Didrik Pining

Didrik Pining (c. 1430 – 1491) was a German privateer, nobleman and governor of Iceland and Vardøhus. He is most notable because some have proposed that he may have landed in North America in the 1470s, almost twenty years before Columbus' voyages of discovery. Some of the claims concerning Pining are controversial because information about him is, in general, relatively sparse and partially contradictory.

Didrik Pining has been found by modern German genealogists to have been a native of Hildesheim in Germany, and this has according to a report been "suddenly and conclusively proved." It had been assumed that he was a Dane or Norwegian until the 1930s.

In Hanseatic records until 1468, he is mentioned as a privateer or captain in the service of Hamburg, charged with hunting down English merchant ships in the North Atlantic. From 1468 to 1478, he was in the service of Denmark (by 1470 as an "admiral") first under Christian I of Denmark (ruled 1448–1481), and later for his son, John of Denmark (ruled 1481–1513). Before his employment by the Danes, Pining and his partner Hans Pothorst had also been regarded by the Hanseatic League as "pirates who did much damage to the Hanse towns." During the later years of the reign of Christian I, Pining and Pothorst are said to have distinguished themselves "not less as capable seamen than as matchless freebooters."

The theory of the Pining voyage reaching America was published for the first time by Dr. Sofus Larsen of the University of Copenhagen in his book The Discovery of North America Twenty Years Before Columbus in 1925. Larsen based his claims on various sources (mainly three) which had no immediately apparent connection. Pining was according to Larsen appointed leader of an expedition to the north towards Greenland in the early 1470s. He, together with Hans Pothorst (also from Hildesheim), and the Portuguese explorers João Vaz Corte-Real and Álvaro Martins, were said to have been the principals in the expedition. The navigator was supposedly the semi-mythical figure named John Scolvus. According to Larsen, the mission likely started off from Bergen, went on through to Iceland and Greenland, and eventually discovered Terra do Bacalhau, the "Land of Codfish", later presumed to be Newfoundland or Labrador. While it is known that Pining and Corte-Real were respectively appointed governors of Iceland (1478) and the Azores (1474), these appointments were according to Larsen a reward for having discovered the Land of Codfish.

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