Did the Zen Brothers Reach North America in the 1380s?

I just finished reading Irresistible North: from Venice to Greenland on the Trail of the Zen Brothers by Italian-born, U.S.-educated historian Andrea di Robilant (2011). In this interesting little book di Robilant investigates one of the many mysterious oddities thrown up by the Age of Exploration, the Zen Map. This map of the North Atlantic was first printed in 1558 in a book by a Venetian luminary named Niccolo Zen. From there some of its details were taken up by the famous Dutch mapmaker Gerard Mercator, confusing sailors for half a century; the English dispatched at least two expeditions in search of the nonexistent island of Frisland, shown on the map halfway between Scotland and Newfoundland. (Click on the map for a better view; it is a pretty big file. And note that while the family name is sometimes rendered Zeno, Venetians spell it Zen.)

Like many other accounts of exploration, from Marco Polo's Travels to the General Historie of the Pyrates (1724), Niccolo Zen's book combines impossibilities with descriptions that must be based on firsthand observation. For example, it gives a very accurate description of Greenland's strange "smoking mountain," where natural deposits of coal and tar have been smoldering for centuries, and in fact Zen's was the most accurate map made of southern Greenland for another century. It also describes a monastery on the south coast of Iceland where bread was baked without fire, using geothermal heat; bread is still baked this way in Iceland, and there was at least one monastery in the setting described by Zen.

So where did this map come from? Niccolo Zen said it was based on a sketch and series of letters written by two of his forebears, Niccolo and Antonio Zen, in the 1380s and 1390s. Zen says these letters were fragmentary and in such bad condition that he could not be sure about the names of many people and places. This adds a further layer to the mystery, as readers try to connect Zen's peculiar names to medieval or modern place names.

In 1383, Zen the author tells us, the earlier Niccolo Zen embarked from Venice in a cog. He was sailing for the Low Countries, hoping to trade spices and Italian manufactures for wool and salt fish. Blown off course by a storm, he landed in a place that he called Frislanda. This place was by the older Zen's account nowhere near the Frislanda shown on the younger Zen's map, and from the topography it can be recognized as the Faroes. There Zen met a noble lord his descendant called Zichmni and entered his service. If the mysterious Zichmni is based on a real person, that person must Henry Sinclair (1345-1400), a half-Scottish, half-Norwegian Earl who was briefly overlord of both the Shetlands and the Orkneys. Sinclair was instrumental in shifting these islands from Norwegian to Scottish control, so he is a historical figure of some weight. These days he has two groups of fans, one that respects what he is known to have done, and the other that thinks, based on Zen's book, that Sinclair sailed to the New World and aimed to establish an ocean-spanning empire.

Niccolo Zen (the explorer) profited in Zichmni's employ, and he realized that these Atlantic islands were the real heart of the fish trade. So he wrote to his brother Antonio and urged him to bring another cargo of goods and join Niccolo with Zichmni. Antonio did so. Not only that, but as Niccolo sailed home to Venice Antonio enlisted under Zichmni as his admiral, sailing with him to Iceland, Greenland, and unknown places Zen the author called Icaria, Estotiland, and Drogo. Icaria, ruled by kings named Icarus and Daedalus in strict alternation, is a place straight from the same world of classical fantasy as the Amazons who never lived in South America; it must be a literary flourish on Zen's part. Whether this renders everything else Zen wrote suspect is a matter of taste. Estotiland, on the other hand, is a forested, rocky place inhabited by hostile bow-wielding natives, a plausible description of Labrador or Newfoundland. According to Zen the natives were intensely hostile toward all Europeans because of their frequent bad experiences with Basque and Portuguese fishermen.

Palazzo Zen, Venice

But was any of this true? Opinions have varied ever since 1558, with strong partisans on both sides. Some think this is a complete fraud by Zen, who mixed details from a few sea tales he had handy into a made-up narrative. But Zen has also had ardent defenders, including some scholars of note. As he travels to the Faroes, Shetlands, Orkneys, Iceland, and Greenland, Di Robilant meets several of these partisans, and sees the places Zen's defenders think are the real background to his story. It makes for a fun read, and the mystery really is a good one. If Zen made it all up, where did he get such good information on Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroes? And wouldn't his Venetian audience have known if two members of the noble Zen family had not at least been rumored to have journeyed to the north? But if the narrative is true, how did fantastical details like Icaria get into the story?

I like these questions unresolved, myself. I delight in imagining the late medieval Atlantic as a place of fisherman, pirates, and wild rumors, unknown even though not exactly unexplored. If you enjoy the same sort of mystery, you might like Irresistible North.