1st commercial ship sails through Northwest Passage

The source for much of Mercator’s representation of the north Atlantic was a book published in Venice in 1558, described as an account of the fourteenth-century voyages of the brothers Antonio and Nicolò Zeno, and accompanied by a woodcut map. The book was compiled from family papers by Antonio Zeno’s great-great-great grandson, also called Nicolò, a respected writer, mathematician, and geographer, and member of the city-state’s Council of Ten. Around 1380, so the story goes, Nicolò Zeno left Venice on a trip to England and Flanders, but was blown wildly off course by a storm, and shipwrecked on an island which, he subsequently discovered, was called Frisland. Attacked by the natives, he was rescued by Zichmni, prince of nearby Porlanda; the two formed an alliance, Zichmni becoming lord of Frisland and the neighboring islands of Ledovo, Ilofe, and Sanestol with the help of Nicolò’s naval know-how.

This information is said to come from letters Nicolò wrote to Antonio Zeno, who then joined his brother in Frisland, and continued in Zichmni’s service for ten years after Nicolò’s death. Together, Antonio and Zichmni led expeditions to Grislanda, Engroueland, and Icaria, meeting hostile natives, stunted cave-dwellers and practically-minded monks who fashioned all manner of things from volcanic rocks. Further discoveries are mentioned in material supposedly drawn from another letter, this time from Antonio Zeno to another brother, Carlo. These were not made by Antonio himself, but were narrated to him by a Frisland fisherman who, blown off course, found himself among the savages of Drogeo, where he lived for many years before escaping to Estotiland. Here the fisherman found the king’s library stocked with books in Latin—evidence of some earlier European contact—and heard tell of more civilized peoples, of cities and great wealth lying to the south, seemingly a reference to the settled tribes of North America or perhaps Mexico.

All of these places appear on the “Carta da Navegar” which accompanied the book. The tip of Scotland can be glimpsed at the bottom of the map’s centre, and Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are recognizable and duly labelled; above Norway is a gulf, with Europe’s landmass looping across the top of the map to “Engronelant”—as Greenland was often then known. Iceland, too, appears, though it has acquired seven unfamiliar extra islands to the east. Indeed, apart from the slightly misplaced Shetland islands—here “Estland”—everything else on the map, though scrupulously labeled, is entirely fictional.

Within only a few years of their publication, however, these details had all been incorporated into standard cartography—starting with the 1561 edition of Ptolemy published in Venice, which was widely reproduced thereafter and used as the basis for subsequent maps. Sailors navigated the North Atlantic assuming the existence of Frisland, Estotiland, and Drogeo—Frobisher had actually landed on Greenland when he thought he was planting the English flag on Frisland—and around a hundred years passed before enough journeys were made and reports filed to confirm that where Zeno had carefully mapped out islands, there was nothing but sea.

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/18/wood.php