A curious pair of separately-issued maps depicting fictional islands in the North Atlantic according to the bogus account of Nicolò Zeno.

Frisland
In 1558, Venetian named Nicolò Zeno published his book 'Della Scoprimento', together with an accompanying map, claiming the discovery of the island of 'Frisland' in the North Atlantic for Venice and, further to the West, the "New World" of Estotiland.

These "discoveries" were based upon accounts of voyages alledgedly undertaken by Zeno's ancestors in the fourteenth century: his namesake, 'Nicolò' (the elder), who supposedly led a fleet of Venetians into the North Atlantic in 1380. He was soon shipwrecked on the island of Frisland, then rescued by its Latin-speaking prince Zichmni and his brother, 'Antonio', who had the good fortune to discover the "New World" over a century before Columbus, naming it "Estotiland", and noting its cannibalistic inhabitants.

Unfortunately for Zeno, and all future historians, these accounts were destroyed by Zeno himself: "Being still a boy when they came into my hands, and not understanding what they were, I tore them in pieces and destroyed them, as boys will do".

However, Zeno's story was supported by the inclusion of a map that, presumably, Zeno was able to reconstruct from memory. The map made compelling viewing: the rectangular Frisland bore a convincing shape, and was populated with placenames such as 'Forlanda' and 'Sorand'. What is more, it was drawn with lines of latitude and longitude, which made it easily exportable into other maps.

The first of these was the present example, issued only three years after Zeno's book, by the respected Venetian mapmaker Girolamo Ruscelli. In 1569, the great Gerard Mercator included it on his world map, and, not to be outdone, Ortelius, ever the opportunist, joined the party with his 1570 world map at the front of his 'Teatrum Orbis Terrarum' - the first printed modern atlas.

Once on the maps of such luminaries, the island could hardly be ignored, and so was spotted by the English navigator Martin Frobisher in 1576, and, in 1580, was named for England by Queen Elizabeth's advisor John Dee. Now, whilst one could perhaps charitably claim that, on a misty day and in a rush to search for the elusive Northwest Passage, Frobisher might have confused Greenland's bulk for the fictional island, to lay claim to a territory without anyone actually setting foot on it was a little precipitous. What none of these mapmakers seemed to notice was that Zeno's map – purportedly based on fourteenth century sources – was, in fact, drawn very much in the style of mid-sixteenth century Venetian printed maps, such as those of Olaus Magnus and Benedetto Bordone. Nonetheless, the myth perpetuated, and, in the mid-nineteenth century, English scholar Richard Henry Major declared the Zeno story an "authentic… genuine, and valuable narrative", while, in 1951, geologist William Herbert Hobbs determined that the Zeno brothers were "honest and quite competent discoverers". Indeed, as late as 1989, Venetian philologist Giorgio Padoan argued that there was no forgery: Venetians had stepped on the New World before any other Europeans. Proof, if ever it were needed, of the rhetorical power of a map!

The Maps
The two maps - Ruscelli's North Atlantic and the Ruscelli edition of Ptolemy's second projection - were published by Girolamo Ruscelli for his 1561 edition of Ptolemy's 'Geografia'. Both maps were printed on a single sheet, but when found, as here, undivided and without text on the verso, it may be inferred that they were an earlier publication and, in all likelihood, printed for inclusion in a Lafreri composite atlas.