Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1944, Page 333

REVUE LITTÉRAIRE
certain cases depths are entered in
the maps. The second volume in-
cludes Johannes Mejer’s maps of
the villages and their adjacent land
in the county of Aabenraa.
Mejer’s maps, not least his special
maps, contain a most valuable ma-
terial for geographers, historians,
and topographers, and the scientific
usefulness of the edition started
here will undoubtedly be very
great. But there is another aspect
of the matter. As a national treasure
Johannes Mejer’s maps rank very
high, on a par with our greatest
architectural and literary monu-
ments, and it ought to be something
of a national duty to bear testi-
mony to this before ourselves and
before the world.
In vol. VI the cartographical hi-
story of the Faeroes is treated in
text and renderings of maps. The
Faeroes are mentioned as early as
about 825 by the Irish monk Dicuil
in the strange work De mensura or-
bis terrae, but the earliest map with
the name of the Faeroes was not
drawn until about 1280, in Eng-
land. Also Clavus in his late map
includes the Faeroes, but only in the
16th century we find more genera-
ally a cartographical representation
of the islands, although a primi-
tive one. Olaus Magnus, the great
Swedish cartographer thus in his
great work Carta marina depicts the
Faeroes as nine islands, several of
which are named. His sources pre-
sumably are old directions for na-
293
vigation and oral information from
seafaring men.
In 1558 a book by the Venetian
nobleman Nicoli Zeno about a voy-
age in the Northern seas which was
said to have been made about 1380,
was published in Venice. The sub-
joined map, however, must date
from a period much later than 1380,
as it is pieced together from sour-
ces of a later date even down to
the time of publication. The map,
however, highly influenced the car-
tography of the time.
After Olaus Magnus Gerhard
Mercator entered the Faeroes in his
maps, and after his time the islands
are rendered in all good maps, but
essential new information is mis-
sing until the publication of Lucas
Janz Waghenaer’s Thresoor der Zee-
Vaert 1592. In this map some new
names are added, and further the
nature of the Faeroes is mentioned,
chiefly the conditions of the cur-
rents in the straits between the is-
lands, which are very important to
navigation.
The first survey of the Faeroes
was made by Bagge Wandel, the
later principal of the Navigation
School, who in 1650 was on a cruise
to the Faeroes. His contributions,
however, have not been completely
elucidated, still, it may be stated
that he must have had other sour-
ces than his own observations, thus
he must have communicated with
Lucas Debes, who for a long period
was a vicar in the Faeroes, and who