DECLINE OF GREENLAND SETTLEMENTS 



Meanwhile we meet with obscure information in other quar- 

 ters about a possible communication with Greenland at that 

 time. In a map of Iceland, printed in Paris in 1548 by Hierony- 

 mus Gourmont/ a rocky island is marked to the north-west of 

 Iceland, with a compass-card and a Latin inscription. This, as 

 A. A. Bjornbo has pointed out,^ is of interest; it reads in trans- 

 lation : 



"The lofty mountain called Witsarc, on the summit of which a sea-mark 



De Pygmaeis Gruntlaiidiae, A rupe HuitfarK. 



The rock Hvitserk, and a fight with a Greenland Pygmy 

 [Olaus Magnus, 1557] 



was set up by the two pirates (piratis), Pinnigt and Pothorst, to warn seamen 

 against Greenland." 



The map is a modified copy of Olaus Magnus's well-known 

 large chart of 1539, on which the island with the compass-card 

 is found, but not the inscription. 



It is possibly a fuller version or adaptation of the substance 

 of this inscription, or of the source from which it is taken, that 

 is met with again in Olaus Magnus's work on the Northern 

 peoples, of 1555, where he says of "the lofty mountain ' Huit- 



1 Published by J. Metelka [1895]. 



2 A. A. Bjornbo, Berlingske Tidende, 1909; Bjornbo and Petersen, 1909, p. 



249. 



123 



