Thursday, September the 2nd, 2004

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Pining and Pothorst

The continent of America takes its name from Amerigo Vespucci, but here at Hooting Yard we have decided to promote the case for Dietrich Pining and Hans Pothorst. Sixteen years before Columbus, this pair of roguish German pirates may well have been the first Europeans to set foot in the New World, alongside Johannes Scolnus, a Polish seafarer who may or may not have existed in the first place. Wily Dietrich and Hans kept getting chased further north by the Danes, and they regularly sailed to Greenland to be piratical. It is thought they may have accidentally blundered ashore in Labrador in 1476. Whether they did or not, the United States of Pining And Pothorst Land seems to me to be a far more evocative name than the United States of America, so that is how we shall henceforth refer to it.

Incidentally, some years after this voyage, Pining and Pothorst settled on a rock called Hvitsark, some way off the coast of Iceland. According to Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Uppsala, in his Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555), “they lived there outlawed with their fellow-rovers and inflicted many atrocities on every seafarer, whether sailing close at hand or at a distance”, and built a lead compass atop the rock to help them in determining the shortest direction to go in their “profitable plundering forays.” This compass can be seen in the superb map of Scandinavia made by Olaus in 1539 and published, as luck would have it, in Ülm. The map, together with exciting details, and much other pleasurable material, can be visited by clicking on this small section of it below, where Pining and Pothorsts's compass is indicated by that circle about a third of the way down on the left hand side, to the west of Iceland.