Since 1317, the Venetian Republic run an annual sailing route that linked Venice to Bruges. The route was rather insecure because of the Atlantic storms, much harsher than the Mediterranean ones. The Venetian Piero Querini, in May 1431, while sailing to Flandreau, met a series of terrible squalls that dragged him towards North Ireland and Scotland and from there to the northern coasts of Norway, finally shipwrecking on the uninhabited cliff of Sando. Some local anglers rescued him after ten days, and so the survivors could reach Trondheim and therefore begin their long return home.

An analogous event had taken place, some fifty years before, to the Venetian Niccolò Zen. Zen left Venice for Fiandra in the spring of 1383, but a particularly violent squall off the coast of the Channel dragged him northwards, letting him shipwrecking on one of the islands of the Faeroese archipelago. The survivors of the shipwreck were given help by Henry Sinclair, Baron of Roslyn, a vassal of the Reign of Norway and feudal lord of the Orkney Islands (on the northern peak of Scotland).

Sinclair was then fighting to conquer the Faeroes, and found it extremely difficult to sail among the islands, for the presence of shallows, cliffs and narrow passages. Zen immediately put the sailing ability of the Venetians at his saviour’s disposal, and therefore he could boast his superior technical experience and skill. The Baron awarded Niccolò Zen with various honours, who wrote to his brother Antonio, inviting him to those faraway islands. Niccolò Zen was designated head of the fleet, and later participated to another war to submit, in the name of the Norwegian King, the Shetland archipelago. Subsequently, in July 1387, Niccolò, willing to discover new places, ventured on the sea with three little ships, thus reaching the southern Icelandic coast, near today’s Cape Portland (this was a shore full of ships during the summer, but completely frozen during the winter). Niccolò Zen could there visit a Dominican monastery – marked on the most ancient maps -, where the inhabitants made use of the warm sulphuring streams to heat their houses (to this day, Iceland displays an incredible number of secondary volcanic phenomena). The important reports transmitted by Zen about the Icelandic population, about the economy and the typical round houses of the island, are the first ones to arrive from that faraway country to Central Europe, and must be considered extraordinary. In the autumn of the same year, Niccolò returned to his country.

At the Faeroes, Antonio Zen then replaced Niccolò. In 1397, an angler returned home after twenty-six years of absence with astonishing reports, also showing objects to prove what he was saying, and all the sailors confirmed the exactness of his recounting.

The angler said he had been pushed westwards by a squall, together with his travel companions, and he shipwrecked on the Isle of Estotiland – from where one can spot New Scotland – and that he was lead by the inhabitants to a populous city.

• “The people living there are ingenuous, and practice all the arts that we practice, and he thinks that, in ancient times, they had trades with our people: because he says he has seen books in Latin in the library of the King that they are not able to understand. They have language and letters separated (i.e. the sound does not correspond to the letters of the alphabet); and they extract any kind of metal, and most of all they have an abundance of gold; and their trade is in Engroveland, where they get furs of sulphur and pitch; and southwards, he says, there is a place rich in gold and much populated. They sow wheat and produce beer, which is a kind of beverage used by Northern populations, as we drink wine. They have wood of incredible vastness, and build walls [...] they make canals and sail: but they do not have the magnet, neither they know the compass and the North.”

According to this evidence, it seems it is not the case of native Amerindian, while it is easily recognisable a Viking settlement (the beer, they have ships but do not use the compass, etc.), which had lost any contact from the original country. The mentioned books must have been a Bible and some liturgical work: once the priest, who had some rudiments of Latin, had died, those books could not be understood. It is also known that, in 12th century, Bishop Erik from Greenland visited the Viking Vinland (i.e. New Scotland).

The angler went on with his recounting saying that he and his companions were then sent southwards to the king, in Drogir (which in the north-western part of today’s Massachusetts), but, shipwrecked, they were made hostage by ferocious population who killed and ate most of them. The angler, together with a few others, succeeded in escaping that cruel death by teaching those people who to use nets, and therefore he ended up being contended by various tribes.

• “He says that country was incredibly vast, and almost a new world, but the people was rough and lacking of every richness, because they walk naked, although they suffer harsh cold temperatures, neither they know how to cover themselves with animal skins that they hunt. They do not have any sort of metal, live on hunting and bear wooden spears with sharp edges and bows, whose strings are made out of animal skin. Those populations are extremely ferocious, they fight mortally and eat each other; they have leaders and many different laws.
But, the more one moves towards South-East, one finds much more civilisation, because of the temperate air: this way, there are towns, temples to the gods – and they sacrifice men there, and then they eat them - having also here some notions about the use of gold and silver.”

The angler concluded relating how, many years later, he managed to escape, arriving in North Massachusetts, and from there returning to New Scotland and finally to native Faeroes.

Stunned by these reports, Baron Roslyn armed an expedition and entrusted it to the more skilled Antonio Zen. The ships, deranged by another squall, missed their route and eventually reached the Isle of Icaria (from where one can spot Terranova). However, because of the hostility shown by the inhabitants, Zen and his companions could only skirt partially around it, from White Bay, rounding Cape Saint-John to Cape Farvel.

Therefore, the Venetian Antonio Zen could not reach the island where – right one hundred years later – disembarked Giovanni Caboto.

The fleet went back to sea and was pushed northwards by the wind and the streams, reaching the southern peak on Greenland (today’s Cape Farvel) that the sailor named Trinity Promontory. It was June 2, 1398. Here they found an Eskimo population, on average not very tall and rather fearful. The area looked welcoming and the climate temperate. Baron Roslyn instructed Antonio Zen to take back to Faeroe those sailors who insisted on going back home, while he stayed to explore and colonize those resorts. Roslyn established a colony on the shore he had arrived at, and was able to draw a map of Greenland displaying a precision – especially in the southern regions – that would have remained unparalleled for a couple of centuries (if not more), marking place-names still recognisable to this day.

Roslyn died in 1402, shortly after having returned home, while fighting against a fleet of invaders on the Orkney Islands. Antonio, instead, died some days before returning to Venice.

The European settlement in Greenland – which was not the first, although the Vatican Archive retains reports and letters from the bishop of Gardar, a Greenlander village – lasted for various decades; then, once every contact with the motherland was lost, that settlement vanished, as it had already happened to previous settlements and for the Viking colonies in America. In this case, this must have happened because of a significant climatic revolution, probably due to a deviation of a ramification of the Gulf Stream. That land named “Greenland” (as Sinclair found it), became extremely cold, as it is still today, and Iceland, on the contrary, became temperate. It also appears that, in the first decades of the 15th century, Eskimo warrior tribes came down from the North, taking the place of the primitive local population and thus contributing to eliminate the colonists and everything about them.

The discovery made by Antonio Zen and Henry Sinclair was, therefore, a “lost discovery”: just like the one made by the Vikings, although there are some traces of it in the poetic sagas. The Serenissima (The Venetian Republic) was too concerned about losing the monopoly about the trade of spices to take any interest in those seas offering only fish products. Moreover, Venetian ships were not at all apt to transoceanic routes. The Zens, as Marco Polo and generally all Venetian travelling traders were keen on keeping those skills to their own environment.

The only recollections about the sailing made by Niccolò and Antonio Zen remain in some letters preserved in the family archive, letters remanaged and spread in the 1500 by a descendant when those discoveries were already outdated. Nevertheless, the historiographer cannot help noticing the extraordinary value of these reports about Iceland and Greenland at the end of the 14th century and the angler’s recounting holding the first account on America and the local populations. By the may, if Marco Polo had not been taken prisoner in Genoa after the fight at the Curzolari, when he dictated “The Million” to Rustichello from Pisa and had been killed, we would not know anything about the travelling of those traders, whose amazing results lead to expeditions in the country of spices. Besides, we know very little about the first expedition made by Giovanni Caboto.