The green outline superimposed on the details here is taken from the "Cantino" world map of c1501, which famously includes a big, strange island south-west of Greenland. Unfortunately, both this and the related Canerio (Caveri) map of c1503 stop too far south to see whether Greenland was visualised as an island, but its apparent derivatives by Martin Waldseemuller, the "Admiral's Map" of 1513 and the "Carta Marina" of 1516, both show Greenland as a peninsula joined to the north of the Eurasian landmass. |
The comparison above was intended only to show how the angles of southern Greenland matched on the Vinland and Cantino maps. When you try to match the scale as well (which is difficult because they depict many features very differently, so I've just tried matching the vertical scale through Spain and France) things get really intriguing. There is a good match of positions for both Greenland and the Atlantic island on the Cantino Map (which has a large caption scroll at its northern end) conveniently placed just on the Portuguese side of the colonial boundary line agreed in the Treaty of Tordesillas after Columbus announced his new discoveries. Furthermore, the little island shown off the southern tip of Greenland in the Cantino map, but non-existent in reality, corresponds remarkably well with the strangest wormhole in the Vinland Map, which the worm gave up on almost as soon as this page had been eaten through. It seems we are being asked to believe that the Vinland Map was one of the Cantino map's sources- but the fact that the Tordesillas boundary falls just on the right side of the Atlantic island/Vinland implies that the VM must also have been available to the Portuguese during the treaty negotiations. |
And there's more- what is going on with the more northerly of the two inlets shown on Vinland? Are we seeing a very long inlet with a basin at its head (like Lake Melville on the Labrador coast), or a lake drained by a very wide river (bearing in mind that even the Nile is shown on the Vinland Map by a single line)? | |
On Baffin Island is a large, quite shallow lake, containing hundreds of little islands, called Nettilling Lake. This lake is drained by a rather remarkable river, the Koukdjuak. Although less than 80km long, this river is about 2km wide for most of its length- much wider than the Nile at Cairo; nearly twice the width of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge, and comparable to the St. Lawrence at Quebec. The river drains westward, not east, but by simply turning Vinland upside down, and comparing with a modern map (based on my W.H.Smith World Atlas, 1982 edition), here's what we get: | Matters become slightly more complex, however, as we go back in time. Here's a sequence of maps from 1955 (about the latest that could possibly have been used in drawing the Vinland Map) back to 1912 (an arbitrary choice, just because I happen to have two atlases from that year). If the lake/inlet on the Vinland Map is a cheeky reference to Nettilling Lake, its trefoil shape seems to be based on a 1950s map, not a map from the 1930s or earlier. |