Myth
The size of Smeerenburg has been greatly exaggerated by many authors. William Scoresby (1820) said 200 to 300 ships and 12,000 to 18,000 men visited Smeerenburg during the short summer season. The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1920) made similar claims, stating that hundreds of ships anchored along the flat of Smeerenburg where ten thousand people visited a complete town with stalls and streets. Besides the tryworks, smithies, and workshops, there were shops, churches, fortifications, gambling dens, and even brothels. Such claims have no basis in reality, as noted above. No more than fifteen ships and 400 men would have visited Smeerenburg during its peak in the 1630s. There were no shops, churches, or brothels, though there was a single fort with two guns. Unfortunately, despite the results of archaeological excavations that took place in the period 1979–81, modern authors still sometimes repeat the fabulous legends told of Smeerenburg.
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Famous quotes containing the word myth:
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman—a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)