Yet behind all the pomp and majesty, King Haakon remained suspicious. It was not enough that a number of Scottish noblemen serve as guarantors for Henry by providing sureties in the form of open letters attached to the official document of investiture. The king insisted that four members of the delegation remain in Norway as hostages until payment of the thousand golden pieces was received. Among the four was Malise Sperra, Henry’s first cousin and himself a claimant to the earldom. The king was so worried that the troublemaking Malise might challenge the document that he made him sign a specific clause of renunciation. It was Henry’s responsibility to make sure Malise did not violate it.
The following year, before the Feast of Saint Martin, Henry paid the sum he had pledged—it is not clear whether he borrowed it against his future revenues in Orkney or whether he raised the money in Scotland. The hostages, including Malise, were allowed to leave Norway. But before the year was over, King Haakon was dead. His son Olaf was only five years old, so his Danish mother, Queen Margaret, took over the reins of government, opening the way for a Danish takeover of the Norwegian Kingdom.
Queen Margaret needed to reestablish control over the Faroes in order to collect revenues from the rebellious population. But her kingdom had fallen on such hard times that she probably did not have the means to launch a military expedition. Besides, she was so embroiled in the struggle at home to preserve the crown for her young son that she could ill afford to devote herself to her dominions at sea. If Zichmni was indeed Henry Sinclair, then the most plausible explanation for his presence in the Faroes at the time of Messer Nicolò’s landing is that Queen Margaret, taking advantage of the earl of Orkney’s obligation to the Crown, ordered him to sail north with “up to a hundred armed men”—as the title stated—to take control of the islands. And once he had completed his mission, he made his way back to his earldom.
A Turn in Orkney
DURING A STOPOVER in London on my way to the Orkney Islands, I took a train down to Haslemere, an hour south of the city, in Surrey, to pay a courtesy visit to Niven Sinclair. Although not a direct descendant of Henry Sinclair, he was his most energetic and vocal apologist.
Niven met me at the station. I knew him to be well into his eighties but his jovial disposition made him seem younger than his age. Over lunch at the local Italian restaurant, he told me about his days as a cashew farmer in Tanzania after World War II. He had lost his farm when the country had become independent and had been repatriated. “I arrived in London with nothing but the bush clothes I had on,” he said, digging into his veal scaloppine. His entrepreneurial drive did not desert him. He found a job driving a cab and soon took over the company. Within a few years he was running one of London’s top car services and making a small fortune in the process.
Retired and childless, Niven was now free to devote himself and much of his money to his passion for Henry Sinclair. Which meant that he was often up at Rosslyn Castle, in Scotland. It was Henry’s grandson, William Sinclair, who later built Rosslyn Chapel, which became famous all over the world after the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Niven helped restore the chapel and preserve the ruins of the castle and was now busy making a permanent arrangement for the Sinclair papers and library.
After lunch, we drove to his home, a rambling stone house overlooking a terraced garden filled with roses and irises and rhododendron. “Henry, you see, was no small Scottish laird,” he said as he walked me around the grounds. “He was a visionary leader who had in mind a vast commonwealth stretching all the way to North America to counter the power of the Hanseatic League.”
Niven was convinced that Henry had sailed to North America with Messer Nicolò’s brother, Antonio, and had established a colony in New England a century before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic. This particular story was very popular among Henry Sinclair devotees on both sides of the Atlantic. But it seemed just as far-fetched to me as it had when I had first heard it from the American tourist who had wandered into the public library in Venice. For the time being, I was more interested in Henry’s role in Norse-Scottish relations at the end of the fourteenth century. So I was grateful when Niven brought out books and letters and articles he had collected over the years and proceeded to pile them up on my outstretched arms.
“I can’t carry any more,” I warned after a while, teetering under the weight of all that paper.
“Yes you can,” Niven insisted, producing yet another set of biographical notes. He added melodramatically, “Believe me, from now on you’ll need all the ammunition you can take.”
A FEW days later, I flew to Aberdeen and took a ferry to Kirkwall.
Unlike the Faroes, tall and sharp-edged, the Orkney Islands are low-lying and locked in an easy embrace devised by Nature to protect them from rough seas, beating gales and perennial rains. A great number of firths, sounds, bays and “gulfs” (to use Nicolò the Younger’s word) fill the Orkney perimeter. The largest of these is Scapa Flow, a calm inner sea that serves as a center of gravity for this family of old islands.
The first migrants arrived in the Orkney Islands during the Neolithic Age and the remains of their primitive round houses are still scattered in the open landscape: stately stones standing firmly in the moors like ageless Giacometti statues. When the Pictish tribes reached these shores, fleeing northbound Roman legions, they took over the crumbling round houses that survived from prehistoric times and turned them into fortified brochs that towered over the surrounding villages. The Picts were peaceful people who farmed and tended to their animals; they did not brave the high seas and only fished close to shore. Gospel-carrying missionaries converted them to Christianity as early as the seventh century, turning these islands into the northernmost outpost of medieval Europe. In the following century the Picts bore the brunt of the first Viking raids. Each spring, mighty warrior ships carried by strong westerly winds brought terror and destruction to these tranquil islands.
One’s heart goes out to the unlucky Picts, who fled from a mighty enemy coming from the south only to be destroyed by another mighty enemy coming from the north.
In due time the Vikings too settled down to farm and trade. The Orkney Islands flourished and Kirkwall became one of the great commercial centers of the Norwegian realm.
THE LAYOUT and size of Kirkwall (“Church Bay” in the old Viking language) have not changed much since medieval times except that the sea has receded and what used to be the waterfront is now well within the town. The old Romanesque church of Saint Olaf that looked out on the bay in medieval times no longer exists but for an original stone portal that was fitted into the new cathedral built in the nineteenth century and dedicated to Saint Magnus.
The ferry terminal has been moved a few miles out of town so there are only small fishing boats puttering about in the harbor. I was told that until not so long ago the last remnants of the once formidable Kirkwall fortress still stuck out of the water. Some say that Henry Sinclair himself built the castle in the shallow waters of the harbor after he became the earl of Orkney. But it seems unlikely that he would have violated his oath of loyalty to the Crown in such a blatant fashion. Besides, official documents state that his service was nothing but faithful. The illegal castle was probably built by his son, Henry II. And when Henry Sinclair’s grandson, William, became the earl in 1434, he was ordered by the Crown to destroy the fort because it had been built without royal consent. But it wasn’t torn down until two centuries later. By then the Orkney Islands had passed under the control of the Scottish Crown. When the English laid siege to the harbor they had such a difficult time blasting the castle they claimed it was built by the devil himself. After its demolition, the crumbling pile of rocks in the middle of the harbor served as a reminder of English determination to quash Scottish resistance. Weather and seawater erosion finally had the better of those stones, and today there is no visible trace of the Sinclair fortress.
The ruins of the old Bishop’s Palace, on the other hand, are still there on th
e hillside behind the main street. They retain a certain gloomy grandeur. Crows build their nests in them and swoop in and out of the crumbling walls letting out their sinister croaks.
In town, they say that Bishop William’s restless ghost still haunts those old stones.2
King Haakon had been unhappy with Bishop William for a long time. The bishop had taken advantage of the weakened presence of the Norwegian Crown to extend his power in Orkney by ruthlessly enforcing the payment of tithes and Peter’s Pence on impoverished islanders and confiscating the property of those who could not pay in order to increase his landholdings. The problem had been exacerbated by the Great Schism of 1378, which had split the Church in two and produced a pope in Rome, Urban VI, and one in Avignon, Clement VII. Norway had sided with the Roman pope whereas Scotland had come down on the side of the Avignon pope. Bishop William was backed by Clement VII and by Scotland, so Norway considered him not just a scoundrel and a thief but a usurper as well.
When Henry Sinclair took over the earldom he found himself in a difficult position. As a Scotsman he was expected to side with Bishop William. But as a vassal of the Norwegian Crown he had to oppose him. Indeed King Haakon had made it plain to Henry, in entrusting the earldom to him, that he was counting on him to neutralize the threat posed by Bishop William to the Crown’s authority in Orkney. Tensions continued to build between Henry and William until 1382, when the bishop was slain. Was Henry responsible for his death? So much time has gone by that it is impossible to say so with certainty. But it was clearly to King Haakon’s advantage not to have William around anymore, and if there was foul play it is hard to imagine that Henry did not have a hand in it. In any event, the Avignon pope and the Rome pope both named successors, but neither took office and the see remained vacant for several years.
I RENTED a bicycle one day and rode out to the island of Burray to pay a visit to Willie Thomson, Orkney’s local historian. He was something of an institution on the islands. Then retired, he had been for a long time the popular headmaster of Papdale Primary School, in Kirkwall, and for an even longer time before that, a history teacher in Orkney and Shetland.
It was one of those beautiful clear days after a period of wind and rain. Along the way I made the mistake of stopping by the Highland Park distillery to see how Orkney whiskey was distilled. I was running a little ahead of schedule so my idea was to have a quick look around the malting house, the peat-fired kiln and the vats of mash and wash and quickly get back on the road. An hour later, I staggered out of the distillery and struggled to get back on my bicycle. “You will find it is good fuel for the road,” I heard the manager chuckle as he waved me off.
Burray was no more than twelve miles away but I felt wobbly in my seat. The breeze was blowing against me and the road went up and down an endless series of green hills. I reached my destination exhausted and late for my appointment.
Thomson was waiting for me in a glassed-in porch that looked out on the bay. Mrs. Thomson brought out a jug of fresh water, some coffee and a plate of butter pancakes served with delicious Orkney cheese, and sat with us to chat. Within minutes the sky grew dark and the rain swept in from the sea.
Thomson answered my questions about Orkney history with the patience accumulated in a lifetime of teaching. He had words of praise for Henry Sinclair and said he took his duties as the earl of Orkney very seriously. “However, he didn’t live here permanently. In winter, he returned to Rosslyn Castle to look after his affairs in Scotland and spend time with his family. He had very good connections in Norway and was frequently in Scandinavia to attend to his duties, but he was mostly concerned with his Scottish estates. He was a Lothian gentleman after all.”
My host could not have been more amiable. But when I brought up the topic of the Zen voyages he demurred. In the town library in Kirkwall I had noticed that Thomson had dealt very sympathetically with the Zen story in the first edition of his History of Orkney but had expunged his comments in the latest edition. I asked him about this. He told me that Brian Smith, a former pupil of his at Lerwick Grammar School and now the chief archivist at the library in Lerwick, Shetland, had persuaded him that the story of the Zen voyages was a fictitious account.
“And what about Zichmni?” I asked.
“Smith says he was probably just a pirate,” Thomson said as he leaned over the table to offer me a pancake with a slice of cheese.
Clearly, it was with Brian Smith in mind that Niven had loaded me with “ammunition” at our meeting in Haslemere. For Smith, I would soon discover, was the driving force behind the anti-Zen front in the region. In an article published in The New Orkney Antiquarian Journal he once described the Zen voyages as “tripe” and elevated Nicolò the Younger to the rank of “most blatant hoaxer in the history of the art.” But I suspected that what rankled Niven the most was Smith’s habit of dismissing Henry Sinclair as a laird of “middling rank.”
We said good-bye on the porch and I promised Thomson I would call on his former pupil when I reached Shetland. “He was a brilliant student,” he insisted. “One of my very best.”
THE SKY had cleared and I rode back along the eastern shore of Scapa Flow and across the Churchill Barriers to East Mainland. During World War II, the British navy hid much of its fleet in this sheltered inner sea, which used to have four natural openings. For reasons of defense, two of those openings on the eastern shore had been blocked out with stone barriers erected by Italian prisoners of war encamped on Lamb Holm, a small, windswept island between Burray and East Mainland.
The Italian prisoners were quite popular on the island. They set up a music band and a teatro italiano. They were for the most part artisans, masons, contadini, and they loved to make things with their hands. They built a small church by soldering two Nissen huts, plastering the interior and embellishing the building with a stucco portal. The young master builder, Daniele Chiocchetti, painted religious scenes on the walls.
The old campsite on Lamb Holm had long since reverted to green pastures and was dotted with fluffy sheep when I passed by. The little church was still there, though, and seemed in surprisingly good condition. I was told that Chiocchetti had returned not so long before on a nostalgic visit and had retouched the frescoes.
Despite the breeze and the strong smell of the grass and the sea, it was enough to step inside the little building to recognize the sweet, dank odor of Catholic sacristies all over the world.
BY THE time Messer Nicolò arrived in the region, a year after Bishop William’s death, Henry Sinclair had consolidated his hold on the earldom, settling important land disputes and reorganizing a complex tax system. Agriculture had collapsed in the wake of the Great Plague (1349–50), but Henry had encouraged the reoccupation of the land, which had lain fallow during a generation for lack of farmhands. However, if the Orkney economy was growing it was largely because the islands were fast becoming an important link in the booming European fish trade.
Scapa Flow was at the center of this transformation. Every day fishermen hauled tons of cod onto the beach, where an army of workmen busied themselves splitting, boning, filleting and hanging each fish to dry on wooden racks that were laid out in double and triple rows along the beach. Cod was king, of course, but the daily catch might include haddock, mackerel, ling, herring, coalfish and whiting. Foreign merchant ships arrived in increasing numbers to load up, mostly on stockfish (wind-dried cod) destined for the great markets of northern Europe. Fish-processing plants along the shore also guaranteed a steady supply of cod liver oil—another staple of medieval trade in the northern countries (it was used as a lubricant on the rolling logs over which ships were transported on land, in addition to being a part of the traditional Norse diet).
Impressed by the commercial possibilities that seemed to open up in the region, Messer Nicolò wrote to his brother Antonio in Venice, sometime in late 1383, urging him to join him. “Many ships come here to take large consignments of fish and head back to Flanders, Brittany, England, Scotland, Norway and De
nmark,” he reported, adding as an enticement that “great fortunes are amassed here in this way.” Presumably, Antonio did not receive the letter until the following year at the earliest, that is in the summer of 1384. “He purchased a ship in Venice,” the narrative said, “and headed out to join his brother, for he was just as eager as Messer Nicolò to see the world, experience life with different peoples and achieve some measure of greatness in this way.”
Setting up an expedition to the North Sea was not as simple a task as Nicolò the Younger implied. Antonio must have reached the Orkney Islands no earlier than the summer of 1385. Messer Nicolò “greeted him with great joy because he was his brother, and a very worthy one.” But they were soon separated again because Zichmni ordered Messer Nicolò to join him in a new military expedition in the north.
This was another instance in which the lives of Zichmni and Sinclair seemed to match.
Estlanda
ALTHOUGH HENRY SINCLAIR had established his power in the Earldom of Orkney, his authority did not go unchallenged for very long. His cousin and rival, Malise, who now called himself Lord Skaldale, had settled in the town of Orphir, a few miles south of Kirkwall, toward the island of Hoy, after his release as a hostage in Norway. Tensions ran high between the two cousins and conflict finally broke out when Malise made a surprise land grab in Shetland. Claiming a right to rule the islands as a direct descendant of a Shetland folk hero, Ivan Sperra, he took over the huge estates of the Hafthorsson brothers, absentee landlords who belonged to a wealthy Scandinavian family, and placed his own agents to run the farms. The Crown was too weak to fight back on its own but it had the authority to summon Henry to action in defense of its dominion. The earl of Orkney’s oath of allegiance was clear: “If any may wish to attack or hostilely invade the land of Hjaltland [Shetland], we promise and oblige to defend the lands named.”
Irresistible North Page 8
