Prospero surveys his heaving storm with satisfaction. This noble magician then gathers gleaming cloak tight across frail shoulders. Exiled from a radiant city, he fetched up on these cold and distant shores years ago. At sea for nineteen rolling days and sparkling nights, he was glad at last to feel the solid earth beneath his feet. He knows how these poor creatures must now feel. He is proud of the awesome powers of his art, but sad that it must be used this way. Soon he will cause the roaring waters to still and the howling wind to quiet, but not before their job is done. On board there is confusion and fear. These timbers will surely splinter and fail, this canvas split and these ropes snap. The Venetian brothers in adventure, Nicolò and Antonio Zeno, have seen singing angels and rotten monsters, soaring palaces and sulphorous dungeons, but nothing to match this show of natural rage. In prayers they call to St. Clare, but the storm is deafening.
Two men more different than himself and Henry Sinclair, Prince of Orkney, it would be hard to find. Prospero immersed in the subtle arts of illusion, Prince Henry a master of battle and pillage. And yet their destinies were entwined. When cruelly left to the water’s mercy, Prospero’s faithful lieutenant had managed to secrete his master’s beloved books, his treasured paintings and other precious items aboard the castaway’s vessel. Policing his southern territories, Henry chanced upon these treasures installed in the magician’s secluded palace of mirrors. Unaccountably disarmed by a gentle influence he subdued his natural inclination to claim them for his own. Enthralled by the charming Italian, he engaged instead in conversation. Although his appetite for the subtler arts was limited, the Prince listened intently as Prospero discoursed eloquently on his prized volumes and priceless paintings. All the while, however, a part of Henry’s mind was directed elsewhere. As darkness began to fall the two men parted, promising to continue their conversation on the following day.
The sea is all spitting foam and smashing sheets. Soon it may be too late. Prospero hesitates. He has waited too long for this moment. He feels he is finally the master of history, the commander of fate.
Prince Henry sat before the blazing fire, deep in reflection. Surrounded by the spoils of his rapacious exploits, they now seemed heavy and pointless. Disturbed, he could not understand why Prospero had failed to acknowledge the map. The Prince’s pirate eyes had nonetheless memorized its every inlet and promontory as his host spoke of light and shade, of rhythm and rhyme. He rose to fetch parchment, ink and pen. But as his hand moved to trace the remembered lines other images entirely flowed onto the page. A vengeful goddess shielded her undressed body from the eyes of a surprised intruder. The agitated Prince took a fresh sheet. This time, to his dismay, a scene of Christ and the Adulteress emerged with graceful fluency. For a third time he bent his concentration to coastlines and contours, only to witness a naked Venus rise modestly from the frothy sea.
Despite the majestic appearance of his new acquaintance, the Scottish Prince was unaware of Prospero’s own noble standing. (He was, at this early stage of their friendship, unaware of most things pertaining to the mysterious foreigner.) But in former times the enigmatic Italian had been the revered and respected Duke of Venice. His devotion to the arts, however, drew him away from the affairs of state and into the private seclusion of his study. To his brother he entrusted his civic authority and such, unfortunately, is the way of these things that before too long the brother’s taste for power led him to treachery. Aided by the conspiratorial Doge, Andrea Contarini, Alonso usurped his otherworldly brother, forcing his destiny into the slippery hands of the fathom-filled deep. And now, these many years after, the winds of fate will force him to decide.
The boat is beached high above the tide-line, its settling timbers creaking in the pale late morning sun. One by one its occupants wake, drowsy and bewildered. Nicolò is the first to step on to dry land, followed by his brother Antonio. Exploration and navigation are in their blood, but they have no idea where they are at this moment. Prospero observes their perplexity from his hidden vantage point. Now is the time. Obeying his command, the waters abate, the wind subsides. As from this moment the storm will lie beyond every man’s recollection. This episode would connect the past to the future, but remain itself forgotten. He will approach them tomorrow. The Prince is preparing the deal in his mind. He will present it to the beguiling stranger when they meet in the palace of mirrors this afternoon.
Nicolò and Antonio are deep in conversation over their charts. Tonight they will look to the stars to gain their position.
The map is exactly how Henry remembered it from yesterday. He has never seen colours of such intense brilliance. Prospero’s learned conversation turns to the philosophical art of geometry. Henry has never seen forms of such staggering complexity. From Euclid to Virgil, Prospero’s earnest discourse continues. Henry has never witnessed such a blissful scene of pastoral harmony. And as the noble Italian passes on to Plato, the Prince realizes that never before has he experienced the exquisite beauty of the invisible. He must speak now—now whilst its four edges are still able to contain the ever expanding cosmos.
Despite his impassive expression, Prospero is greatly stirred within. He is tremulous before the magnitude of such events as these. This earth always stretches beyond its bounding horizon, distance constantly replenishing itself. It is full of unknown and unvisited places. The tasks of the cartographers, the botanists, fabulists, the landscapists and the portraitists are interminable. And the earth itself is but a speck in the divine firmament. That chance and his art should converge at this point seemed more than possible. The storm he had conjured into the world from the depths of his arcane knowledge might realign time and space. These innocent travellers, these passing Venetian seafarers, would serve to reunite him with his stolen past, help reinstate him in his former position. But first, this unexpected offer from the Scottish Prince must be followed to its conclusion.
They watched him suspiciously as he approached, but greeted him with warmth as he spoke in their tongue and offered them food and drink. They had been bound for the legendary islands known as Estotilanda, Engrouelanda and Drogeo when the furious tempest drove them onto this land. They were explorers, they said, and builders, and traders, and opportunists. They listened with seriousness to his proposal, accepted his terms without hesitation and bade him farewell until tomorrow. Then they celebrated without restraint until, one by one, they began to think about what it might mean. Now that the map was in his possession, Prince Henry never left the isolated security of his bleak refuge. His servants would keep the fire blazing in the hearth, bring him his food and clear away his waste, but he never stirred from the heavy oak chair in front of his treasure. Talking among themselves in the stone-floored kitchen, the servants could not understand their master’s obsession with his tattered sheet and its maze of crudely inked lines. If told of its secret price, they would not have believed.
The tales of Prospero’s journeys with the Zeno brothers over the following years are legion. Had any of them known what lay in store, they might never have set forth. But the glinting promise drove them on. Passing through this rough and sometimes bitter land, they occasionally found pleasant spots to settle for a while. At these times Prospero and his fellow Venetians would talk fondly for hours about their distant home and melancholy would grow in their hearts. To save them from this despondency they would often bring out one of the exquisite carpets they carried with them for trading. Gazing into the carpet’s intricately woven patterns, each in turn would use its labyrinthine lines and jewel-like colours as inspiration for a fanciful story. In the mind’s eye of one this would lead to battles and far-flung empires, for another it would bring forth love and betrayal.
The carpets became, for these homesick wanderers, gateways to the marvelous and the infinite. It was during one of these periods of rest, when the carpets were exciting the spirits of the men, that Prospero decided to honour their powers of distraction. He had not deployed his magician’s art since commanding the storm that had originally shipwrecked those who were now his companions, but time and place now looped themselves into another knot of necessity. Closing his eyes and concentrating all his energies into a single image, he projected the magnificent edifice from his mind into the world. Opening his eyes after this tremendous effort, he was as astonished as his fellows. Shining in red, white, green, blue and gold was an approximate version of the Doges’ Palace. It was the first time that any of the adventurers had seen him laugh, but even the solemn Prospero could not contain himself. The thought of his beloved city still shaped even his fantasies.
In exchange for the map, Prospero had received cryptic clues in an unknown script. But even the Duke’s capacious learning was not enough to unlock the mystery. He only knew, as did the Prince, that the Grail was itself a form of unintelligibility. And yet years of constant attack on the puzzle had finally led him and his faithful followers to this place. Impelled by irresistible forces beyond the control of knowledge, he sensed it was close at hand. The walls of this stronghold of the Knights Templar were massive and dull, pierced only by slits of window. Prospero entered alone, his slow footsteps echoing to the vaulting roof. How starved of light, he must have thought, this exile from a luminous city. To the flickering blaze of the fire he was blind. He only saw the heavy chair in silhouette. St. Clair rose slowly and took the map from its place on the wall. The flames leaped and roared as they devoured the brittle parchment. Henry turned and spoke:
…These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind: we are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep…
William Leiper’s Templeton carpet factory was built beside Glasgow Green in 1888. Externally, it is a replica of the Doges’ Palace in Venice.
Titian’s Diana Surprised by Actaeon and Venus Anadyomene (Venus Emerging from the Sea) are in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. Christ and the Adulteress (attributed to Giorgione) is in Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow.
The Sinclairs, originally Saint Clairs, were Normans who had come to England as part of William the Conqueror’s invading army. They were present at the battle of Hastings in 1066. Sir Henry Sinclair was a trusted friend of Robert the Bruce; he had fought at Bannockburn with him. Sir Henry’s son, William, was en route to the Holy Land to bury the heart of the Bruce when he died while fighting a skirmish with Moors in Spain. Young Henry Sinclair, born in 1345, was only 13 when his father died in battle; he thus became Lord Henry Sinclair Lord of Rosslyn at a very early age. He was named after an ancestor, Henry de Saint-Clair, who was with Godfroi de Bouillon when Jerusalem was wrested from the Saracens. More than a few of the Sinclairs, on both sides of the English Channel, were Templars. Henry was a Renaissance man living in the Middle Ages. In addition to being trained in military matters, he was highly educated, speaking both French and Latin. At the age of 24 he was made Earl of Orkney and Lord of Shetland by Hakon VI King of Norway; in fact, this is how he received his princely title. He was thus a vassal to the Kings of Scotland and Norway. Sinclair made the acquaintance of Nicolò Zeno who was shipwrecked on the Faroe Islands, which were part of his dominion. In fact, he had literally saved the lives of Zeno and his crew from the local populace. Nicolò’s brother Carlo, the ‘The Lion of Venice’, was a well-known figure—he was in fact the greatest admiral of his time. Sinclair made Carlo the admiral of his fleet. Sinclair’s desire was to rule the Northern Seas, and Zeno went about exploring for him. Zeno made a survey map of Greenland in 1393; this map would be the most accurate map of this area of the world until 1550 [from www.tsj.org/sancto.htm].
It has been claimed that a member of the Sinclair family (perhaps Prince Henry) travelled to Nova Scotia with the Venetian navigators Nicolò and Antonio Zeno in 1398. Primary evidence for this claim is provided by the Zeno Narrative, published in Venice by one of Nicolò’s ancestors in 1558, and the Zeno Map, purporting to be the earliest map of the coastline of Nova Scotia. Additional evidence offered by supporters of this claim include the remains in Rhode Island of the Newport Tower constructed in a similar style to the Norse/Scottish buildings of the Western and Northern Isles. The Zeno Narrative also describes a landscape very like that of Louisburg, Cape Breton Island, where an ancient cannon was discovered in 1849. This cannon is virtually identical to a 14th century Venetian cannon now in the Naval Museum at the Arsenale in Venice and the implication is that it could only have come from there, as no one else made guns like that. The Sinclair family was based to the south of Edinburgh in Rosslyn and is reputed to have had connections with the Knights Templar. Some believe that the Holy Grail rests in Rosslyn Chapel, others that it is to be found at Sinclair’s purported settlement in Oak Island, Nova Scotia.
St. Clare (cf. Sinclair) founded the Order of Poor Ladies (Poor Clares). Toward the end of her life, when she was too ill to attend Mass, an image of the service would display on the wall of her cell; thus her patronage of television.
Shakespeare’s Prospero (in The Tempest) was the Duke of Milan.
Giorgione’s The Tempest is in the Accademia, Venice.