Facts or Fictions: The Mysteries of Renaissance Cartography

>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. >> Ralph Ehrenberg: I am Ralph Ehrenberg, chief of the geography and map division. It is my great pleasure to welcome you here to the Library today for our two-day conference on Facts or Fictions, Debating the Mysteries of Early Modern Science and Cartography, which is being sponsored by the Jay I. Kislak Family Foundation and the Virginia Gray Family Memorial Fund. This conference was planned and organized by Dr. John Hessler, curator of the Jay I. Kislak collection of archaeology and history of the early Americas at the Library of Congress, and John is also the geography and map division specialist in modern cartography and geographic information systems. The subtitle of our conference is a celebration of 500th anniversary of Waldseemuller's 1516 Carta Marina. I'd like to comment briefly on the Library's acquisition of this chart, one of the great masterpieces of Renaissance mapping. Shortly after its publication, our copy of this map was acquired by Johann Schoner [phonetic], a noted Nuremberg mathematician and geographer, who bound it together with a number of globe gores drawn by him, the earliest printed star chart of the southern hemisphere engraved by Albrecht Durer, and Waldseemuller's other famous map is 1507 Universalis Cosmographia, the map that named America. With the recent acquisition of Durer's star chart, the Library of Congress has now brought back together all of the maps and charts that were originally contained in Schoner's bound portfolio now known as the Schoner's [inaudible]. This portfolio was unknown to the wider world for some 350 years although Washington Irving's research in 1828 on the origin of the name America cited Waldseemuller's 1507 map. German geographer Alexander von Humboldt later alluded to Irving's work, stimulating a further search for the map. No copies were found, however, until 1901, when the Austrian Jesuit scholar, Josef Fischer, who we'll hear more about shortly, located this map while searching for material relating to the early Norse voyages to North America. It was found in the Waldburg-Wolfegg family castle in south central Germany. Fortunately, this family had provided a safe haven through three centuries of numerous wars and political upheavals. As early as 1912, Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg offered Waldseemuller's 1507 map to the Library of Congress where he believed it would be more readily available for research on display, but limited resources prevented its purchase at that time. In 1977, the chief of the geography division at that time, Walter W. Ristow, viewed the Schoner portfolio at the castle during a visit with Count Maxwell Wilbrod [phonetic] Walburg. Six years later, the Schoner portfolio was loaned to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History for exhibition focusing on the naming of America. The centerpiece of this exhibition was Waldseemuller's 1507 map with one sheet of the map displayed at a time most frequently the one contained in the name America. The Schoner portfolio made a return visit to the nation's capital in 1992 during the Columbus quincentenary celebration. On that occasion, the Folger Shakespeare Library's conservation staff removed the 12 woodcut map plates of the 1507 map from its portfolio, binding and reassembling them as a wall map for the first time for display in the National Gallery of Art. Former Librarian of Congress James Billington began discussing during this period with Count Johannes Walburg about acquiring the 1507 map. It was purchased in 2003 with a $5 million appropriation from Congress and matching funds generously donated by George Topolowski [phonetic], Virginia Gray, Gerald Landfest [phonetic], David Kauf [phonetic], and the Discovery Channel. German Chancellor Angela Merkel formally transferred this treasure to the American people in an official ceremony in the Thomas Jefferson building in 2007. Waldseemuller's 1516 Carta Marina, the subject of our work today, was later purchased by Jay I. Kislak along with the rest of Schoner's portfolio, which included Schoner's important celestial and terrestrial globe gores. Mr. Kislak then arranged for the donation of the Carta Marina and the globe gores to the Library of Congress along with his monumental American Collection. Durer's star chart was acquired late last year with appropriated funds, which added the final piece that compromised Schoner's [inaudible]. Thanks to the dedication and the public spirit of these donors, Schoner's portfolio with Waldseemuller's two master maps, Schoner's globe gores, and Durer's star chart will remain together, available for future generations for examination and study. Waldseemuller's 1507 map is on permanent display in this bleeding in the second floor gallery along with Durer's star chart. The Schoner portfolio with the 1516 map will be on display tomorrow in the geography and map division, which is located in the basement of the Madison building across the street and will be on display from one to three in the afternoon along with other treasures from the map division ranging from Porterlain [phonetic] charts dating from the 13th century to maps by George Washington and Lewis and Clark. For those of you who aren't familiar with the geography and map division, the division holds the world's largest and most comprehensive map collection, numbering some 5-1/2 million maps and 80,000 atlases. We are open to the public for research from Monday through Friday from 8:30 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon. Established in 1897 as the Hall of Maps to serve Congress and federal agencies, the geography and map division today functions as a national map library. It's primary responsibility is developing the Library's cartographic collections. An average of some 40,000 items are acquired yearly through government deposits, transfers of superseded maps from federal libraries, copyright deposits, domestic and international exchanges, purchases, and gifts. These range from rare globes and maps to geospatial data sets. Our cartographic collection is dated as I said from the 13th century and covers virtually all countries and subjects. While many of the current items are acquired through exchange and deposits, the division relies heavily on donors to assist in the acquisition of rare maps and unique collections. In 1995, we established a public support group, the Philip Lee Phillips Map Society of the Library of Congress for those persons who wished to support the work of the division. The Phillips Society issues four newsletters and two occasional papers yearly. A copy of our most recent newsletter is available at the foyer, and I hope these were passed out to you when you came in. If you wish to add your name to our mailing list, please contact any of our staff members who are in the foyer. And now it's my pleasure to turn the podium over to Dr. John Hessler, who will begin a formal program today. [ Applause ] >> John Hessler: Well, I want to extend the same welcome that Ralph did to everyone. Welcome to the Library of Congress. We've got kind of a two-part program today. The first part has got a title called Facts or Fictions, the Mysteries of Renaissance and early cartography. Now, the reason we kind of paired these two things together, an afternoon on the 1516 Carta Marina and the mysteries of other maps of the period is simply because the Waldseemuller maps are also a rather large cartographic mystery, and so we thought we would put in one room a number of scholars who've been working on some of these difficult problems in the history of cartography, everything from Marco Polo maps all the way to the 1516 Carta Marina, which I believe Chet is going to actually solve all the problems about today, so he's been working on it. One thing I want to do before we begin and before I introduce our first speaker is I want to thank Ralph Ehrenberg for his service to the Library of Congress as chief of the geography and map division. Ralph will be retiring sometime in the next few months after years and years of service to this institution to the national archives and to this discipline. When I was a young student, when I was an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to get a fellowship at the Vatican Library in Rome and actually at the Vatican Observatory Library, and there I met a man whose name was Pietro Tucci [phonetic]. Pietro Tucci was a 92-year-old librarian who believed that doing his job, being a rare book librarian, being a librarian of science was one of the highest callings. I appeared on his doorstep as a very young man of 19. He wasn't used to having 19-year-old Americans through the Vatican Observatory Library. As a matter of fact, in the three months I was there, I only saw one other human being besides Pietro Tucci. But Pietro Tucci warmed me and at one point in time he called me back to the stacks. And he said, young man, I want to teach you something. I want to show you something that is more important than the work you are doing. You're a scholar. You're looking at these books, but let's walk down through these stacks. And he walked down through these stacks, and occasionally he would pull a book off the shelf and say, this person collected this. This was put up here by this librarian. And Pietro Tucci had come through the war. He was an Italian priest of Polish extraction who had come through the war, and Pietro Tucci wanted me to know that one of the most important things about doing this work is the fact that a book standing freely on a shelf in an open library was for him the difference between lightness and darkness, between goodness and evil. And he said to me there were very few people in the world who knew this, who practiced this, who thought this was the purpose of a library, that this entire enterprise was the difference between, and he called it, humanities last stand. In my 35-year career of doing this I have met few people who could come up to Pietro Tucci's standard. One of those people is Ralph Ehrenberg, a man who as I said has dedicated his life to this institution and to the history of cartography, and I just want to congratulate Ralph on his retirement. [ Applause ] And with that, I will introduce our first speaker, Kirsten Seaver. Most of the people in this audience who are involved in the early history of cartography, she would need no introduction as she is at least to me somewhat of a legend in this field. She is a historian of the Norse of Greenland, the history of the North Atlantic. She has written many novels. She has traveled widely, participated in many documentary films, and her novelistic talent, her talent for writing novels I think goes deep down into her scholarly work. She is one of the few people, I think, who have actively and intensely studied the relationship of Josef Fischer, the Norse, and the maps that we are going to talk about today. So without further ado, I would like to introduce Kirsten Seaver. [ Applause ] [ Background Noise ] >> Kirsten Seaver: Thank you, John, for that wonderful introduction. I was swelling as I was listening to you, or at least my head was. It's a pleasure to be here tonight, or this morning rather. I am confused because I just came in from California last night, and it really is a good cause because this is a fantastic thing to celebrate, having these maps here. Father Josef Fischer, S.J., the Arodite [phonetic] German and Austrian cartographic historian, who discovered the 1507 and 1516 Waldseemuller maps at Wolfegg castle in 1901, some decade later became the likely author of Yale's controversial Vinland map. And that situation appeared so incongruous that I want to talk this morning about some of the maps and ideas I believe inspired both events. [ Background Noise ] Although at the time of his Wolfegg sojourn, Father Fischer was working on his MA thesis for the-- better, okay? Everybody can hear me now? At the time of his Wolfegg sojourn, Father Fischer was working on his MA thesis for the cartographic historian and geographer Franz von Wieser, who had convinced him that early cartographic evidence existed for the Norse westward expeditions from the recently settled Greenland colonies to the North America around the year 1000. In the aftermath of the 400th anniversary of the Columbian discovery, the region the Norse called Vinland or wine land was the southernmost of the three American areas that the Norse had explored, and it was the only one that interested von Wieser, Fischer, and others. Although Vinland's demographic extent is in fact unknowable except as an area that included Newfoundland and the southern St. Lawrence [inaudible], Fischer was sure that it consisted of Nova Scotia and Cape Britain combined, and he was equally certain that the climate a thousand years or so ago was so warm that the Norse had traveled up both the coasts of Greenland and learned their country's essential shape. He reasoned that all maps showing Greenland would also reveal the rest of the Norse westward exploits as such maps must have a uniquely German lineage rooted in Adam O'Bramen's [phonetic] 11th century references to the Norse presence in Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland. And he hoped to find further evidence for his theories at Wolfegg castle, a baroque jewel in Baden-Wurttemberg with a magnificent collection of art objects [inaudible], manuscript texts, and maps. He would not have far to travel, nor did he need a formal introduction because Wolfegg's noble owners, the Catholic family of Altberg [phonetic], Wolfegg habitually sent their sons to be educated at Stella Matutina, the Catholic school in the Austrian border town of Feldkirch where Fischer was teaching geography and history. In 1901, he wrote to the castle librarian and asked if the collections might include a manuscript map showing Greenland as a European peninsula in the manner of 1482 and 1486 Olm [phonetic] geography in the Olm editions. And the librarian reported back that the search had yielded a manuscript map by Donnes Nicholas Gamonis [phonetic] that might meet Fischer's requirements. Fischer soon identified the Nicholas Gamonis manuscript as the prototype of printed maps in the Olm editions where Greenland and the so-called B [phonetic] reduction is depicted as a large, blunt peninsula east of Iceland and connected to Eurasia above Norway. He and von Wieser were already familiar with the manuscript maps, which the Benedictine monk, Nicholas Gamonis, had drawn for the so-called Zamweskee [phonetic] codex of circa 1467, and edition of Ptolemy's Geographia, which had strengthened the two scholars' belief that cartographic evidence of Norse exploration westward must have existed. The Zamweskee version shows Greenland as a pointed peninsula west of Iceland in the so-called A reduction but also linked above Norway to northwestern Eurasia and like the Wolfegg manuscript indicated a second Greenland where Norway meets Sweden in the north. Continuing his searches in the castle library, Fischer discovered, as we have heard, Waldseemuller's printed world map of 1507 and the Carta Marina of 1516 in a bound volume miscellany owned by the Nuremberg mathematician Johannes Schoner. As an expert on Ptolemaic maps of the 15th and 16th centuries, Fischer was well equipped to identify the Waldseemuller maps. The German academic educate required that his thesis advisor verify the discoveries, so in the joint analysis was published in 1903, von Wieser's name joined Fischer's on the title page. In a book that Fischer published in his own name in 1902 and which appeared in English the following year, he enthusiastically reviewed the cartographic connections he had made at Wolfegg and wrote, this lucky discovery was remarkable if only for its bearing on the discoveries made by the Norsemen as well as on the relation to the later discoveries of Columbus and his successors. Prior to 1901, the 1520 Petrus Apianus world map was considered the oldest surviving printed map using the name America. Waldseemuller's 1507 map was known to have existed but was believed lost until Fischer found a surviving example at Wolfegg. The 1507 map additionally rewarded him with a prominent Greenland, shaped and positioned as in the Wolfegg Nicholas Garmonis manuscript and the printed Olm maps and linking to the Eurasian continent north of Norway. Waldseemuller did not repeat the name America when he made his magnificent Carta Marina in 1516, but like it's 1507 predecessor, it featured a large peninsular Greenland linked to Norway. Moreover, like all the other maps mentioned so far, it had a second Greenland where northern Norway and Sweden met and provided similar place names on the larger Greenland peninsula. Fischer felt confident that all these features were directly related to the work that the Danish cleric Claudius Clavus did sometime between 1424 and 1427 for inclusion with cardinal Gion Feastrus [phonetic] manuscript copy of Ptolemy Geographia, and the connection is there but not quite in the way that Fischer imagined. The Clavus map of the north, which the French scholar Jon Lorr [phonetic] discovered at [inaudible] in 1835 is the first known cartographic representation of Greenland. Here it is shown as the east coast of a peninsula called Greenlandia Provincia [phonetic] and connected eastward to the Eurasian mainland via the Scandinavian peninsula. Because Fischer credited Clavus with envisioning a continuous circumpolar continent, he considered the [inaudible] map the first map to also show America. An opinion he developed fully in 1911, unaware that Norse activities that far west had long been so murky in the Danish consciousness that Clavus had mistakenly relegated the Norse to the Greenland's east coast [inaudible] west. Ptolemy for his part had never referred to Greenland by any name. Therefore, Blor [phonetic] considered both the Clavus map and a short companion text worthy of special attention, particularly given that both items were in a hand different from that anywhere else in the codex, and both employ the Danish letter o/ that is O with a slash rather than O with an umloute [phonetic]. And these peculiarities suggested to Blor that Fiasta [phonetic] had commissioned somebody quite well informed about these remote northern regions, in other words that the map and the text were the personal work of Claudius Clavus as claimed on the map. And Blor was right. The O with slash implied only in Norwegian and Danish is used correctly throughout the map and text with a consistency that no French or Italian copies would have been likely to manage, and by the way I am a native Norwegian speaker. There are also numerous other indications that Clavus had made the map and the texts specifically for the cardinal's Geographia. Nonetheless, this agreement with Blor arose in 1835, 45 rather, when the German scholar Gee Vites [phonetic] blindly ignoring the O with a slash, doubted that the map and the text were personal work of Claudius Clavus. [Inaudible] believed that both the map and the text were anonymous and inferior copies of Clavus originals was soon joined by an equally persistent and wrong-headed conviction that post 1427 Clavus had made an improved version of the map that had also followed Ptolemaic precepts closely but that later maps unfortunately was lost and could not be consulted. Huh, where have we heard that one before? Clavus had left Denmark for the European mainland before, or around I should say, 1413 or 14, just when Ptolemy system of coordinates was embraced farther south but had not yet reached Denmark. [ Background Noise ] Airplane throat. Had not yet reached Denmark, but the Danish cleric was obviously a very quick learner because only a decade or so after leaving home he based his map and text for Feastrus manuscript on Ptolemy systems of coordinates as well as unfamiliarity with the works of Adam O'Bramen and [inaudible] and on what he knew personally about the geography of his northern home region. [ Background Noise ] While he knew from Adam O'Bramen's history that Greenland lay west of Iceland, his grasp on Denmark's Scandinavian neighbors failed him beyond the Dovre mountains in Norway, and he had difficulties with Norwegian and Swedish [inaudible]. Only one such problem concerns us here. On the Feaster [phonetic] map but not on the accompanying text, Clavus wrote [foreign language] where northern Sweden joins Norway. And that became the second Greenland on both the A and the B reductions in Nicholas Garmonis' manuscript maps and their successors. The known whereabouts of Feastrus' Geographia between 1427 and 1835 show that the codex could not have been seen by Nicholas Garmonis but by 1467, he had nevertheless acquired information that inspired both his twin Greenlands and his experiments with the country's shape, it's nomenclature, and it's placement. We must look for an explanation in the context that Clavus is known to have had with continental scholars and in notes and sketches necessarily made in preparation for Feastrus' codex. Alas, the whereabouts of any such material is as unknown as the ultimate fate of Clavus himself, but a trail suggesting a Benedictine network and containing many later interpolations has yielded nuggets of additional information that could only have originated with Clavus although his own affiliations were [inaudible]. Next, a fantasy about an improved companion text joined the notion that Clavus had laid a second and improved map in 1904 when the Danish scholar Oxlong von Burenbul [phonetic] and Carles Pietrus [phonetic] published the interpretations of two 16th century manuscripts they had discovered at the Royal Library of Vienna and called the Vienna text. They argued that travels in Greenland and other Nordic countries after 1427 had enable Clavus to produce both a second map and an improved text that became the prototype of the two Vienna texts and from which excerpts had been published in 1515 by Johannes Schoner and in 1518 by Francisco Zerenicus [phonetic]. As soon as Burenbul and Pietrus' book was out, Fischer began a correspondence with Burenbul that lasted until the latter's death. He immediately assured his Danish colleague of his own belief that Clavus had personal knowledge of Greenland, a conviction he still held when Burenbul died in 1911 without revealing to Fischer that the Norwegian explorer Fetuv Nonsen [phonetic] was certain that Clavus had never been to Greenland. In a short monograph on Clavus that Fischer published that same year in 1911, he insisted that Clavus had explored up the Greenland coast as far as 70 degrees 2 second northward, northern latitude. Because of his inability to read either the primary or secondary material in Nordic languages, plus his tendency to rather rigid thinking, Fischer maintained his belief in the post 1427 information by Clavus had provided Nicholas Garmonis with information about Greenland. When starting his thesis research on the medieval Norse, Fischer had relied on help from the Norwegian historian Gustuv Steim [phonetic], but Steim died in 1906, and with Burenbul's death in 1911, Fischer lost his remaining source of Nordic collegial help. He did nothing with his beloved Norse from 1911 until 1932 when he was 74 years old, and the Swiss Austrian auction firm of Gilhof Antrantsburg [phonetic] asked him to analyze a manuscript copied from early Ptolemy Geographia. The volume's regional map of Greenland, which reminded him of Ausmiller's [phonetic] Greenland in the 1513 Strassberg Geographia, brought all his former preoccupations back in full force. The Gilhof Antrantsburg auction catalog for 1934 featured both the Geographia codex with Fischer's analysis and selected items from the library of Mikulov [phonetic] castle in Moravia, a collection with which Fischer was as familiar as with the auction house. [ Background Noise ] While the Library contained damaged as well as undamaged items, the [inaudible] were excluded from the auction catalog but a fragment of the Speculum Historiale by Vincent Aubove [phonetic] was acceptable because Mikulov had provided it with a new binding, and it was in generally good condition except for leaves seven through 12, which had been damaged by a nail. Interestingly, that fragment represented the book following immediately after the four Speculum books that ended up at Yale in association with the Vinland map. [ Background Noise ] On October 11, 1965, Yale University Library announced that it possessed an unnamed manuscript from about 1440 that depicted the Norse discovery of America. The item was dubbed the Vinland map because in the northwestern Atlantic it showed a large island with two legends calling the island Vinelanda insula. On that same day, Yale University Press launched the Vinland map and the [inaudible] relation by R.A. Skelton [phonetic], Thomas Marsten [phonetic], and George Painter to authenticate and describe the map and the formerly unknown version of Friar John de Plano Carpini's [phonetic] account of his 1245 to 47 embassy to the great Kahn [phonetic], the so-called tarter [phonetic] relation bound with the map at the time of purchase in Switzerland. Four dilapidated books of the Speculum Historiale in a comparatively modern binding had turned up a little later as a sister manuscript to the map. No existing cartographic record of Vinland was known not surprisingly, since the medieval Norse neither used nor made maps. Therefore, it's appearance on otherwise conventional medieval world map was remarkable indeed. However, the Vinland map is a demonstrable fake, and like any other artifact, fake or genuine, it reflects its maker's preoccupations and environment. In 1974, the map's ink was found to continue anatase crystals of a kind first available commercially around 1920, and analysis was confirmed in 2002. Amazingly, this did not settle the authenticity issue with those of the map's defenders unable to grasp that the additional historical and cartographic evidence shows that this work in no way reflects Norse geographical knowledge. Instead, it illustrates the 19th century preoccupation with England, and that times mistaken belief that the Norse experience with North American had been a very short duration. Unfortunately, Skelton and Marsten and Painter knew as little about the history and culture of the medieval Norse as the man who had made the map and left footprints so idiosyncratic that there is no mistaking who's they are. The shorter of the two legends near the island of Vinland says, island of Vinland discovered by Bjarni and Leif and company. Well, the very first time that Leif and Bjarni sailed off to America together and discovered Vinland, that was Leif Eiriksson and Bjarni Hyalson [phonetic] and that was in 1765. In the history of [inaudible] Greenland by the German [inaudible] David Grantz [phonetic] who had simply misread Paul Ava Malay's [phonetic] [foreign language]. Grantz' book appears in the bibliography of the 1903 English translation of Fischer's book on the Norse voyages to America, which had a contorted explanation for the Icelandic [inaudible] agreement on who had first discovered America. In addition, sharing his Ausmiller triumph with von Wieser had made Fischer receptive to a broader definition of joint discovery, and his hero, Adam O'Bramen, to whom both Vinland and Greenland were islands had written that Vinland was an island "discovered by many." The longer legend's description of the land which byarnus and leiphus erissonius discovered together, "a new land extremely fertile and even having vines" echos Adam O'Bramen's statement that Vinland got its name because "vines producing excellent wine grow wild there" along the unsewn crops. The same legend also reveals Fischer's tin ear for German names, non-German names, and his unease with the suffix -son. He invariably referred to Leif Eiriksson as the son of Eirik in his publications, and on the Vinland map the name is Latinized to leiphus erissonius as you can see. Understandably, he gave up on a Latin patrolimic [phonetic] for Bjarni Hyalson. Henricus [inaudible] bishop [inaudible] of Greenland is straightforward but dating his arrival in Vinland to "the last year of our most blessed Father Pascal," whose papal reign was from 1099 to 1118 is not straightforward. In fact, this entire legend is part of a complex riddle and reveals that the map's purpose is to demonstrate that emissaries of the Roman church had succeeded in circumnavigating the inhabited world at an early age. When Bishop Eric proceeded to "wintery east" it was in the Columbian sense of to the east, that is even so far west from proto [phonetic] America that he gained the farthest east and thus completed the circle. [ Background Noise ] Father Fischer, a man of immense rectitude and devotion to his church would have been appalled by the later use made of the map he drew in the 1930's as a private catharsis during a difficult time. Being then old and frail, he had reason to believe that if the map turned up after his death, it would confront German Nazi culture bearers with a difficult choice. If they denied the early reach of the despised Catholic church and pronounced the map a fake, they would miss an opportunity to use the Norse discovery of America as an argument for expanding the Aryan Third Reich right to our own shores. In 1944, Fischer died at Wolfegg castle where he had been given refuge during World War II. He was 86 years old. Thank you. [ Applause ] [ Background Noise ] >> John Hessler: Just in a word of format, we're going to go through all the speakers, and then we'll sit together and have questions from the audience as a group. Our next speaker, Ben Olshin, is one of those people who have come to the history of cartography with a multitalented and multifaceted background. Ben both studies classics and design, which really makes him perfect for studying the history of cartography. He is a professor of the school of the arts in Philadelphia, has taught widely all over the world, and has written a book on what have been called the Marco Polo maps. One of those maps called the Rossi map with Ship reside in the geography and map division, and it will be on display at the open house tomorrow. These are maps that have always had real questions associated with them and the family. Many scholars have dismissed them, but Ben has really written a book that brings these maps alive and back into the scholarly discussion in a measured and really intellectual way. So, Ben-- [ Applause ] [ Background Noise ] >> Ben Olshin: First of all, I'd like to thank the Library of Congress for inviting me and despite the very kind introduction, I'm actually rather humbled. As I was sitting there, I looked over there, and I saw Chet Van Dusser, and I sort of metaphorically tipped my hat. That's real scholarship there, and Hester himself is a real scholar, and obviously Seaver as well. So you might say I bring many talents. You could also just say I'm and amateur and a dabbler, so it's really up to you. The other thing I wanted to say today is that this is not a book promotion talk, but I do want to draw your attention to the book because many questions that people might have are addressed in the book itself, and so what I'm going to talk about today refers to the contents of the book, but you should read the book. And I'm going to talk a little bit, you notice the title is different from what you might see in your program, I want to talk about methods and analysis, which in a way is sort of a nice segue from the proceeding talk as well. What do you do when you're faced with something like the Vinland map or like these Rossi maps? However, I want to start even before then to talk about the book a little bit. My father, who is a pediatrician, and there's another speaker who is also a pediatrician who likes maps, my father is a pediatrician who gave many talks, and all pediatricians have a sense of humor. And he said you cannot give a lecture without some humor at the beginning, and so I thought about that, and I was lecturing at Oxford in April, and my wife, who is an accountant, which is the exact opposite, said do not make jokes at the beginning of a talk at Oxford. So I ignored her and listened to my father, and I want to tell the audience, you know, why should you buy this book if you haven't bought it already, and I just want to show you because if you don't buy it, my child will go hungry because of low book sales, so-- I asked my daughter to pose for that photograph. I also like to point out that sort of in retrospect it was strange. I gave a talk once, and somebody came up to me, and they said, well you speak Italian and you speak Chinese, did you draw these maps? And I said, no, no. But it seems like I'm sort of a Marco Polo, and I dug up this photo of me. This is probably from about 15 years ago, and it's me with my wife, who is from the Far East, and we're standing in front of the Colosseum in Rome. So I like to think that I'm a Marco Polo although the Netflix series did not contract me for some reason. So let me talk a little bit about the research methods because I think for an audience like this that's a mix of map scholars and people who are interested in maps, it's kind of insightful to see what do you do again when faced with material like this. We don't really know a lot about Marco Polo. He is so famous that he has a TV series based on him, but ironically for a figure like this, we don't really have that much material evidence. We have his last will and testament, which has survived. We have a few other documents, and then oddly there's this Rossi Collection as it's called of about 13 or 14 documents related to him. But really the primary document that we do know of is of course his narrative, Il Milione, as it's called in Italian, and there are multiple manuscripts of this Il Milione in different languages, and we know for example that Marco Polo's text was read by Christopher Columbus and annotated by him, so it's interesting. On the one hand, we have a very well-established history of Marco Polo, of his narrative that's very clear, but what gets puzzling is when we try to take that and connect it with maps. Maps and charts are hardly mentioned in the narrative at all, and if you pick up a translation of the narrative of Marco Polo, you find that it's very difficult to draw a map. It's very vague in terms of how it refers to different locations, to different parts of his travels, but if you get a nice 19th century edition and open it up, you'll see these beautiful maps with little dotted lines as if you could read it and actually plot a trip, and you cannot. And that's one of the puzzles. It's made some people doubt that Marco Polo went on these voyages, and then becomes even more puzzling when suddenly we're told that there's actually a series of maps connected with Marco Polo. So as Hessler said, it's called the Rossi Collection, and the reason it's called the Rossi Collection is because of this man, Filomeno Emmanuele Marciano Rossi, who was an Italian immigrant who came originally to St. Louis and then ended up in San Jose, California. He brought with him probably on more than one trip a collection of maps, texts, and letters, and the material likely ranges from the 13th to the 18th century. What's interesting is the maps themselves. I'll show you some examples, because they contain a very odd mixture of Arabic, Chinese, Latin, and Italian, and very little study was done of these, partly probably because they seem kind of a fringe element of cartography, partly because they're such an odd range of subject matter within them. Leo Bagrow, the very famous historian of cartography, wrote really the only published scholarly article in the 1940's about them, and nothing was really done since then, and then the Library of Congress still holds one map. They possessed some of the other maps for a time. They did an internal study, but nothing was really published. And then I came upon these around 1999. I had moved back to the states, and I tracked down the owner, and I got access to them. And I was really intrigued, but from the perspective of a researcher, what I think is so interesting is the range of knowledge that one has to bring to bear, and I would be the last to say that I have all this knowledge, but I'd like to point out, just in terms of methodology, what does one have to know to attack these maps. Again, Latin, Italian, Chinese, as I'll show you. You have to know the context about ancient and medieval maps. You have to know about Ptolemy and similar maps from the period. You have to know about Marco Polo himself, his narrative, the tradition of the manuscripts, of the Marco Polo narrative. You have to know the general history of central Asia, east Asia, Europe. You have to know as I found out later, Chinese legends because there's a Chinese legend connected to one of the maps. And then you have to know about velums and inks and carbon dating, which I know much less about and still up for discussion. And then you have to know about the history of forgeries, which is fascinating. You just heard about the Vinland map and the motivations for a possible forger. So let's look at some of the maps themselves. I'm going to pick a few because they have some of the more interesting features. This is called the Moreta Polo map, and most of the maps have an apparent signature by one of the daughters. Marco Polo was very lucky as am I to have daughters, and he had three daughters, and this is in fact well documented. Seeing them connected with cartography is quite peculiar of course, but this is one of the maps, the Moreta Polo map, and anyone that's done history of cartography can immediately see this is a very strange piece of work. It has gridlines like Ptolemy, but the depictions of the continents and the whole system is very strange, and it has these odd columns with the number seven at the bottom and what looks like a Chinese seven at the top. It's not really clear, and then a very long inscription along the bottom. What's interesting then too is what the inscription says. Very matter of factly it says in English translation, journey made by Maffeo Nicholau and Marco Polo from Venice to Acre in Persia, from Acra finally to Campalu in Tartary, voyaging through valleys and mountains, Marco Polo drew a summu nauticu, kind of a nautical summary, and navigated the sea up to the eastern extremity, whatever that is, and finally a long peninsula completely surrounded by sea wolves, luvi marini, and connected to a huge land completely unknown, hint, hint. So it's very strange. You know, it's very strange because in a way unlike the Vinland map it makes no explicit claim. It's kind of an implied claim, and it's just very peculiar to see a map with this text, with these depictions. And what struck me in particular about this collection is that it's a collection. There's more than one piece, and they sort of relate to each other but they don't. As I'll point out at the end of the talk, the Vinland map to me is fascinating because it's a one-of. It's a single creation. These are multiple creations. This one's called the Sirdomap Chart because it refers to what's terms a Syrian navigator, so an Arab or Islamic navigator named Sirdomab or Sirdomap. It's spelled differently in two ways. And again already you see very strange setup here where there is a map or chart. There's Arabic. There are Roman numerals, and then there's a text below. And again it's all about northeastern Asia, the furthest reaches of Asia, and here we see that the text below is written apparently by another daughter, Bellela Polo. Again, Marco Polo did have three daughters, we know that. And this map has a set of toponyms and then a brief text excerpt here says, my father, Marco Polo wishes me, Bellela, to show this world map, it's not a world map, which he obtained from the pilot, the navigator, Biaxio Sirdomap, who, for at least thirty years sailed the coast of Asia from Syria to the Far East, trading in seal skins. And again, from a historical perspective, this is very odd. It's a combination of story of Marco Polo with an account supposedly by his daughter talking about an Arab navigator, talking about the extreme northeast reaches of Asia, about which there's no documentation in this period. So as a historian, I looked at this without bias, and I was very, very puzzled, and I want to highlight here in case I forget later, I had not particular take on this in terms of is it a forgery, what's the voracity of this account, but later when the book was published, I got interviewed by the media a great deal, newspapers, the Smithsonian Magazine here in DC, and a report from the Daily Telegraph said, well are they real or not. You know, that's all they want. They just want that statement and I said, you know, it's not about that. For me the book is really about the content. I translated these. I deciphered some of the names. He says well what can I quote you on? I said, quote me that I'm the person who looked at the content. And he said that's very boring, and I said, I know. [laughter] But that's really the purpose. I wanted this as a foundation for people to look and discuss this further. If we then analyze the content a bit further of this chart for example, we see again very peculiar toponyms that again kind of imply a certain bias within the material itself, because if we move across the map, we see the different toponyms have very specific names. The first says, peninsula de li servi, peninsula of the Stags. Then peninsula of the phoca marina, which are marine seals, and then valle conzonta e giazata, so a connected frozen valley. So you really get this feeling of remote northeast Asia. Island of women, anything Italian has to have an island of women of course, Isola delle Femmine. There's a long tradition of this mythical island of women on cartography, and then the gulf of the mangi, or the manchuse [phonetic]. So what's strange again is you have an Italian and Arabic and it implies again a knowledge of a region about which we have no documentation in this period. This is the famous Map with Ship, which you will get to see if you come to the Library of Congress. Hessler himself has done some work looking at writing on this and some scratches in the velum that also reveal writing. This is the most famous of the maps. If you google Rossi maps, you'll see this because the Library of Congress put up a very nice high-res image, and it's also famous because it seems to suggest something, which I'll highlight later. Again, very strange. It has a faint drawing of a ship to the left, and apparent seal of the Polo family, and then the map on the right. And I was most interested in the map because it's an odd map, and it has a "Chinese inscription." It was kind of odd that I came to this map speaking Chinese, which was pure coincidence. I did not write this. One of the reasons I can tell you I didn't write this is the characters are not written by a person who knows Chinese. And this was something that had not been pointed out before. Chinse has what's called a stroke order. If you write any character, there's a stroke order which basically moves top to bottom, left to right. There's a way of writing Chinese. If I were to hand you a Chinese menu and say copy General Tsao's chicken in Chinese, what it says, you would draw the character sort of copying the lines, and it would look very awkward. The proportions would be wrong. And in fact that's what you see here. So whoever did this, you can recognize the characters, but whoever wrote this was copying from some Chinese thing sitting next to him or her. So when you look at the characters then, some of them you can make out fairly well, and I did. I transcribed them. But they don't really say anything. There's not a sentence here. You see a variety of characters, the character bai, which means one hundred; chu, which means to go out; qi, seven; si, meaning four. So there are characters here, but there's no sentence here, which is very frustrating for a researcher. However, it's interesting because whoever put these together, whether it was a forger, whether it was someone who genuinely was trying to collate some kind of cartographic data. They were looking at something Chinese. They were looking at something that had Arabic text. And you get this very odd amalgam here. The Map with Ship, again, also has these kind of numbered toponyms that again refer to very similar set of places moving towards the east, and if you look at them again, there's this attribution to the Saracens, to Arab navigators, these remote islands, cattigara [phonetic], which you find in Ptolemy. Again, a reference to animals that would live in these regions. Lioni marini, sea lions. And then these islands connected to the peninsula of the stags. You can imagine these reindeer running across remote corner of Siberia and northeastern Asia. Of course, what the media globbed onto was the fact that this section of the map looks just like the Bering Strait, and if it looks like the Bering Strait, it must be the Bering Strait, and I argued strenuously against this, and in fact going all the way back to my PhD thesis, I have a long history of arguing that with cartography things may look alike. It doesn't mean they're the same thing. But if you go online, you'll see this in a whole bunch of magazines and newspapers, and I like to show audiences this because it's interesting. You do see this ring of islands, which look sort of like the Aleutian Islands, but we cannot make any firm statement as to the identity of what this map is referring to in terms of present day cartography. Another daughter, Fantina Polo, also has her name on one of these maps. This is a very odd map in terms of its frame, the strange ellipse, and again it has inscriptions, and again it has a series of toponyms. And it was this map that struck me in a way as one of the most interesting because the toponyms when I looked at them puzzled me literally for several years. I was like what is this because it's Italian, Latinated Italian, but some of the words were not even remotely Latin or Italian, and when I looked at them, well the first was Zipangu, which is Japan. That's how Marco Polo period text referred to Japan. That's not strange. The first one, Serica, that's just the word for China, and Tartary, Tartaria. But then toponym number three Uan Scian, you'd say it in Italian, and then the next one, To Qiu. And then the next one, Da Han, or in Venetian the C would be pronounced H, Ta Can. And then Focan. And the final one, the eastern sea. But I looked at those middle ones, and I said those just sound very, very strange to me, and again I already had this idea that the renderer of these maps was trying to take something foreign to him or her and put it into some kind of Italian, something that would be understandable to them. And it finally struck me that the third one, the fifth one, and the sixth one were Chinese, and I only knew that by pure chance because there's a famous story of Fu Sang, which some of you may know about, it's this Chinese tale of a Buddhist monk that supposedly travels to the distant reaches beyond the ocean, but the place names actually are referred to sequentially in the myth, so you have Uan Scian [phonetic], which is Wen Shen in Chinese, and that literally means a tattooed body, like the Ainu, a marked body, Chen means a body. And then Da Han would be, actually I explained it here. Da Han would be the great country of the Han, of the Chinese. So again you're going in order because according to the original story in the Liang Shu, in fact there's this progression of places going to the distant northeast. Wen Shen, the tattooed or marked bodies that may refer to the Ainu. Da Han wall [phonetic], the great Han country, said to be east. And then finally to the distant east, you have Fu Sang, and that Sang refers to the mulberry tree. So it's interesting that you have this map that's attributed to Marco Polo's daughter that has these toponyms written in Italian, written in Venetian dialect, and yet they're referring to a Chinese story, a mythical story, and that to me was the most interesting. Not in terms of proving a voyage beyond the Pacific, but just looking at sources. And what's fascinating is that this story of Fu Sang was actually only known in Europe in the 1700's. A sinologist, a kind of strange sinologist named Joseph de Guignes, who some of you may know, he believed that Chinese characters were based on Egyptian hieroglyphs, but he was a sinologist, and he did understand Chinese. He only found that text, the Fu Sang text, the Liang Shu text, he only found that in the 1700's, and he presented it about 1761 in France, and he took the Chinese names and Romanized them via French through the French language. So what's very strange is that we see here it done in Italian. And in fact these place names became put onto maps in the 1700's. This is a map, I forget the map maker here, but he's actually drawn across the bottom, let me see here, he says [foreign language]. So it's like the root of the Chinese to America in 458. So obviously in the 1700's people believed this tale as a true tale of journeys across the Pacific. But what's interesting is that the Polo map suggested somebody had this idea much earlier, had read this Chinese story much earlier, and had essentially brought it to Europe much earlier. So to me this was the most interesting aspect of these maps, a very strange synthesis of Chinese and European sources. The conclusions are interesting since this first part of the conference really is about fact or fiction, and again, when I wrote the book, and when I was talking to the University of Chicago about the book, I said I really just want to be the person examining the contents. I want to translate everything. I want to draw some analogies, like I just did. I want to look at content, but it's very hard to make fixed conclusions. You have here some interesting possibilities that the content suggests. You know, the book, my book really looks at analysis of the maps themselves, translation of the text, again tries to put it in context of other cartographic work, but it's not quite a repeat of the Vinland map. First of all, there are more documents, which is interesting. The other is that there's connections between the two. They use this sort of same toponymic system, sometimes the same places are referred to in one map and another map. They're tied together by supposedly all being penned by Marco Polo's daughters. They are also different from the Vinland map in that there's no single suspect, at least that I was able to identify. Even Rossi himself I don't think quite had the chops let's say to crank all of these out as a collection. Also, it's not clear what the motive is. Usually when we look at forgeries there may be a political motive, a socioeconomic motive, just a straight monetary motive. You know, I am making these to sell. And in fact it's interesting in Rossi's history, we don't have any record of him trying to sell them to the Library of Congress for example or sell them to anyone else, so it's very, very strange whoever created these had some motive, but it's not really in line with what we might see in the history of other forgeries. Here's a picture of the Vinland map again as I talk about my conclusions, and maybe during the question session it would be nice to sort of look at what is the analogy or not. Again, the Vinland map is essentially written in one language, has a fairly clear agenda, one that was just elucidated in the proceeding talk, and even the cartography itself very explicitly says look here up in this portion of the map. The Rossi maps obviously make lots of allusions to the far northeast, but there's never find of the explicit claim, for example, that Marco Polo reached America. It's never said. So it's a very kind of obtuse, very obscure agenda in those maps. So the conclusions that I do draw in the book that these may be copies from the 18th century of something that was genuinely earlier because certainly the handwriting suggests something that was written after the time of Marco Polo. There's not been a lot of testing of the inks. There has been some testing of the velum. But these may be something where it was genuinely a manuscript tradition trying to preserve genuinely anomalous maps, but there are many oddities, there are anachronisms in terms of the representation, you know, this far northeast that doesn't appear on any maps of this period. But obviously I felt that there were a number of distinctive features which merited 13 years of my life to study these maps, and then the sort of last lesson that I like to say is that the critics, for those of you who plan to write books, critics are never satisfied. So when I presented this book, and again if you read it, it's very conservative I think. Many people said it wasn't speculative enough. They said but look it looks like the Bering Strait. So they weren't satisfied. Others of course said that it's too speculative, so that's a nice warning for those of you that do cartographical research. Again, for me what was most interesting is the content and the fact that there's probably a lot more work to be done on these maps. Thank you, and we'll have questions at the end. [ Applause ] [ Background Noise ] >> John Hessler: Thank you, Ben. We are now going to, you can see that our cartographic controversies are kind of forcing their way across the ocean here. We first started with the Vinland map. It was trying to get to America. Ben's maps are trying to cross the Aleutian Islands and get here. Our next talk is actually going to get here, and it's going to just prove that in fact that the cartographic controversies are not for European historians alone. The curatorship that I hold is the history of early Americas, and we broadly can see that. So our next speaker, Stephanie Wood, is a Latin Americanist. She is an expert in the Natawala [phonetic] language. Her dictionary, her online dictionary, is used by hundreds of thousands of people. She has also worked on Nawat [phonetic] pictorial manuscripts. We have this a little bit in common. I spent the summer working at the Bibliotheque Nationale doing hyperspectral imaging on a lot of map manuscripts from the Aztec post-colonial period that we have no idea who made them and what they are. And so she's going to talk about a group of maps that you may not, this crowd may not have any knowledge of. So, Stephanie, I'm just going to let you do it. [ Applause ] [ Background Noise ] >> Stephanie Wood: Well, they so much. It's wonderful to be back at the Library of Congress. I spent some months here in 1995 in the Hispanic division. Almost took a job there, but my husband is at the University of Oregon, so it was hard to be divided so distantly. And I wanted to just thank John Hessler and the Kislak Foundation and in particular Arthur Dunkleman [phonetic], who invited me to be a part of this really fun and interesting meeting. I didn't realize, sorry, I thought I was going to stand out as, you know, really an oddball with these particular manuscripts, but now I don't think so so much. So [laughter] these are manuscripts that are in the Library of Congress so you could take a look at them yourself if you have some time and if you have the interest. The maps are, there are I think 24 here. I didn't put them all up, but I put a large sampling so you can get a sense of the corpus. There are more than the ones that are here. There are some still in Mexico, but the ones that are here are found in a court case, a criminal case of forgery from the late 19th Century. It turns out that a group of 18 men were participating under the leadership of a Melecio Yanez from Puebla, [foreign language], a person of mixed heritage, who worked with these other men to make the maps and associated land title for indigenous communities in the Puebla-Tlaxcala area of central Mexico, and at least 25 towns bought these maps and the associated titles and some have more than one. So I don't know what happened. Maybe they made a map and the town said no, no, no, that's not right, and so they made them another one, I'm not sure. I visited one of the towns that has two, and they're still in their archives and they are so proud of these and love these maps, so what I'm about to say I'm glad no one is here from the town because they have some oddities. I'm going to be looking at, you know, the nature of the corpus in general, why would people buy them. I'm looking a lot at the content. I'm a historian and not a map specialist myself, but also sort of the technique. So my methodology in deconstructing the maps is something I want to make clear today. And not just the maps but again the titles, which are manuscripts that include supposed information about town founding, declaration of the boundaries, and so on. We'll see a little bit more about that in a minute. So what is the nature of the maps? There are a number of what I call subsets, groups within the corpus that have shared characteristics, so this is one subset where there are a lot of greens and yellows, and across the landscapes of the towns represented, we have birds and snakes and large human heads. This is another group that has the palette of browns largely, buildings painted white, and so on. And here's another group that the cartographer really liked to use sharp, notable angles. So I'm thinking there were several people who made the maps. There was a fellow named Manuel Tello who was pointed out in the course case as being the map maker, but I think that among the 18 men there must have been a few working on this. Maybe he taught some others how to make maps, and so there are multiple styles. And so one of the things I work with students is to identify when you see a map that might be part of a larger corpus to see what is it about that map that makes it seem to fit in with that group. So I put up here for you some other maps of central Mexico, and there's one from this Puebla-Tlaxcala group. By the way they were made about 1870, purporting to be colonial Mexican maps, and so I have some colonial maps here, one from the 16th century and two from the 17th and one of these 1870 maps. And I hope that you can see which one it is. Does anyone want to venture a guess? It's the lower left here, so it has, this is one of the green and yellow, but it also has those buildings painted white, and it's, you know, it looks rather romantic, landscape like compared to the others. The upper left is the 16th century, very much indigenous cartographic example, and then the other two from the 17th century on the right, top and bottom. So here's a closeup of the one that was in the lower left. This is not here in the Library of Congress. This one, a vendor of Rare Books and Manuscripts, contacted me in 2012 saying, you know, what can you tell me about this map, and right away I said, oh, that looks like it fits with this corpus of the Yanez-Tello Workshop that I'm calling it. Here's the document that's in the court case here in the Library of Congress that shows the arrest record of Melecio Yanez, who was sort of the ring leader and Manuel Tello and some other men. Vicente Poblano, Antonio Guerrero, these are typical names of urban dwelling, mixed heritage men, probably came from Puebla. Francisco Coca, now that last name is in line with an indigenous community elite from one of the Townsend vaults, so it's, so there's some involvement of indigenous people in the making of these maps for indigenous towns, but it's largely not their work. This is another document in the court case, which shows the profit motive if you will and making these maps. The man made maps and titles from more than 20 communities as I said, and in this case, for example, made 15 visits to one town to collect payments. And for me this is a risky behavior because for one thing if you're doing something surreptitious, the authorities are likely to see you if you're around to different towns collecting money. Also I work on another workshop from the valley of Toluca, Mexico, where the collector was in fact murdered by a town that was very fed up with making these payments, and the money was rather, it was expensive, and it was hard to get the money together. And this document, another one, they kept very meticulous records of all the monies they collected from the different towns and who went and did what, so it was very easy for the criminal case layer to figure this out. I just show this one because it mentions don Francisco Cahuantzi, who was again an indigenous person, an elite, and some relative of his became governor of the stat of Glasgow in the 19th century, so it's really intriguing to me who this man was, but he was lesser known than Prospero Cahuantzi, who was the governor. So I don't know a lot about that particular fellow. Here's an example of a map and the accompanying titles. For one particular town, they had to pay 299 pesos, a daily wage was a third of a peso, so this is a lot of money for humble and small indigenous communities to come up with. So they were, there was a monetary motive to a large extent here. The documents that go with the maps, very fitting elements are say a royal provision that says this town has this territory and we recognize it, and then there is a process that provides a protection of possession, boundary survey, measurements, and then result is a map. Now that's the official colonial administrative kind of record. Now these have, in addition to those faked elements of the town title, they have some more things that they have pulled from the more indigenous historical record tradition. So portraits of town founders. A code of arms. A narrative of the town founding. A narrative of the first church and the use of Nahuati. I'm not saying that, you know, using Nahuati was fake. It was an internal thing that many towns had records in Nahuati, the indigenous language of the central Mexicans, but for a colonial official record to have that was unusual. So here's an example of one of these titles. A town founder, supposedly the portrait from the year 1623, but his clothes immediately convey that's not the case. You know, if this is a copy of something earlier, okay, made in the 19th century perhaps, but it claims to be a [foreign language]. They use these true, you know, original and so on words all the time, which when there is copy made, it was always a true and loyal copy would be stated, so they're bending over backwards to say this is not a copy, but it's not original. And here's an example of a coat of arms in one of these bundles of town titles. And they say specifically that the town gave this coat of arms to the viceroy, which is backwards because in most communities where they had a coat of arms that was given to them by the kind or the viceroy, you know, that's the direction it went. It went, you know, authorities to the town and then they proudly would, you know, show it in their community center. But this one they said the town gave this to the viceroy. Well it's crazy, but anyway, it's interesting. So here we have the boundary measurements, the standard kind of thing, but the page itself is very odd. It says it's from 1758. The handwriting says no it isn't. There's a big stamp right on top of the writing. That's not a sealed paper, official colonial sealed paper had the stamp in the upper left corner, and then you wrote next to it. You didn't write over it. And so this is, the stamp has come later and been put on top of the writing. The orthography full of K's. The letter K came into Mexico in the 19th century. It was definitely not there in the colonial period from many records I know of. So, you know, it's just very strange. So another example of the boundary survey, the royal provision, supposedly from these years, has three stamps. You wouldn't have a page with three stamps. Usually just one in the upper left-hand corner. Typically too it would have then some text that gave, with the stamp that gave the years that the paper was made and sold. This is protection of possession for one community, again full of K's and so on, and misspellings and other things. This is a peculiar signature, a hand print and a cross. Sometimes, you know, we do see crosses in colonial manuscripts, not so many hand prints, and I would just think that's very fun if you're a, you know, a fingerprint analyst, you could figure out who this was, but of course the person is now long dead, but enjoyable. Problematic dates. This is one document that says onyo day [phonetic] 1546, the year of 1546 when it's not at all the right handwriting for that period or this statement on a map that says, you know, 1760, and again full of K's and so on. And here a map, totally original, from the town. Maps didn't say totally original. They only said, you know, totally faithful to the original when it was a copy, as we see in the bottom example here. Peculiar orthography, so again just kind of sharing with you the methods of deconstructing this syelo, the word for sky, S, Y, E, L, O, just unheard of spelling. You know, maybe C and S's were substituted, but the I for Y with the S just strange. Eskritura with a K, no, no, never. And so on. So Eskribano Real y publiko, this notary. Notaries typically abbreviated real y publiko, they got so sick of writing. Even the work escribano was abbreviated, so the whole thing would be abbreviated here. It's all spelled out like a very big amateur might do, but even that, it's just very rare. A lot of these titles were tied with ropes in legahos [phonetic] bundles, and those ropes over the years of being tied and untied would create a lot of wear, which this one page, you know, looks, it looks something like the wear that you see, but this was burned in to make it look like it was worn by robes, and yet the page underneath is not worn, and that would be strange. So very curious, peculiar. Here's another example of an oddity, lined paper. We didn't have lined paper in the colonial period. You go in the archives, you won't find it. So very 19th century flavor right here. And going back to those seals that I already pointed out. These are fabricated. They misspell the word seal itself, so, you know, duh, but they also made two or three different kinds, and they stamped them all over everything in a kind of enthusiastic way. So that's a problem. Also, these stamps were made for official paper that you would write documents on. Maps were not usually stamped with these seals, so we find that the maps have the seals stamped all the way around the edges, and that's not done. In looking back at the titles, there was I think an effort here to make them look old by making them dirty, but smudging them with ink. So we see a lot of that on a lot of the pages. Okay. I mentioned the appearance, the use of Nawat. There isn't a lot in these manuscripts and maps, but there are some examples, which I the suggest the map makers wanted to blend an authenticity of Nawat community, and this is their language, and, you know, this is what they wrote, but again it's poorly done. It's by people who don't really know the language very well, they maybe know a few words, so on this map we see it says ninteopantzin tel tochantzin. It's their church, but it's our town, our home. Which is a puzzling, peculiar thing to say. There may have been some kind of dispute in this community over whose church this was, which town it pertained to, but that was extremely rare and unlikely, so I don't know, whoever wrote that might not really have realized even what they were saying. But I do want to say that the paintings of the churches are sometimes very realistic as though, as I said, these guys were itinerant. They went to the towns collecting money. They also seemed to have gone to the towns to look for legitimate local detail to work into the maps. So the church here, the photograph that I have is from the back, so it's not going to look identical to you maybe, but it is the same church, so that's kind of interesting. On a couple of the maps we have a founding couple prostrate in front of the church, crawling toward it. And that's very unusual. I've never seen it before anywhere else, and if you know of examples of this, I'd like to understand the origin, where did they get this image, and it's because it appears twice. See here's another one. Having a founding couple, male and female, is an indigenous Mexican characteristic of early maps and manuscripts. You know, we talk about our founding fathers. They had their founding mothers and fathers, which is kind of refreshing for the gender balance, but they very rarely crawled like, or, you know, lay down in front of the church. This is very typical, a couple sitting in a cave or in a building. This is the usual founding couple arrangement, male and female, yes. And here's another one. So these are legitimate 16th century examples that I'm showing you of founding couples, early ancestors and so on. That's typically the way they appeared. Okay, also on these maps we have these talking heads, which I showed early on, and what I didn't say is that they have speech scrolls coming out of their mouths, and that's an indigenous cartographic tradition. You put people on the landscape. You put words coming out of their mouths. The indigenous local elite was called aglactowani [phonetic], one who has the speech, the speaker. And in this case, this one talking head on the upper left is saying, you know, the patron is San Antonio, so he's speaking about the patron saint of the local church. So that's kind of interesting. And to have large heads on the manuscripts was something in the region known on manuscripts. I showed two examples from the Puebla area where large heads were put on the landscape. It's pretty unique to this region. I haven't seen it a lot in other parts of central Mexico, but I wondered if the map makers had seen these other earlier manuscripts and got the idea to put these large heads out there from these other manuscripts. And here's another example. The large head on the upper left here, he's saying, the father, the father, the father, which is odd because usually it was the father, the son, the holy spirit. And so again they've written this in Nawat, really not sure probably how to say the father, the son, and holy spirit in Nawat, so they just repeated the father, which is, again, humorous for me, but I can see they were earnestly trying here to put something believable and authentic seeming on the landscape. I got two other examples of people. You more often would see a bust or a whole body than just the head in many other manuscripts. So I have shown you some heads. They did exist, but this is more common in a way. Okay, another feature from another map example on the left, we have a comet from 1816. And I wonder if that comet was maybe seen in the 16th Century, Duran corex [phonetic], you know, because it has some similarities in the way it's represented, but again I really don't know all the sources that these map makers had for trying to infuse their maps with some authenticity and typical indigenous traditions. There was a definite interest in celestial phenomena, and comets were, texts are full of references to comets, so, you know, it kind of fits in that way. One of the titles that accompanied the maps has a reference in fact to the Aztec empire, so that's kind of interesting again that they were thinking about, you know, trying to reach back and connect to pre-Columbian and early colonial times in various ways, and then there's a reference to 1578 here, and definitely the hand is not 16th century. One of the manuscripts has an eagle with a serpent, and if any of you know the Mexican flag, you know we have the eagle on a cactus with a serpent. And so again maybe they pulled this from an earlier manuscript and put it on the map to give that Aztec flavor. They also put serpents, and in this case tigre, a tiger, which was really [inaudible] the word in the Nawat for any kind of man-eating wild cat. So you get, I really think they mean jaguar here because serpents and jaguars were very prominent in pre-Columbian Aztec iconography and so I also have a 16th century map that shows a tiger on a hill, which is sort of a glyphic representation of the word Tehuantepec, which was wild cat hill. And so again maybe they saw some earlier maps, and they got the idea, oh, let's put all over the landscape snakes and tigers and things. So here are some other legitimately colonial maps with snakes on them, so you can see where they might be trying to recall that. Now this gets more like Ripley's Believe it or Not. They have drawn and painted in some what appear to be pre-Hispanic sculptures in this one town in particular, and the one on the left, you know, it does look as though maybe there's something like this in the town, and I want to go there and see if they have any kind of sculpture that looks like that. The one on the right is really very strange. It looks like an alien from outer space I think, but nothing I've seen like that. And also, you know, again like with this mysterious Ripley's kind of flavor, an eagle of what they say here in the text to be 37-1/2 pounds that could life up a sheep and carry it away. So super interesting. And here's some more details to research locally. I haven't gone yet to this particular town. There's so many of them, it's going to take a while but there are a number of really mysterious details on this Acapetlahuacan map, you know, a man hanging by his feet. You know, a woman lying bloody and dead. Another head suspended from a branch and some skeletons, so this town had a really colorful history apparently. I just really can't wait to learn more. Now aside from trying to reach back and bringing in indigenous traditions, these map makers I think also tried to infuse their maps with a semblance of cartographic modernity. And so they have these features, like, you know, a compass showing, you know, the cardinal points. The slightly different one to the next is again is though there were multiple hands involved in making these maps, and some port north on the top, and some put east on the top. So the indigenous tradition was to put east on the top and European north. So that's something further to research and who might have made which type of compass. And then this example on the right is from one of our Pueblo-Tlaxcala maps, and it has [foreign language]. I mean that's just, I've never seen that, and it's fascinating. And that kind of language is probably familiar to some of you who are cartographers. And on the left I can show you that we do have some colonial maps with these kinds of cartographic modernity beginning to appear in the 18th century. And so it's not unusual exactly, but it's kind of an exaggerated example. So that fascinated me. So European influences do, you know, creep their way into these maps. In particular, I find it in the cartouches, in the, you know, the one on the left here, it was incredibly elaborate, beautiful example from a European authored map. On the right are two examples from our Puebla-Tlaxcala group, which are, you know, not so elaborate, especially the lower right is very simple, but the upper right tries to be more detailed and pleasing. Okay, just to put this one example I'm sharing with you in a context, we have known today eight title and map manufacturing workshops in Mexican history, and so I wanted to show you another example to give you a sense of how the Yanez Tello group compares. Am I doing okay on time? Okay. So just a few slides of this other group, which is led by a fellow named Ramirez de Arellano, and these maps and titles were made around the year 1900. Again, purporting to be colonial. In this case, almost all of them have dates something like 1639 or 1609, and so they're made on cloth some of them and on paper. And they too have this emphasis on the cartouche that starts out mapa, map, and so on, and they're all indigenous towns in central Mexico. Some of these are copies, and so the styles vary a little bit, but they're pretty similar as a whole as you look at the group, and the legend there, map, de las tierras map of the lands that pertain to such and such a place. They have certain repeating characteristics in the handwriting, the D and the E being combined, the V for U. They almost all have a town founder, a single person on the landscape. At the center of town, he's dressed quite the same in almost all these maps, holding his hat down and his hand up. I think this pointing is an effort to make him the platawane [phonetic], the one who could speak, the local ruler, because they often showed in 16th century manuscripts a person with the voice also would point the finger. So I think that's what's happening here. Interestingly, in 2009 the town, one of the towns that has one of the lienzos [phonetic], canvas maps, they gave a presentation on 400 years of the validity of their town map, and I couldn't go, but I was really intrigued to note how the town really embraces it as a legitimate valid map of their town. And so I had done a little looking around at some of the details on their map, and I have been able to identify four different place names that are in fact local. So again, I think the makers of this group went to the town and asked, you know, tell me, you know, let's walk over the landscape and you identify everything for me, and they would work that into the map. So in that sense you can see how the town would embrace it. Yeah, this represents our town. And here are four more examples of this particular corpus, and they're slightly different though they have these recurring characteristics that help us identify them as a group. They also are customized. So again they've been to the town. They've asked the local people. They tried to put the mountains where they're supposed to go. If there was a body of water, they tried to put it in there. They also incorporate a few more indigenous cartographic details such as if there's a road or a path that is marked with footprints, which was a pre-Columbia, early colonial indigenous way. And water is a current that throws off shells as it goes, and they tried to use that method for replicating rivers. Okay, so to summarize and figure out what our takeaways are from looking at these kinds of mass-produced maps and manuscripts. I want to urge that we not dismiss them outright as forgery, so we're looking at fact or fiction. For me it's fact and fiction. It's more fitting to say that these are contrived. In other words, they've taken local input to make a vision of a community that fit what the town itself might recognize even if they've also tried to pretend it's early, old, which would, if it ended up in the courts perhaps help the community defend their lands. Towns desperately need a documentation, so they were ready to pay these exorbitant prices to get maps for their towns, to fulfill that need to defend their towns. And it wasn't such a level playing field. In the colonial period and especially in the 19th century, there were a number of laws attacking group-held lands, and indigenous community lands were held by the town. Use of parcels was individualized, but as a whole land was held by the group. So in the reforms of the second half of the 19th century that attacked group held lands, which were mainly aimed at the Catholic church, they affected indigenous communities. Then Maximillian of Hapsburg came in and reversed that, but then we had a dictatorship, Porfirio Diaz [phonetic], in the late 19th century Mexico, where he returned to attack a group-held land, and it was when it was in that last quarter of the 19th century, last third of the 19th century when indigenous lands were really alienated more than ever before and large estates were being built up more than ever before. So it was tough, and towns were really desparate for some documents to defend their communities. So I call that the, you know, the social versus the legal context, and as I said, there were eight such workshops, so this is a huge phenomenon. There was a recent book by Karina Olds called "Forging the Past" in which she looks at medieval and Renaissance manuscripts to understand some of the complexities of forgery, and one quote I just thought I would share with you here from her recent book is forgeries were not, at least from the perspective of their perpetrators, outright lies. They were rather a recovery of a deeper, more essential truth, that had been waylaid somehow, or in the case of indigenous communities, maybe they never had documents to defend their territories. And yet I don't want to be speculative or not enough, I want to say that science is also important, and so we need to take science to our study of these manuscripts. We have to have a methodology that allows us to recognize when a new map or manuscript emerges. Does it fit in some of these known corpuses? Does it have that kind of style, that orthography, terminology, handwriting. We even need to look more at the paper or the cloth and so on, and we need to seat the historical context that produced the map and also the history that it conveys. We don't want to undermine their validity for the indigenous communities, but we can't be naïve either, so we have both fact and fiction. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> John Hessler: Well, I want to call our speakers up for a question session if we'd like to take some questions. One of things that I found interesting about all three of our papers here is this combination of the, both the cross-cultural context in both post and pre-modern elements that are moving into both of these, all of these maps. Any questions? John? >> Yeah, I have one for Stephanie. I have a question and a comment. [Inaudible] conceptual Mexico and-- [ Inaudible Comment ] Was genuine civic pride that they really wanted to show off their ancestry as well as making land claims. And then the second comment, just a comment, that crouching position that you showed in that map, I've seen that in a number of places with people going on pilgrimage to pilgrimage destinies. So if these towns were pilgrimage destinies, I've watched people down like that say going into San Miguel del Milagro in Tlaxcala and you know Tepaoc [phonetic] and so forth. I'm wondering if they're saying, you know, this is place of pilgrimage, and we are going to the shrine of our patron saint and so forth. >> Stephanie Wood: Thanks John. Yeah, two really good comments and questions. First of all, pride in ancestry I do think enters into it, certainly in legitimate internally made manuscripts and maps, and these [inaudible] weren't so far removed from the indigenous heritage that they might, and again, because a couple of them are indigenous, koka [phonetic] and kawansene [phonetic], I think they did, they were probably in line with this not just for the money but for the pride and the ability to provide communities with something they desperately needed. It's interesting to me that they don't try to replicate the genealogy across the landscape, which is very common on many indigenous authored maps. Putting people on the landscape is huge in, you know, age-old traditions. And often those people are ancestors, you know multiple generations of ancestors. I haven't seen that yet in that group, but I think it wouldn't be too surprising to find it, but they were a little bit removed maybe from that tradition. The people on the ground, you know, pointing toward the church, I agree with you, it's the pilgrimage concept definitely is worth exploring. I've been Tepeyac, for instance, the virgin of Guadalupe shrine, where people get off the bus a kilometer or two kilometers away and crawl the rest of the way, and they get to the church bloody and their clothing torn and everything. So, yeah, it really does recall that. I mean the whole thing of prostrating oneself before a cross or an altar, and there's plenty of examples of that in, you know, across Europe and in Mexico. I just haven't seen it on these kinds of maps, but it's not a surprise exactly, you're right, it's just unusual on the maps. Thanks. Thanks John. >> John Hessler: John, the other John. [ Inaudible Comment ] >> Stephanie Wood: Hey. >> What was the result of the attempt by these people to hold onto their lands. In other words, you're looking at these communities, what did they lose in the process? Were they successful, even if these are fraudulent maps, did they indeed lose property based on porfirioto [phonetic] and [inaudible] land? >> Stephanie Wood: Yeah, I think the Puebla-Tlaxcala region did find the perimeters of their territories encroached upon increasingly in that period, but they still held the town center, and in the second group I showed they were especially, and I didn't point it out, but that whole Ramirez de Arellano set has the fundo la galle [phonetic] marked off. So in the colonial period, the crown recognized a minimum town base, and it wasn't just for the buildings and the church, but it was farmed, and I've got lots of manuscripts that show that. And I do think in the Puebla-Tlaxcala area they at least protected that much a lot of the time. There are some towns, I studied, one of the maps I showed from Wahaka [phonetic] whereby the town, only the mere core was left. The haciendas took a lot of it away, but in the end, in that particular case, the church gave back, when their lands were attacked, they gave back some of the land that they had accumulated to the town. I think that's a rare thing. I don't think that was common, but anyway, whether the maps were really effective in defending the territories, I'm not so sure because they were denounced as forgeries, and you know there was a trial, and that happened a lot with many of the, many of the workshops we've identified. The leaders were sent to jail, or one as I said was murdered, and then his widow was investigated because she continued going around trying to get the money that the husband couldn't end up getting. It didn't really matter to them sometimes like the sacatel cotu [phonetic] maps that are still in one of the towns in the region, they love them, and they're proud of them, and I don't think they've ever taken them to use in court. So they had, it's the social context for them that is the most important, but anyway, I think a study of late 19th century landholding in the region would really be helpful to see, you know, just the situation for these particular communities. Thanks and good to see you. >> John Hessler: There we go. >> I've got a question for Ben. What do you know about Rossi's professional life or his possible motivation for amassing this collection, which I think you said comprised much more than 14 maps? >> Ben Olshin: That's a very good question. In the book, I sort of give a little bit of background of him, and I guess you may know that the present owner is a direct descent of Rossi. Rossi's professional life was interesting in that he was a tailor, and he was not highly educated. And that itself is kind of an interesting point of contention because I think there's a lot of bias that people think that somebody who doesn't have a lot of formal education wouldn't be interested in history. But he is partially just because he's Italian, he's strongly identifies as an Italian, so he's interested in history generally of the Italians. But also he's a tailor, and yet he makes the claim, particularly in a letter to the Library of Congress that he's descended from somebody named Julio de Rossi, who was connected directly with Marco Polo. So, you know, it's very difficult to verify that claim. That's one of the projects that still has to be done genealogically. But apparently then he says, you know, he's just a tailor. He's interested in history; however, he's amassed these manuscripts while in Italy. He comes to the United States and then wants to have them examined. I mean he brings them literally right here to have them examined. So that's kind of his personal history, but in the documentation, and there's not a lot of correspondence that survives from him, but there's nothing that sort of indicates again that he had a particular agenda other than kind of an amateur in the positive sense of an amateur, you know, a lover of stuff, to find something else about them. And that's one of the frustrating things because I kept looking for a hint that he was trying to make money out of them or that he wanted to make some strong claim. Really the strongest claim is that he's descended from this Julio Rossi. Is that possible? Absolutely, but with a name like that, it's going to be very hard to determine. And then when he passes away, what's interesting is the maps then go to an uncle, Louis Rossi, and then finally to the current owner. So it's kind of odd that he even in death he doesn't make a sort of strong effort to have them preserved or anything. When I came across them, they literally were sitting in just the drawer in this house in Houston. So kind of a long answer to your story, to your question. Nothing in Rossi's history really suggests any kind of useful information at this point about the actual origins of the map, etc. >> John Hessler: One of the things about the map that came to the Library and when the group of things came to the Library and Ben said they were analyzed, and we'll pull this out when we show it tomorrow, the FBI crime lab is the people who did the investigation. And J. Edgar Hoover, there's correspondence, that he's very worried about this map as being a national security issue because if it does in fact show that the Chinese or Marco Polo or someone knew about America, this would overturn western history, and so there's a letter here form J. Edgar Hoover announcing that they are going to do everything they can to study it. And so it's kind of a fascinating, the power of maps really in this collection, in the Vinland collection and with Stephanie's workshops, you can see the amazing power of these images in a cultural and legal sense that the authenticity and truth of them doesn't really matter. It's just they have these profound effects. >> Ben Olshin: And we have to do whatever we can to stop the idea that either Catholics or Chinese came here early on obviously. >> A question for [inaudible]. >> John Hessler: Just wait for the mic. [ Background Noise ] >> A question for Kirsten Seaver, could you expand a little bit more on your description of Father Fischer's relationship to the Vinland map and what motive he might have to commit a forgery and why a researcher of his stature would do something like that? >> Kirsten Seaver: You mean what propelled me to research it or? >> No, I thought at the end of your talk you implied that Father Fischer was the creator of the Vinland map. >> Kirsten Seaver: Yes, uh-huh. >> And what was his motive? What do you think his motive might be and why would such a professional researcher like Father Fischer commit that forgery? >> Kirsten Seaver: It's very difficult to explain Father Fischer's personality unless you have read all his writings, but essentially he was an extremely Arodite [phonetic] and at the same time naive person, and he had a kind of a fixed framework of thinking. Once he had hit upon an idea an become convinced about it, such as that the Norse had left a cartographic trail, there was no budging him, really no budging him. And so in his old age, he was in a situation where he had retired. The Nazis had taken over Austria and of course Germany first. They were persecuting Catholic priests, which is what he was, which is why he was given refuge at Wolfegg, and they were trampling on some of the things that were dearest to his heart, and that was the truth of cartographic history and the Norse. I mean he knew that the Norse were the Norse from the far north. That had nothing to do with what was going on in the so-called greater Germany. He was an educated cartographic historian. Then in the mid-1930's, he had completed his magna opus on the Ptolemaic maps in the Vatican library, early Ptolemaic maps, and the book was reviewed by Leo Bogrov [phonetic], who didn't like it at all, and Fischer was absolutely crushed. This was the low point in his life, with the Nazis without and then Leo Bogrov's review in front of him. And he got ahold of an old manuscript that he could use, and he made in his quiet moments of his life, he made a map, which he was convinced at one time actually existed in one form. He never made it for sale. He had no personal property as a Jesuit, so at some point when he died it would have floated out there, and he was sure the Nazis would have had to pick it over in their own peculiar fashion, and he put in this riddle. As I said, he would have been appalled had he known what happened to it afterwards. He was a very strange man. The Vinland map is a very strange production. It is a product of his old and unhappy life. [ Background Noise ] >> John Hessler: Anyone else, we've got time for a couple more. If otherwise, we can break for lunch. There's Arthur up there. [ Background Noise ] >> For Stephanie, this series of maps is really part of an old tradition of forgery in Mexico and other places to support indigenous land claims. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that tradition and also about the type of social cohesion in a community that would coalesce to pay for, hide, and contribute to the manufacture of this vast amount of information and kind of one would imagine in secret, I mean in secret from the Mexican authorities or the [inaudible]. >> Stephanie Wood: Yeah, thanks Arthur. Good to see you again. Yeah, with eight workshops we've now identified producing maps and manuscripts to defend indigenous communities we know is a massive tradition, and we're trying to understand each group is unique in itself in its approach and so on, but we have for instance primordial titles as they're called, which are written in indigenous languages or which really try hard to suggest they came internally from the communities involved, and yet because now we've identified so many of them we can see they have recurring elements that suggest mass production, and yet, again, a real effort to include local detail, and the social cohesion in terms of acquiring these kinds of things that people would come together. It was the leadership was really a crucial element there. Leaders had sometimes benefited personally from the stories that were told because their ancestors would be featured. Some titles include testaments of town leaders, ancestors, and so on, so they would urge the community, you know, this is really important, we need this, we need to raise funds to buy this, and they were often doing that for other purposes too, you know, for religious festivals, so in the Puebla-Tlaxcala area for instance, it was the fescales, the indigenous community leaders, who were associated with the church, who were doing a lot of the fundraising I think for buying these kinds of things. And you can just see it in the way the town, the towns still do embrace these even though they very often can't read them anymore, and they don't even really know what they say. There might be one or two people who can read them and explain to the town, so I went to [inaudible], which had that 400th anniversary of the validity of our manuscript. I went, every couple years they handed from one town manuscript guardian to the next, and they have a big ceremony, and they have a princess. And they have a long recitation they read in Nawat that most people don't understand it anymore. And they get out, they truck out their lienzo, and everybody walks around it. And they want the youth to see it and know it, and this is our town, and this is our charter. And this is really important to us, and so everybody nods and goes along with it. Anyway, and they also reject. They don't want to hear any of the scientific analysis of it. So am sympathetic, I really am toward them, but then I also, it's awkward. I'm not quite sure how to deal with that. I have a book on this that I've been developing for a long time because there are so many different interesting groups, and they have such interesting stories. But I've been worried that people will see it as an attack on indigenous community landholding, which I don't feel it's an attack. I mean some communities will say we're very glad to know what you have to tell us here. We don't want to be naive either, you know, so we want to know what this is. Even if we like it, we want to know it's origin. So that's a complicated, roundabout answer. I hope I got to what you were looking for. >> John Hessler: So any final questions? Wes? >> For Kirsten Seaver, you alluded to this at the beginning, but I was a little confused. So if you could hit this again. Father Fischer's manuscript was created by him, remind us again, remind us again how it was then discovered and reintroduced into the world in the 1950's or whenever that happened. >> Kirsten Seaver: Oh, you mean the history of how it ended up at Yale. >> Yes. >> Kirsten Seaver: Now that's a very interesting history because there was a book dealer, an antiquarian book dealer from Massachusetts, who went to Switzerland and linked up with Italian book dealer who had long operated in Switzerland as well as in Spain. His wife was Spanish. And picking over what was said at the time about the purchase and what in fact happened over time, this was a collusion to make money, you know, sort of gradually, by passing the manuscript on through various channels and making it look like a coincidence that the Vinland map, the tarter relation, and somehow the holes in the Speculum Historiale in the old dilapidated binding all matched. Well actually I've looked at the thing, and there's only one hole that matches, and that is one that looks like it's going straight through like that. This is all very peculiar. The way in which the two so-called sister texts ended up at Yale is also very strange because it has to do with antiquarian book deals that sort of went back and forth with, you know, one person sells it, the other one buys it and then sells it back to the next person again, and it was all done to make it look legit. This is just a snake operation from start to finish by the time it got out of Father Fischer's hands. My guess is that after he died and the Stella Matutina Library was taken over by the Nazis, either a German soldier stole it, you know, it looked like all might be money, or a liberation soldier stole it, who knows. But in 1957, all kinds of stuff surfaced because then the lid was off. You could then sell loot from the war, and that's when it all began to happen. >> John Hessler: Well, thank you everyone for coming to the morning session. We will break for lunch and resume back here at 1:00 for the Carta Marina. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.

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