Recently we have begun to discuss future directions for The Cabinet, but at the same time an interest has also grown in investigating its past. Not just its more obvious recent past, but also its partially hidden deep past.
There are a number of threads that could be picked up in this investigation. For one thing, the house which hosts The Cabinet was, immediately prior to me, owned by an Irishman who had a stated fondness for Irish whiskey and who was politically well connected and known to have gatherings here where those connections and that fondness intersected.
Going to the opposite end of the historical continuum, right to the beginning, it is interesting that this property sits at an important ford over the Assiniboine River. Directly across the river from us is St James Anglican, the oldest wooden church in Western Canada, and an old Red River oxcart track cuts through our yard and runs down to that ford. Centuries before the Mid-Continental Trade Corridor that the Government of Manitoba is currently touting, this ford sat at the heart of an indigenous trade route running from the subarctic to the subtropics. Archeologists have determined that among the trade goods traveling north were clay jars of "pulque", the highly alcoholic fermented agave beverage favoured in Mesoamerica. This did not travel particularly well so we can only imagine the wretched swill it became by the time it arrived here, but there is evidence of ritual pulque use right on this site. This is, however, a topic that will be explored in more depth in a future post as I have quite exciting news that I wish to share now and that prompted me to write this post in the first place.
I am originally from Germany and my entire extended family still lives there. Recently a cousin of mine who is a geographer by profession was digging around the Jever Stadtarchiv in the far northwest corner of Germany. She noticed that some of the 15th century maps were misfiled and asked the head archivist to help her find the one regarding the early drainage canal networks that she was searching for. She describes him as looking exactly like what Andy Warhol would have looked like if he had lived to be 80. This mop haired old man fished around for some keys and led her to a back room where storage boxes of unfiled maps and documents were kept. Apparently funding cutbacks had put a major re-organisation project on hold in mid-stream many years ago and Jever was such a backwater that his appeals for help went unanswered.
In any case, after a long morning of going through these boxes my cousin found what she was looking for and then, immediately after, also found this:
Incredibly, she had in her hands a copy of the famous Vinland Map! The original Vinland Map now resides at Yale University and has been dated to about 1445. It is reputed to be the first map to show the North American continent and, controversially, it does so a half century prior to Columbus. It was drawn with information from the Norse voyages that occurred around 1000 AD. It made sense that a copy would find its way to Jever as that region of Germany was, and is, closely tied to North Atlantic seafaring. My cousin sent me a digital copy of this map though because of an important difference with the original Vinland Map at Yale. This version of the map shows two intersecting rivers, a lake and some writing at the western edge of North America. Those rivers and that lake closely resemble the Assiniboine, the Red and Lake Winnipeg. And the word is clearly "brennivin"...
There are a number of threads that could be picked up in this investigation. For one thing, the house which hosts The Cabinet was, immediately prior to me, owned by an Irishman who had a stated fondness for Irish whiskey and who was politically well connected and known to have gatherings here where those connections and that fondness intersected.
Going to the opposite end of the historical continuum, right to the beginning, it is interesting that this property sits at an important ford over the Assiniboine River. Directly across the river from us is St James Anglican, the oldest wooden church in Western Canada, and an old Red River oxcart track cuts through our yard and runs down to that ford. Centuries before the Mid-Continental Trade Corridor that the Government of Manitoba is currently touting, this ford sat at the heart of an indigenous trade route running from the subarctic to the subtropics. Archeologists have determined that among the trade goods traveling north were clay jars of "pulque", the highly alcoholic fermented agave beverage favoured in Mesoamerica. This did not travel particularly well so we can only imagine the wretched swill it became by the time it arrived here, but there is evidence of ritual pulque use right on this site. This is, however, a topic that will be explored in more depth in a future post as I have quite exciting news that I wish to share now and that prompted me to write this post in the first place.I am originally from Germany and my entire extended family still lives there. Recently a cousin of mine who is a geographer by profession was digging around the Jever Stadtarchiv in the far northwest corner of Germany. She noticed that some of the 15th century maps were misfiled and asked the head archivist to help her find the one regarding the early drainage canal networks that she was searching for. She describes him as looking exactly like what Andy Warhol would have looked like if he had lived to be 80. This mop haired old man fished around for some keys and led her to a back room where storage boxes of unfiled maps and documents were kept. Apparently funding cutbacks had put a major re-organisation project on hold in mid-stream many years ago and Jever was such a backwater that his appeals for help went unanswered.
In any case, after a long morning of going through these boxes my cousin found what she was looking for and then, immediately after, also found this:
Incredibly, she had in her hands a copy of the famous Vinland Map! The original Vinland Map now resides at Yale University and has been dated to about 1445. It is reputed to be the first map to show the North American continent and, controversially, it does so a half century prior to Columbus. It was drawn with information from the Norse voyages that occurred around 1000 AD. It made sense that a copy would find its way to Jever as that region of Germany was, and is, closely tied to North Atlantic seafaring. My cousin sent me a digital copy of this map though because of an important difference with the original Vinland Map at Yale. This version of the map shows two intersecting rivers, a lake and some writing at the western edge of North America. Those rivers and that lake closely resemble the Assiniboine, the Red and Lake Winnipeg. And the word is clearly "brennivin"...Brennivin is an Icelandic caraway flavoured liquor. As utterly astonishing as it seems, this map would appear to indicate that early Norse explorers penetrated deep into the continent and somehow made a connection between brennivin and this location. It looks like we may have discovered the founders of The Cabinet's antecedent. And this is just the beginning of the story. Just the beginning.
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