Cornelis Gijsbertsz Zorgdrager

Cornelis Gijsbertsz Zorgdrager , Dutch navigator, was born towards 1650.

It left in 1690 as captain a ship Baleinier in the Mer Greenland. It appears that it continued during several years to make these kinds of voyages.

Abraham Moubach published in Dutch the result of work of Zorgdrager: this book is entitled flourishing Progrès of fishing in Greenland , and Traité fishing of the whale , Amsterdam, 1720, in-4°, fig.; $the Hague, in-4°, translated into German with additions, inter alia an extract of the work of Nicolas Denis on the fishing of cod, Leipzig, 1723, in-4°, fig.; second edition, under the title of Description of the fishing of the whale and other fishings of Greenland , Nuremberg, 1746, in-4°, fig.; translated into English under the title of Table commercial of Greenland and the fishing of the whale , London, 1725, in-4°.

My profession during several years, known as Zorgdrager, having been fishing in Greenland, I believed myself obliged to acquire knowledge and the instruction which it required. Thus, independently of what I learned by my own experience, I stuck to me well to penetrate of all that had known the most experienced captains. I traversed and I read many annal and history, travel diaries: I very carefully noted in my annual register all the remarkable facts which had arrived to me, in order to have an exact idea of my operations.

Work of the author having shown him that several newspapers and stories contained fables, and that the people who had made fishing with the Greenland did not have anything writing which could inform, it solved to publish the result of its observations and its research, in order to be useful to its fellow-citizens and all the navigators who would make fishing in the boreal seas.

Its book, best which appeared on this matter before the works of the captain Scoresby, indicates the way in which the ship dispatched with fishing must be equipped; the processes to be followed when one arrived in trimmings where find cétacées and the other inhabitants of the sea. It offers invaluable details on the temperature and the meteors of the Arctic icy ocean, on the formation and the walk of the ices; the description of Greenland, the Iceland, the Spitzberg, the Nova Zembla, the island Jean-Mayen, the Strait of Davis, etc; birds and other animals. The figures are not bad, and the charts are good for time when they were drawn up. It is in this work that all the authors drew who dealt with the same subject.

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