Vinland Viking Map or Million Dollar Hoax

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History Documentary hosted by Roy Marsden and published by Channel 4 in 2004 - English narration

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Image:Vinland-Viking-Map-or-Million-Dollar-Hoax-Cover.jpg

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Vinland: Viking Map or Million Dollar Hoax investigates the strange story of the Vinland Map, arguably the world's most controversial document.

If the document is genuine, it is worth a fortune - at least $20 million. But it may be an almost worthless fake.

The map apparently shows the known world in about 1440, nearly half a century before Columbus's famous voyage. Yet it seems to depict the east coast of America, in the form of an island named 'Vinland'. And a few lines of text make an extraordinary claim: that Viking adventurers had reached the New World as early as 1000AD. The Vinland Map seemed to have been drawn from the information they had brought back from these epic journeys.

The program tells the story of how the Vinland Map came to be bought - for a sum thought to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars - by one of America's most prestigious universities soon after it first appeared on the international market in the 1950s. Yale persuaded Paul Mellon, a billionaire philanthropist and one of the university's most generous benefactors, to pay for it, and the purchase was announced to a fascinated world in 1965.

The news was accompanied by a lavish book, in which experts explained not only the importance of the map but also why they thought it was genuine. But cries of 'fake' went up almost immediately from cartographers and historians. The argument has continued fiercely ever since.

The program follows a story which contains all the elements of a gripping thriller, featuring secretive European and American book dealers, scientists working at the cutting edge of forensics and, of course, the Viking seafarers. The detective story, which begins in Switzerland in 1957, leads to the halls of the British Museum in London, to the university towns of East Coast America and the laboratories of the Space Age, before returning to Europe, where Spanish book dealers, in particular, were involved in the chain of hush-hush deals that brought the Vinland Map to the world's attention.

Vinland Map: Viking Map or Million Dollar Hoax embarks upon an untold detective story to reveal the truth about this extraordinary document.

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Image: Vinland-Viking-Map-or-Million-Dollar-Hoax-Screen0.jpg

[edit] Technical Specs

Video Codec: XviD MPEG-4 codec
Video Bitrate: 1880 KB/s
Video Aspect Ratio: 1.79:1
Video Resolution: 688 x 384
Audio Codec: FAST Multimedia AG DVM (Dolby AC3)
Audio BitRate: 384 KB/s (CBR)
Audio Channels: 2 Ch
RunTime: 00:46
Framerate: 25 FPS
Number Of Parts: 1
Part Size: 744 MB
Ripped by gavin63
Subtitles: NO TV Rip
Source: DVB

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