he nor the priest having actually seen the Inventio. Cnoyen's account (originally in his own language; translations here based on Eva Taylor's version) mixes probable fact with what may have been his own attempts to research the background, stating that Greenland was first settled at the orders of King Arthur, whose army supposedly conquered the North Atlantic islands. He also refers to the "indrawing seas"- currents which drew ships northward, so that: "nearly 4000 persons entered the indrawing seas who never returned. But in A.D. 1364 eight of these people came to the King's Court in Norway. Among them were two priests, one of whom had an astrolabe, who was descended in the 5th generation from a Brussels citizen. One, I say: all eight were from those who had penetrated the northern regions in the first ships." Of the visiting Franciscan, Cnoyen (or Mercator) summarised the priest's report thus: "Leaving the rest of the party who had come to the Islands, he journeyed further, through the whole of the North etc, and put into writing all the wonders of those Islands, and gave the King of England this book, which he called in Latin Inventio Fortunatae." In reality, the "book" may have been a detailed report, intended mainly to highlight the commercial possibilities offered by the North Atlantic following the decline of Norwegian interest in its colonies. Authorship Mercator's contemporary, the 16th-century English historian Richard Hakluyt, identifies the author of the Inventio as Nicholas of Lynn. Hakluyt apparently arrived at this conclusion because of Geoffrey Chaucer's mention of Nicholas in his Treatise on the Astrolabe. Hakluyt did not himself, of course, have a copy of the Inventio. Nicholas was alive at the right time (very roughly – he is quite likely to have been a child in 1360), and had the right skills, but he was a Carmelite friar, not a Franciscan, and no earlier biographer indicates that he spent years travelling back and forth across the Atlantic on government business. There is another possible candidate, about whom, unfortunately, almost nothing is known. According to early 16th-century literary historian John Bale, an Irishman named Hugh, who was a Franciscan, travelled widely in the 14th century, and wrote "a certain journey in one volume" – but again, whether or not this was the Inventio, no copy of it is known. Influence on maps The concept of the pole as a magnetic