It seems, as Dr. Björnbo has suggested,[97] that the Paris map here spoken of may be Gourmont's of 1548, mentioned above. But Grip's letter contains information about the despatch 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" [Grönl. hist. Mind., iii. p. 499]. It also has some resemblance to what Olaus 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 skippers having been sent out by Christiern I. shows that in any case there was in his day a tradition of the voyage of Pining and Pothorst. We must therefore assume that they were despatched on a voyage of discovery by Christiern I. (some time before 1481, when he died), probably at the request of the well-known King Alfonso V. of Portugal (1438-1481). As Hvitserk must be on the coast of Greenland, they seem, in agreement with the other sober statement in Purchas, to have really reached Greenland, perhaps more than once, and to have traded by barter with the natives, which may have ended, as it frequently did later, in skirmishes brought about by the encroachments of the Europeans. This last possibility would explain Grip's statement about the Greenland pirates attacking in many small ships without keels, as also the mythical statements of Ziegler and Olaus Magnus. Nor is it impossible that Pining may have set up some sea-mark or other there. All this sounds more probable than Olaus Magnus's wonderful story. But nevertheless it does not appear to me that the authorities now known justify us in altogether rejecting the latter and the date 1494. As there is mention in 1491 of a new "hirdstjore" in Iceland, we must suppose that Pining was either dead or had left the island; if we compare with this the fact that Pining was excluded from the peace that King Hans concluded in 1490 with the Dutch, and thus in a way became an outlaw to the latter, and that in the same year a provisional peace was made with the king of England, by which, of course, all privateering against English subjects on the part of Norwegians and Danes was strictly forbidden, we may possibly perceive a connection. Pining and Pothorst were not able to break themselves of old habits, and thus had both the English king and their own, besides the Dutchmen, against them, and were compelled to fly the country as outlaws. This would also agree with Olaus Magnus's words, that they were outlawed by the strict edict of the northern kings ("aquilonarium regum severissimo edicto"). It may be supposed that, like the outlawed Eric the Red 500 years before, they took refuge in distant Greenland, which they already knew. But finally they may have come to grief; for among the many "pirates" who "met with a miserable death, being either slain by their friends or hanged on the gallows or drowned in the waves of the sea," Paulus Eliæ mentions "Pyning" and "Pwthorss."[98]