Читать книгу Betrayed - Christopher Dinsdale - Страница 6

In 1496, a young boy named Nicolo was exploring the attic of his large Venetian home. Among the boxes and crates of his great-grandfather’s possessions, he found a large pile of papers with almost unintelligible scribbles and drawings covering page after page. Not impressed with this uninteresting use of paper, Nicolo decided to use some of the sheets for painting, while others he simply shredded to use as the stuffing in one of his many art projects.

Fifteen years later, Nicolo, now a father and husband, returned to the same attic and rediscovered the same manuscript. To his horror, he realized the significance of what he had nearly destroyed as a child. The series of papers were his great-grandfather’s detailed memoirs of his adventures with a mysterious northern prince. They described his voyages west, following the ancient Viking routes to a wild and beautiful land. According to the manuscripts, the voyages took place in the late 1300s, over a hundred years before Columbus sailed west and “discovered” the New World. He found a map detailing Greenland, Nova Scotia and the New England coast. What was missing, however, much to Nicolo’s anguish, was the reason why a northern prince and a Venetian navigator would make such a dangerous expedition to a land so far away from their home . . .