It may be the expression “piratæ,” which might be used both of an ordinary pirate and of a privateer or freebooter, which misled Olaus Magnus into constructing this wonderful story. The mere fact that, both in his map of 1539 and in his work of 1555, he makes Hvitserk, which of course was in Greenland, into a rocky island out at sea between Greenland and Iceland, where no island is to be found, is enough to shake one’s belief in the trustworthiness of this strange report. His incomprehensible story of the compass constructed there does not make things any better. G. Storm [1886, p. 395] thought it might have come about in this way: that Olaus Magnus, who was no great sailor or geographer, read on a chart a note about Pining’s voyage to Greenland, and saw in its proximity the name Hvitserk and a compass-card in the middle of the sea; and then, without understanding its real meaning, he made it an island and gave it his own explanation. Björnbo and Petersen [1909, pp. 250, 251] have, it is true, pointed out that something of the same sort is told of the North Cape by Sivert Grubbe, who accompanied Christian IV. on his voyage to Finmark, and who writes in his journal (in Latin) on May 12, 1599: “We sailed past the North Cape. On the top of this mountain is a compass cut into the rock.” But as they “sailed past,” Grubbe cannot have been up and seen this compass; it may therefore be supposed that a similar error is at the base of this improbable statement; it is difficult to see what value for mariners such a compass could have. But notwithstanding Olaus Magnus’s fantastic story, Pining and Pothorst may really have been in Greenland. The former must be the Norwegian nobleman Didrik Pining, who together with Pothorst (“Pytchehorsius”) is said to have distinguished himself during the later years of Christiern I., “not less as capable seamen than as matchless freebooters” (piratæ). He was much employed by Christiern I. and King Hans against the English and sometimes against the Hanseatic League, and is mentioned by several historical authorities.[95] He seems also to have extended his activity upon occasion to the Spaniards, Portuguese and Dutch, for about 1484 he captured, off the English coast or off Brittany and in the Spanish Sea, three Spanish or Portuguese ships, and brought them to the king at Copenhagen. In a treaty which was concluded in 1490 between King Hans and the Dutch it is expressly stipulated that Didrik Pinning and a certain Busch were to be excluded from the peace. Didrik Pining is spoken of as lord over Iceland, or perhaps over the eastern and southern part, in 1478; but on the death of Christiern I. in 1481, another was appointed as “hirdstjore” (or stadtholder), and it is stated in the letter of appointment, issued by the council at Bergen in 1481, that Pining had “gone out of Iceland”; but a few years later he is again mentioned as hirdstjore there. When in 1487 King Hans took possession of Gotland, Pining accompanied him thither, doubtless as commander of the Danish-Norwegian squadron; he is called “Skipper Pining,” which corresponds to commodore or admiral in our time (cf. Christiern I.’s “Skipper Clemens”). In July 1489 Didrik Pining was among the Norwegian noblemen who paid homage at Copenhagen to the king’s son, Christiern (II.) as heir to the kingdom of Norway; and in August and September 1490 he took part in the settlement of a suit concerning a large inheritance at Bergen; but in two Icelandic laws or edicts of that time, 1489 and 1490, the so-called “Pining’s Laws,” he is described as “‘hirdstjore’ over the whole of Iceland,” and a later chronicler speaks of him as one of the most famous men in Iceland, and he says that “he was in many ways a serviceable man and put many things right that were wrong.” It must be the same Didrik Pining who was appointed in 1490 governor of Vardöhus, and it may be supposed that he was commander-in-chief on sea and land in northern waters.
We hear of Pining, and his associate Pothorst, in an old (Icelandic ?) report which, together with Ivar Bárdsson’s description of Greenland, was found in an old book of accounts in the Faroes, and which in an English translation was included in “Purchas his Pilgrimes” (London, 1625, vol. iii.), where we read:
“Item, Punnus [corruption of Pinning] and Potharse, have inhabited Island certayne yeeres, and sometimes have gone to Sea, and have had their trade in Groneland. Also Punnus did give the Islanders their Lawes, and caused them to bee written. Which Lawes doe continue to this day in Island, and are called by name Punnus Lawes.”
A new document on Pining
As this last statement agrees with the two “Pining’s Laws” mentioned above, there may also be some truth in the voyages to Greenland. An unexpected confirmation of this recently came to light in the discovery of a document by Louis Bobé [1909] at Copenhagen; it is a letter, dated March 3, 1551, from Burgomaster Carsten Grip, of Kiel, to King Christiern III. Grip was, as we are told in the letter, the king’s commissioner for the purchase of books, paintings, and the like. He tells the king that he has not found any valuable books or suitable pictures, but sends him two maps of the world,
“from which your majesty may see that your majesty’s land of Greenland extends on both maps towards the new world and the islands which the Portuguese and Spaniards have discovered, so that these countries may be reached overland from Greenland. Likewise that they may be reached overland from Lampeland [i.e., Lapland], from the castle of Vardöhus, etc.[96] This year there is also published at Paris in France a map of your majesty’s land of Iceland and of the wonders there to be seen and heard of; it is there remarked that Iceland is twice as large as Sicily, and that the two skippers [‘sceppere,’ i.e., commodores or admirals] Pyningk and Poidthorsth, who were sent out by your majesty’s royal grandfather, King Christiern the First, at the request of his majesty of Portugal, with certain ships to explore new countries and islands in the north, have raised on the rock Wydthszerck [Hvitserk], lying off Greenland and towards Sniefeldsiekel in Iceland on the sea, a great sea-mark on account of the Greenland pirates, who with many small ships without keels (‘szunder bodem’) fall in large numbers upon other ships,” etc.
It seems, as Dr. Björnbo has suggested,[97] that the Paris map here spoken of may be Gourmont’s of 1548, mentioned above. But Grip’s letter contains information about the despatch of the expedition and about the Eskimo kayaks, which cannot be taken from the inscription attached to Hvitserk on that map. The statement about the Eskimo (the Greenland pirates) recalls what Ziegler says in his work “Scondia” (1532) of the inhabitants of Greenland, that “they use light boats of hide, safe in tossing on the sea and among rocks; and thus propelling themselves they fall upon other ships” [Grönl. hist. Mind., iii. p. 499]. It also has some resemblance to what Olaus Magnus says in his later work of 1555 of the Greenland “pirates, who employ hide-boats and an unfair mode of seamanship, since they do not attack the upper parts of merchant ships, but seek to destroy them by boring through the hull from outside, down by the keel,” etc. These statements may be derived from mythical accounts of the Greenland Eskimo, which have come down by some channel we do not know of. Something of the sort may have appeared on some now lost map, from which Grip may have taken it; but his statement as to the two skippers having been sent out by Christiern I. shows that in any case there was in his day a tradition of the voyage of Pining and Pothorst. We must therefore assume that they were despatched on a voyage of discovery by Christiern I. (some time before 1481, when he died), probably at the request of the well-known King Alfonso V. of Portugal (1438-1481). As Hvitserk must be on the coast of Greenland, they seem, in agreement with the other sober statement in Purchas, to have really reached Greenland, perhaps more than once, and to have traded by barter with the natives, which may have ended, as it frequently did later, in skirmishes brought about by the encroachments of the Europeans. This last possibility would explain Grip’s statement about the Greenland pirates attacking in many small ships without keels, as also the mythical statements of Ziegler and Olaus Magnus. Nor is it impossible that Pining may have set up some sea-mark or other there. All this sounds more probable than Olaus Magnus’s wonderful story. But nevertheless it does not appear to me that the authorities now known justify us in altogether rejecting the latter and the date 1494. As there is mention in 1491 of a new “hirdstjore” in Iceland, we must suppose that Pining was either dead or had left the island; if we compare with this the fact that Pining was excluded from the peace that King Hans concluded in 1490 with the Dutch, and thus in a way became an outlaw to the latter, and that in the same year a provisional peace was made with the king of England, by which, of course, all privateering against English subjects on the part of Norwegians and Danes was strictly forbidden, we may possibly perceive a connection. Pining and Pothorst were not able to break themselves of old habits, and thus had both the English king and their own, besides the Dutchmen, against them, and were compelled to fly the country as outlaws. This would also agree with Olaus Magnus’s words, that they were outlawed by the strict edict of the northern kings (“aquilonarium regum severissimo edicto”). It may be supposed that, like the outlawed Eric the Red 500 years before, they took refuge in distant Greenland, which they already knew. But finally they may have come to grief; for among the many “pirates” who “met with a miserable death, being either slain by their friends or hanged on the gallows or drowned in the waves of the sea,” Paulus Eliæ mentions “Pyning” and “Pwthorss.”[98]
Johannes Scolvus’s voyage to Greenland
We have yet to mention certain obscure statements about another Northern sailor of this time, Johannes Scolvus (Jón Skolv ?).[99] The Spanish author Francesco Lopez de Gomara, who was a priest in Seville about 1550, and published his “Historia de las Indias” (i.e., America) in 1553, says there of “la Tierra de Labrador”:
“Hither also came men from Norway with the pilot [‘piloto,’ i.e., navigator] Joan Scoluo, and Englishmen with Sebastian Gaboto.”