John Scolvus

According to some sources he was among a group of early Europeans to reach the shores of the Americas prior to Columbus, arriving in 1476 as steersman of Didrik Pining, although this view is not supported by contemporary evidence;[1] as he is not mentioned contemporaneously, his identity and even existence have been disputed.

It has been claimed that in the 1470s, a fleet of several Danish ships sponsored by Christian I of Denmark set sail from Norway westwards to Greenland.

According to speculations lacking surviving written evidence, the fleet was commanded by two Baltic sailors and pirate hunters, Didrik Pining and Hans Pothorst and possibly also included the Portuguese João Vaz Corte-Real on one of the journeys.

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".

Primarily, a 1536 globe of cartographer Gemma Frisius depicts an area within the Arctic Circle, north of a strait dividing Terra Corterealis and Baccalearum Regio from the westward projection of Greenland.

[3] In 1597, the Brabanter Cornelius Wytfliet wrote in his Continens Indica that the northern parts of America were first discovered by "Frislandish" fishermen, and later were further explored about 1390 by the Zeno brothers.

He further writes; "but the honour of its second discovery fell to the Pole Johannes Scoluus (Johannes Scoluus Polonus), who in the year 1476 — eighty-six years after its first discovery — sailed beyond Norway, Greenland, Frisland, penetrated the Northern Strait, under the very Arctic Circle, and arrived at the country of Labrador and Estotiland".

[5] Some writers (initially Peruvian librarian Louis Ulloa in 1934) have even speculated that Johannes Scolvus may have been the young Christopher Columbus, and others that he is identical with Hans Pothorst or João Vaz Corte-Real.

As early as 1911, Fridtjof Nansen had speculated in his study Northern Mist that "Pilotus" (pilot) had been misread as "Polonus" (Polish).