The trail goes cold

For centuries, the history of the far North was a tapestry of controversies and mis- understandings, misspellings, dubious arrivals and equally dubious departures. Pytheas the Greek sailed north from Britain in the 4th century BC, found a place where the sea, land and sky seemed to merge, and was trounced by later scholars as a terrible charlatan. The Vikings mingled cartographical details with stories of trolls and hauntings. During the reign of Elizabeth I, Martin Frobisher went north and (mistakenly) thought he’d found gold. Undeterred, successive explorers and treasure hunters ventured into the Arctic wastes, many of them vanishing among the floes. Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1908; his claim was promptly dismissed. Robert Peary’s arrival in 1909 was also treated with grave suspicion. By then it had become almost de rigueur to dis- believe any news from the North.

More recently, the North has attracted writers picking over historical scraps, in search of the ‘lost that can’t be found’ (as Louis MacNeice put it, when he went to Iceland in the 1930s). The Italian author Andrea di Robilant has added himself to the northbound hordes, travelling in pursuit of ‘an old Venetian tale’ of the 14th century Zen map of the far North. He has produced a clever, highly entertaining book about uncertainty, and those quests that obscure as much as they reveal.

The trail begins in Venice, when an American tourist asks di Robilant about the Zen brothers, two Italian sailors who ‘crossed the Atlantic and reached the coast of North America at the end of the 14th century’. Di Robilant confesses he has never heard of them. Later, he finds a reference to a book, printed in 1558, entitled On the Discovery of the Islands of Frislanda, Eslanda, Engroneland, Estotiland and Icaria made by two Zen brothers under the Arctic Pole and authored by ‘the Magnificent M Nicolò Zen’, the great-great-great-grandson of Antonio Zen, one of the original two navigators.