Pining expedition
The Pining expedition was an alleged expedition to explore the northern hemisphere by a fleet of several Danish ships sponsored by King Christian I of Denmark in the 1470s.[1][2] There was such a fleet in 1473 or 1476, commanded by John Scolvus, supposedly a navigator at the service of the king of Denmark. According to speculations lacking surviving written evidence, the fleet was commanded by two German sailors; Didrik Pining and Hans Pothorst, and a Portuguese explorer named João Vaz Corte-Real on one of the journeys. It has been claimed that from the Western coast of Greenland they may have reached the North American mainland.[3] The story cannot be verified today, since the only surviving records tell us that Pothorst and Pining saw a "rocky island called Hvitsark, halfway between Iceland and Greenland" in 1494, as described by Samuel Eliot Morison in his "The European Discovery of America, The Northern Voyages". Regardless, no sources explicitly support that Pining and Pothorst had any connections with the journey by Corte-Real, nor that they reached North America (excluding Greenland).[4] What is known, however, is that Pining and Pothorst were sent out by a royal Danish order to find out which of several possible policies concerning trade in Iceland should be developed, in which settlements and harbours. Pining's orders further included investigating what formerly, in the 11th century, had been called the regiones finitimae (i.e. "the coasts opposite those still-remembered but obsolete settlements in Greenland").[5] In 1476, they made this trip, which likely went to Greenland, where they were reported to have encountered hostile Inuit, and no Norse people.[6] The location they visited is assumed by some to have been around Angmagssalik.[6] Nothing specific suggests it went further west than this.[7][8]
References
Category:Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact
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