautical charts and modern digital "mash-ups"), his exhibition is less broad in geographical focus, and predominantly restricts its gaze to the western world, lacking the global spread of Jerry Brotton's recent History of the World in Twelve Maps. Neither does he consider how the cartographic artefacts on display have influenced one another. But all surveys books or maps are by nature selective, and On the Map is a survey of some of the most intriguing and thought-provoking moments in map history, narrated with a level of detail, colour and liveliness of which the most ambitious mapmaker would be proud.
Rachel Hewitt's Map of a Nation is published by Granta.
