January 2011

Being an account, based upon his own journals, of a young British naval officer’s adventures in love and war. How he helps take New York—and is almost bayonetted by Hessians while scavenging for souvenirs. How he sets a prize afire, and the lamentable results when she proves to be loaded with gunpowder. How he takes command of a prize fleet with a most intoxicating cargo. How he sails to the West Indies and there makes the grievous error of wooing two Creole ladies at the same time. The tale of a night with an “amiable fair,” and of how he escapes her father’s rebel militiamen. The tale of his perilous escape from the French off the Chesapeake Capes only- alas!—to see his ship destroyed by Monsieur. And how at last, serving ashore at Yorktown, he witnesses the twilight of Britain’s cause.

The Vinland Map contains two statements that Bjarni (whose patronymic is not given) and Leif Eiriksson—who are named in this order twice overdiscovered Vinland in company. If this be fact, it is unrecorded in any surviving textual source for the voyage and must derive from an oral or written tradition otherwise lost.

The Vinland Map makes no verbal allusion to any of the other Norse voyages to America described in the two saga narratives. Its longer legend does, however, give some account of an event which is the subject of the latest reference to Vinland in the medieval Icelandic Annals, namely the voyage thitherward of Bishop Eirik Gnupsson early in the twelfth century. This episode has been interpreted by some modern historians as evidence of the survival of a Norse colony in America into this period.

In the Vinland Map we see the only known cartographic delineation of American lands before the discoveries of Columbus and Cabot. So far as the evidence goes, this unique record remained unnoticed by geographical writers, by projectors and explorers, and by cartographers. We may still ask whether, more positively than all the hints of western land accumulated in the fifteenth-century maps and texts, it served in some way to bridge “the gap between two epochs of Atlantic discovery.”

The portion of the Vinland Map which will most excite scholars of American history appears here. At right, depicted too far north, is Iceland, called isolanda Ibernica (literally, “Irish Iceland.” recalling the early contacts of the Irish monks with that island). In the center, shown too far south, is a remarkably accurate Greenland (Gronelãda in the map maker’s abbreviated Latin), which suggests that the compiler of the map was working from actual experience, the knowledge of someone who had sailed around it. At the left is the most intriguing portion of the map: a strange representation of “Vinland”: the large lettering reads Vinlanda Insula a Byarno repã et leipho socijs, which is to say, “Island of Vinland, discovered by Bjarni and Leil in company.” It probable is an attempt to depict not a literal Vinland but a generalized representation of the lands to the west known through saga and tradition. Some three or four centuries lie between the recorded Norse voyages and the chawing of this map about A.D. 1440.

In 1885, when Samuel L. Clemens' delightful daughter Susy was thirteen and he forty-nine, she secretly began a biography of her father, "Papa"—Mark Twain—soon discovered it, to his immense pleasure: when he himself wrote his biography, years later, he included passages from Susy's, leaving her "frequently desperate" spelling unaltered.  A new book by Edith Colgate Salsbury, Susy and Mark Twain, just published by Harper & Row, sets side by side many excerpts from the daughter's account and relevant remarks by the father in various works.  Here is what they had to say about the "expergation" of his books by his wife, Olivia.