“I, Pietro Querini from Venice, have promised myself to write down exactly, for the memory of posterity, the adversities that have befallen me and the places where they have happened to me according to the dispositions of the wheel of fate. You must know that driven by the desire to acquire honor and riches, I invested my belongings to set up a ship for a trip to Flanders. On April 25, 1431, I left Crete for this journey, which turned out to be very bitter and full of misfortunes.
My state of mind was sad for the loss of my son, and full of pain, as if it were already a premonition of the many and unbearable misfortunes that would come. Pietro Querini was a Venetian Patrician in the 15th century, a member of the powerful Querini family, and a member by right of Serenissima’s Great Council. He was Lord on the Island of Candia (Crete) and owned the fiefs of Castel di Termini and Dfnes, famous for the production of Malvasia Wine, which he traded especially with Fiandre. Bound for Bruges in Flanders in 1431, his merchant ship encountered a terrible storm off the western coast of France. The storm ravaged the ship, and the sailors had to take to lifeboats.
They fought the storm and cold for weeks. Many men drowned or died of starvation and fatigue. Left to their fates, they drifted on the Gulf Stream far across the North Sea. Just after the new year, in January 1432, the survivors were stranded on an island amid the skerries near Røst in Lofoten. Only eleven men, out of a crew that totaled 68, survived. They were found by local fishermen after nearly a month of being stranded on the island of Røst. The inhabitants of Røst welcomed them and shared everything they owned with the survivors. Spending more than three months on the island, Querini and the rest of the crew learned the customs and traditions, which allowed for the exchange of valuable cultural heritage between the two cultures.
On the fourteenth of May, the shipwrecked sailors left to return home with sixty stockfish donated by the Norwegian community. They traveled via Trondheim and then on to Sweden, where they stopped first in Vadstena and then in Gӧtemborg. From this port, two ships left, one for Rostock, Germany, in which Cristofalo Fioravante, Nicolò de Michiel, and the cook Girardo da Lion embarked, and one bound for England, with which Pietro Querini and seven other sailors set sail. The survivors of the first ship landed in the German Hanseatic city, where they joined a group of pilgrims on their way to Rome. Passing through German lands, they reached Venice on twelve October 1432. The second boat reached King’s Lynn on the twenty-second of September.
There Querini and the others traveled along the river routes to Cambridge and finally to London. From London, they arrived in Basel, Switzerland. Finally, on the twenty-fifth of January 1433, Pietro Querini returned to the Most Serene Republic of Venice, where he drew up an account of his journey to present to the Doge. There are two separate reports of that extraordinary adventure, one by Pietro Querini, kept in two manuscript copies in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, the other by the two surviving ship’s officers, Cristoforo Fioravanti and Nicolò di Michiel, kept in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, collected and written by the Florentine humanist Antonio di Corrado de Cardini.
Interesting echoes of Querini’s epic are also evident in the nautical charts of the time, such as in Andrea Bianco’s Atlas, 1436, which indicates ‘stockfish’ in the Lofoten area, and in the famous world map by Fra’ Mauro (1457-1459), who writes: ‘Questa provincia di Norvegia scores mister Piero Querino come e noto’, en: ‘This province of Norway there was Piero Querino as and known.’ In my prayers, I asked the Lord for the grace to return home healthy and to find my loved ones in good health. And so it happened. Let us therefore praise and glory to our Lord in sechula sechulorum. Amen.”
For the quotes: Il naufragio della Querina by Paolo Nelli