Chapter 21: Nadia and Katrin

They worked together on three more projects after the Isla Velada publication. This was not the plan — the plan had been a single collaboration, the chart and the archive and the promontory. But the Isla Velada work had produced a methodology that was useful for other questions, and Katrin had questions and Nadia had the cartographic knowledge to help answer them. The collaboration operated at long distance — Katrin in Berlin, Nadia in Lisbon — with periods of joint work in archives, on research vessels, in the consultation rooms of institutions that held things waiting to be found. They argued about most things. This was the productive kind of argument: Katrin approached questions from the historical record, Nadia from the physical artifacts, and the disagreements between those approaches usually produced answers that neither would have reached alone. On the question of who had planted the chart at the Lisbon auction, they never fully agreed. Katrin's position: a member of an affiliated family who had known about the tower do Tombo letter and had decided, after centuries, that the time was right to trigger the find. Nadia's position: an institution — a university, a church, some body that had maintained the knowledge of the second location across generations and had finally found a descendant of the right lineage with the right profession. 'Both could be true,' Katrin said once. 'Both are probably true,' Nadia said. 'Does it matter?' Nadia thought about it. 'It matters for understanding what Maria built,' she said. 'She built something that survived four hundred years. Whether it survived through a family or an institution tells you something about what she trusted.' 'What do you think she trusted?' Nadia looked at her copy of the journal. 'Both,' she said.