Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1944, Qupperneq 330

290
LE NORD
was a professor of medicine, but
who also lectured on surveying. In
1629 he returned to Husum in order
to support his mother, who was
living in straitened circumstances.
Here he continued his training and
besides earned his living as a teacher
of arithmetic and writing, and at
the same time he began his carto-
graphic activity by preparing maps
of certain neighbouring salt-marsh
regions. The earliest one of the pre-
served maps made by his hand is
dated at 1636, but as early as 1935
his activity may be traced in the
private accounts of the Dukes o£
Gottorp, as he has been paid some
amounts for cartographical works
done in this and the following years.
His first fairly great work from
the years 1639—41 is a collection
of 63 maps of the county of Aaben-
raa with all farms and houses,
fields, moors, woods, roads, water-
courses, etc. This collection of maps
with a list of all the owners and
users of landed property contains
the earliest village maps of our
country and is a document of very
great geographical and historical
interest.
In 1641 he further handed in a
collection of 43 sheets of maps of
the river Slien, this being occasioned
by the rich herring fisheries there
and the conflicts on the right of
property and use of these benefits
thus arising.
In 1642 King Christian IV. im-
posed upon him the task of mapping
out the western coast of Jutland
from Varde to Gliickstadt. This
task later was extended to com-
prising all Slesvig and Holstein and
from 1645 even to the whole of
Jutland from the Skaw to the Elbe.
Some of the maps from Slesvig and
Holstein were engraved in copper
and printed in the above-mentioned
atlas, to which Caspar Dankwerth,
the Holsteiner, contributed a text,
which, however, both then and later
was made the object of some criti-
cism. From this atlas the maps were
taken over by numerous carto-
graphers in the Netherlands and
Germany, and thus he attained to
European fame at a fairly early
stage.
In 1647 Christian IV. appointed
Mejer Royal Mathematician with an
annual salary of 300 rixdollars and
with the task of mapping out the
whole of the Danish kingdom of
the time. Every six months he had
to hand in a special map of a pro-
vince, and his object was to be the
making of a “general map” of the
whole kingdom. We have still a
rather considerable number of maps
made by Mejer during the following
years, partly maps on a large scale
of some provinces, partly general
maps.
For the first volume of Johannes
Mejer’s maps of the Danish king-
dom N. E. Norlund has written a
most interesting introduction, which
on essential points extends our
knowledge of his activity. The main