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THE AMERICAN-SC AN DIN A VI AN REVIEW 
Miss Elisabeth Tamm has had a very different career. She orig¬ 
inally intended to devote herself to the study of history, but when 
she found that this would necessitate selling her paternal estate, she 
gave up her career and became a farmer. As such she has made her 
estate, Fogelsta in Sodermanland, one of the finest in the country. 
At the same time she has taken active part in the community life of 
her neighborhood and has for some time been president of the district 
council. When she was nominated bv the Liberals, she declared that 
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she would not bind herself to the party platform, and though herself 
an advocate of temperance, she would not promise to vote for prohibi¬ 
tion. The party managers therefore put her name second on the ballot, 
but when election day came, so many voters crossed out the name above 
hers, that she was elected and thus became the first woman in the second 
chamber of the Swedish Riksdag. 
Another Pre-Columbian Discovery 
By Laurence Marcellus Larson 
Some sixty years ago a German historian noted the fact that cer¬ 
tain historical writings of the sixteenth century contain allusions to an 
expedition which seems to have visited Labrador nearly twenty years 
before the great discovery by Columbus. The leading authority for this 
statement was Gomara, a Spanish priest who published a history of the 
Indies in 1553. Gomara gives no date to the expedition, but states that 
it was headed by a Norwegian pilot whose name was Johannes Scolvus. 
In 1886 Gustav Storm published a brief study of the evidence 
available at that time in which he stated the belief that Scolvus’s journey 
had no significance for the history of the New World. For more than 
twenty years Storm’s dictum was accepted without question. Mean¬ 
while two documents came to light which revived the interest in the 
“Norwegian pilot.” In the German city of Zerbst a map (dating from 
1536 or thereabouts) was discovered which at a point some distance west 
of Greenland bears this legend: “the people to whom Johannes Scolvus, 
a Danish pilot, came ca. 1476.” The second document is a letter found 
in Copenhagen in 1909 by Louis Bobe. This was dated March 3, 1551, 
and written by Carsten Grip, the mayor of Kiel, who seems to have been 
commissioned by Christian III to purchase books and pictures for the 
royal palace. In this letter Grip describes a new map just published in 
Paris, which shows the country visited by an expedition headed by 
Pining and Potthorst [two famous captains with piratical habits] sent 
out in the days of Christian I on the suggestion of the king of Portugal. 
