Jan Jacobszoon May van Schellinkhout

Who is Jan Jacobszoon May van Schellinkhout?

Jan Jacobszoon May van Schellinkhout was a Dutch ship's captain in the service of merchants from Amsterdam and Enkhuizen during the early 17th-century Dutch push into Arctic whaling grounds. In July 1614 he commanded the ship Gouden Cath on a voyage that reached a small, remote volcanic island roughly midway between Svalbard and Greenland, one of at least three separate expeditions to independently sight the island within about a month of one another that summer. The Amsterdam cartographer Willem Jansz Blaeu subsequently named the island "Jan Mayen" after Captain May, fixing the name on his influential 1623 "Zeespiegel" atlas, and it has been known by that name ever since. Little else is recorded of May's personal life or later career, but the voyage placed Jan Mayen on the map at the height of the Dutch Noordsche Compagnie's Arctic whaling monopoly, and the island served as a seasonal whaling base for Dutch crews from 1615 until whaling in the area collapsed in 1642 as local whale populations were depleted.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Jan Mayen" · Arctic Portal, "Jan Mayen" · secretatlas.com, "Jan Mayen | A Volcanic Outpost Between Svalbard and Greenland"