DECLINE OF GREENLAND SETTLEMENTS 



tends on both maps towards the new world and the islands which the Portu- 

 guese 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 Vardohus, etc.i 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 Green- 

 land 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. Bjornbo has suggested,- that the Paris 

 map here spoken of may be Gourmont's of 1548, mentioned 

 above. But Grip's letter contains information about the 

 dispatch 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" [Gronl. hist. Mind., iii. p. 499]. It also has 

 some resemblance to what Glaus 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 



1 This was the usual representation at that time; cf. Ziegler's map of 1532. 



2 A. A. Bjornbo, Berlingske Tidende, Copenhagen, July 17, 1909; Bjornbo 

 and Petersen, 1909, p. 249. 



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