The professor brandished a tattered and dusty pamphlet in the air. ‘This pamphlet, Omnium Temporum et Annorum Series ex Sacris Bibliis, was published in Lemgo about ten years before Itinerarium and it is a treatise that eruditely challenges conventional Lutheran dogma. The man who was able to elucidate and present a reasoned and logical criticism of the prevailing Church was not a man who would err in presenting his map. He would have had access to other maps, which clearly showed the correct shape of Italy and included Madagascar. Look at the other major maps he created. When he wants them to be fanciful, he uses cloverleaves and mythical winged horses for continents. He has been deliberate in his choices. There is no doubt in my mind that he knew exactly what he was doing when he published Itinerarium and created his World Map.’
‘Knew what he was doing?’ said Nick. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Nicholas, I have spent my whole life examining and re-examining ancient documents and have considerable experience in comparative analysis, particularly in the classical High German period. Simply put, when I compare Bunting’s earlier style to his later style, there is a marked difference.’
‘Well, does that matter?’
‘Absolutely it matters. Let me explain: his use of descriptive language in Itinerarium is interesting. He uses an unusual style to describe places and events, certainly not typical of scholars of this period and dissimilar to his earlier works. For instance, he says on page 320 about Ethiopia:
This country stands beyond Egypt, 800 miles from Jerusalem towards the south, where the sun is so extremely hot that it turns the complexions of the inhabitants to blackness and all go about naked apart from their privy parts which they cover with either silk, cotton or more softly matter. Here the land is marvellously scorched and turned in many places to sand and dust so that the country is thereby wonderfully barren. Here breed a great abundance of dragons and cruel beasts.’
‘Well, what’s unusual about that?’ asked Nick impatiently. ‘Ethiopians are black, they don’t wear very much, it’s bloody hot and the land is mostly scrub and desert!’
‘All true, except for the bit about the dragons and cruel beasts, and this is most important. You see, he displays an unerring eye for correct detail and then oddly throws in a line about dragons, which he would know was pure fantasy. This is typical of the pages I have read so far: accuracy followed by fantasy.’
‘Why would he do that, Dad?’ asked Verity.
The professor rubbed his hand over his chin a number of times before speaking. ‘I really don’t know. Writers of this period are normally out and out fantasists or scholars relating facts, not a mixture of the two. By reading the original German script in Itinerarium and the other tracts, there is no doubt that Pastor Bunting was a well-informed and educated man. He was most definitely not the provincial and ignorant lay preacher portrayed by his detractors. I have a hunch he was trying to tell us something, or should I say, is trying to tell us something.’
‘Hold on a second,’ Verity interrupted. ‘He is clearly making some point with his representation of Europe as a queen or ruler, however, he was not the only mapmaker of the sixteenth century to do this. I can’t imagine they were all hiding secret messages in their maps.’
She then turned to Nick. ‘I am not sure if you are aware of this Nick, but it was not unusual for map makers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to have hidden messages, usually in the decorative cartouches surrounding the actual maps. These usually represented political comments of the time and were often highlighted by featuring the face of one or more of the protagonists within the cartouches.’
‘Are you telling me,’ asked Nick, incredulous, ‘that Heinrich Bunting, a provincial priest from a small German town who died over four hundred years ago, may have left some secret message in his writings and maps?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Yes, definitely!’
Verity and Julius spoke at the same time. There was a pregnant silence as they looked at each other.
‘Well, I have found a poem,’ said Nick, trying to ease the tension that had suddenly developed, ‘and it’s about Heinrich Bunting!’
Both Julius and Verity turned towards him. ‘A poem, Nick? You must be joking.’ Verity smiled as she said this.
‘No joke. It’s called “The Mapmaker and the Map” and it’s by Mary Hofstrand Cornish. I’ll read it to you. Nick coughed a couple of times to clear his throat, suddenly aware the poem was longer than he had first thought.
It’s 1581 in Magdeburg:
Cobbled streets, carts
That go to market early.
There are latitudes, no longitudes yet.
But nobody knows or cares.
Everyone leaves for home
With onions or a pig’s head.
Wooden shutters open
On the market square, and a man
Looks from the window.
North, South, East, West:
By now they all exist. Wars
Have come out of them and been
Forgotten. Boats have disappeared
Plague-winds blown from the south.
Movable type is moving
But a human hand still measures
A horse’s height.
The ruler’s been invented,
Its twelve inches based on the length
Of an emperor, still-born.
So when the man at the window
Draws a map of the world, it maps
The man himself. In this one,
Continents form a flower
With three petals:
Europa, Asia, Africa.
England’s far off, floating.
America’s a quick sketch at one corner
Of the print. Even Deutchland’s vague.
But at the centre of the bloom,
Jerusalem is drawn with tiny spires
And a gate to welcome Heinrich
Bunting, mapmaker, theologian,
Standing at the window
Of his own geography.
Offshore there’s a boat.
Mermaids, monsters
Rise out of the waves.
And because the eye
Is always searching
For a human form, on the boat
He’s put a small man-face
Between the ship’s ropes, barely
Visible – looking back.
‘Can you see the small man between the ship’s ropes, Dad?’
‘No, I can’t see anything,’ said Julius, peering over the World Map with the magnifying glass.
‘Hold on a second,’ said Nick. ‘It’s not the World Map she was referring to, it’s Bunting’s fanciful three petals map!’
Julius carefully turned the pages of the ancient book until he came to the odd map referred to by the poet. The other two remained silent as he studied the sailing ship carefully. ‘There he is,’ said Julius at last. ‘How perfectly strange.’
Both Nick and Verity made a grab for the magnifying glass before Nick’s good manners prevailed. ‘You first, Verity,’ he offered.
Five minutes later they had all studied the little traveller peering through the rigging, staring back at Europe, while the ship headed towards the New World.
‘I am amazed that anybody would notice such a small, faint figure,’ said Verity. ‘Mary Cornish must be a very observant person.’
‘I’m not sure what the significance is,’ said Julius, ‘but it does confirm what I have been saying. There is more to our friend Heinrich Bunting than meets the eye.’
16
‘So, Nick,’ Verity said, the cold air condensing her breath as the three of them hurried back to Julius’s office through Radcliffe Square. ‘There’s conjecture that the Portuguese visited the shores of western Australia, well before any other Europeans. They had settled in Timor before 1520, using it as a trading base to the Spice Islands. Timor is only 285 miles from the northern shores of western Australia. It is inconceivable that this incredible seafaring
nation, who had travelled around the world in their caravels, would not explore the surrounding seas over the next ninety years prior to the arrival of the Dutch in 1606.’
Nick and Julius listened intently as Verity warmed to her subject. ‘They had a zeal for exploration and discovery and a desire to bring riches back to Portugal. Any reasonable person would assume that the short distance to the Australian coastline would have been made on numerous occasions.’
‘Correct,’ joined in Julius. ‘Many other seafarers made use of Timor for rest and recreation and to replenish their supplies over the next three centuries. Dampier, the Englishman, stopped there in 1696 and made a seemingly casual decision to take a short trip over to western Australia. Captain Bligh made it to Timor, in an open boat, after his crew mutinied off eastern Australia. Freycinet and Flinders both called in. In fact, Captain George Grey used Timor to replenish his supplies when he was starting his famous exploration of the Kimberley district in north-western Australia in 1838. This distance of under three hundred miles was not considered a great deal, even in the times of sailing boats and less sophistication.’
‘All right, that makes sense,’ said Nick, ‘but if they did journey to Australia, where are the maps?’
‘Well,’ said Verity, ‘that’s a question which has confounded experts for generations and has caused great controversy. The publication of maps was a secret business for the Portuguese. Their explorers had discovered sea routes to previously unknown and unexplored parts of the world, including the lucrative Spice Islands. The exotic spices found there had become a massive earner for Portugal by the mid 1500s and it was imperative to keep this information secret. The Portuguese King, Henry the Navigator, had established a central authority for managing all aspects of overseas trade. This was called the Casa da India and was so important that its offices were in the Ribeira Palace in Lisbon. Its purpose was to collate all new discoveries made by the intrepid explorers and to provide the pilot maps for future explorations.’
‘I can see it made commercial sense to keep this information secret, but I imagine it was very difficult,’ said Nick.
‘Exactly, and this was the problem,’ continued Verity. ‘The most famous of these secret and collated maps was the Padrao Real. This was the master world map with all the new and secret discoveries made by the Portuguese. To the horror of the Portuguese, a copy of this valuable map turned up in Italy in 1502. It had been provided by an Italian trader sent to Lisbon by the Duke of Ferrara, with the specific brief to spy on the Portuguese and to steal their prized information. This he did by bribing a mapmaker at the Casa da India to make a copy of the map.’
‘Things don’t change,’ said Nick. ‘The same things still happen today.’
‘Absolutely. Afterwards, there was a complete shutdown of information. Watertight systems were put into place to prevent any further leakage of secrets. From then on, this information was consolidated in the hands of very few trusted people, mostly from the royal family. Furthermore, everybody who worked in the Casa da India had to be vetted first and was under the threat of death for revealing the secrets held within the palace walls.’
‘So I see what you are getting at,’ said Nick, ‘hence the lack of information today.’
‘That’s right. This is not to say that snippets of information did not filter out, through sailors talking in ports around the world and the odd map turning up, but the overall picture stayed secret. However, any hope of modern historians discovering their maps was extinguished in the great earthquake in Lisbon in 1755. This earthquake, which was about nine on the Richter scale, and the subsequent tsunami and fires that raged for five days, destroyed over eighty per cent of the city. It killed over 20,000 people. It was a major human catastrophe. The royal archives were completely destroyed, together with detailed historical records of explorations by Vasco da Gama and all the other early navigators, including those who travelled to Timor. Since there were no copies due to the secrecy surrounding the maps, the information was lost to history forever.’
As Nick, Verity and Julius passed through the dark shadows of the Church of St Mary The Virgin and into the streetlights of High and Oriel Street junction, they were deep in conversation. Only the occupants of a black Mercedes parked on the south corner of the junction took any notice of the three as they went through the Gothic arched entrance that led up to Julius’s rooms.
‘Dear Lord!’ exclaimed Julius, as he pushed the door open.
If Nick had thought the room was messy before they left, it paled compared to what he saw now. Every book and file had been violently flung from their shelves and were strewn around the floor; empty drawers from the filing cabinets lay astride the jumbled, printed mess. Even Julius’s old couch had not been spared, its upholstery shredded, the foam and fabric spilling out like a gutted fish.
‘My God!’ stuttered Nick. ‘What a bloody mess!’
Julius stepped through the door, eyes flicking everywhere. He frantically started gathering up loose sheets of paper, searching for matching files, stumbling over books and documents in his blind panic.
‘Dad, stop a second,’ said Verity, noticing the way her father was behaving. ‘Let’s clear all the desks first of all to make some space, then we can slowly reorganise everything.’
Julius didn’t seem to hear his daughter for a few seconds and continued to stagger over the mess, then slowly he came to a halt, as if defeated by the task. ‘I can’t understand why anybody would do this,’ he said sadly. ‘Were they looking for money?
‘I don’t understand it either, Dad, but I don’t think it’s about money. Whoever did this was searching for something specific.’
‘What? You think the Bunting stuff?’ Nick could hardly believe that. ‘But … but how would anyone know I was here? The only other person apart from you who knew I was coming up to Oxford was Bronte.’ Suddenly a frightening possibility occurred to Nick. ‘I’ve got to call to make sure she’s okay.’
‘Someone may have followed you,’ offered Verity as she began replacing books on a shelf.
Nick dialled numbers and listened. Then he dialled more numbers. He waited. ‘Christ!’ he said at last, obviously frustrated. ‘I can’t get her on any of her numbers!’ He stabbed at his phone, eking out a text message. ‘I’d better get back to London to check on her!’
‘Good idea,’ agreed Julius, now recovering from the initial shock and following his daughter’s organisational lead. ‘Verity, why don’t you go with Nicholas? I’ll have this place shipshape in half an hour anyway and I think Nicholas could do with the company. I’ll continue to read Itinerarium and see what else I can glean.’
‘If that’s okay with you, Nick,’ said Verity, ‘I can explain the different theories of Portuguese discovery of Australia fifty years before the Dutch.’
‘Great, I look forward to it,’ Nick said quickly, pleased to have such beautiful company, ‘but more importantly you can keep an eye out for speed cameras!’
17
The four travellers had passed through Helmstedt and Braunschweig, crossing the River Innerste at Hildesheim. It was only a half-day’s walk to the great River Weser and the town of Hamelin. The unseasonal absence of rain had made sleeping arrangements cheap and easy, crowded into wayfarer inns or nearby barns with fellow travellers. Most nights the stars were visible through the roofs of these rough-and-ready hostels. Jakob, who was well aware of Germanic law that disallowed Jews from sheltering overnight in any Christian towns or villages, had been conscious of hostile stares from the other patrons.
‘Does my very visage confirm my difference to them?’ Jakob whispered to the priest.
‘You are imagining it,’ Bunting assured him. ‘They are more concerned with achieving the best position for their knapsacks than your ethnicity. And anyway, while you are travelling as my servant, it is my rights that prevail.’
They had noticed some riders in the distance. A murmur had travelled along the route that these were Prince Otto’s men look
ing to raise some extra taxes from wayfarers.
‘Hold fast there, Priest!’ commanded a knight, skilfully manoeuvring his horse in front of them and blocking their passage.
The knight sat tall, silent and proud, staring long and hard at the group. His men gathered in behind him, their horses snorting in the cold morning air.
Cornelis, walking ahead, turned back and pushed through the riders to rejoin his father. On each side of the silent confrontation other travellers hurried by, their heads lowered, not wanting to attract attention and relieved it was not them.
The knight’s eyes roamed over the four. Bunting unconsciously kneaded his cross. Jakob’s eyes were lowered to the road, while Cornelis and Amir’s attention was taken by a bloodied and moaning body tied across one of the rider’s mounts.
Bunting knew it was not his place to speak first and waited for the knight to address them. When he finally spoke, it was to his men.
‘Well, well, gentlemen, what do we have here? Am I to believe what I see?’ The riders leaned forward in their saddles and began to chuckle. Their reins were held loosely as their steeds pawed the ground. ‘It is my impression we have a priest, two Jews and a heathen in this pretty party. This is like the joke the jester tells at the Prince’s Court. Am I wrong, gentlemen?’
At this, the riders’ chuckles turned into guffaws of agreement.
‘What am I to make of this on the Prince’s highway?’ the knight continued.
Now Bunting spoke. ‘Sir, we are simple travellers joined in our desire to journey to Antwerp.’
‘Antwerp is Godforsaken and controlled by Jews,’ said the knight harshly, nodding his head at Jakob. ‘Perhaps he is taking you and the heathen to sell to his brethren for thirty gold pieces.’
The riders continued to laugh at their leader’s fine joke. But Bunting would not be rebuffed.
‘Sir,’ he continued, ‘we have been sent on a quest by his Holiness. We travel from Magdeburg to Antwerp. The boy is my servant and Herr de Jode and his son are in my employ.’ Bunting hoped the knight would not question which ‘Holiness’ he was talking about and just assume he was referring to an archbishop.
The Bunting Quest Page 8
