CHAPTER II

ACROSS THE VARANGER FJORD TO ELVENAES, WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE FISHING OF FINNER WHALE, AND A NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS WITH A JEW.

One of the most looked-forward-to items of our original programme had been to see the _Windward_ pull her anchors out of European mud for the last time before she went to wrestle with the Arctic floe. But the ship's carpenter ashore who had in charge that new main-topsail yard was slow even in his sober moments; and although every one in authority raged at the delay, not even statements in Anglo-Saxon (or Scottish) as to his personal worthiness could bustle him out of his dawdling gait. So in the end the _Windwards_ saw us off, instead of our doing the like by them.

We took passage across the broad Varanger fjord to Jarfjord in a little coaster, and as she steamed out between the harbour walls and met the roll outside, all hands on the _Windward_, both forward and aft, yelled themselves hoarse, and we sent back our voices in reply. Then up and down from their peak went the blue ensign, as the big expedition wished the little one luck, and we found a Norwegian flag stopped on the rail, and hoisted that up to the head of the poop-staff (which was as high as my chin), and dipped it with all goodwill in reply. There were Norwegians, and Finns, and Russians, and Lapps on the coaster, come from the villages on the Varanger to do their marketing at the big town, and at first I fancy they thought us Englishmen mad, but after half an hour or so they most of them retired to the 'tween decks very sea-sick, and after that they ceased to give us any thought at all.

We lolled down the northern coast of the Varanger in the trough of a lusty swell, and periodically we called in at some small, bleak, dreary harbour, where drying nets formed a festoon before the houses, and drying cod on their wooden racks, and masses of gray inhospitable stone blocked in the background. Then when we had negotiated all our ports of call the helm was starboarded, and we stood out across the broad waters of the fjord towards the gleaming snow mountains which hedged in the country of the Lapps thirty miles away on the other side.

Fishers we passed on the way, Russians with long hair and Tartar faces, clumsy high-booted Finns, and queer-garbed Lapps, swinging over the swells in their viking boats, toiling at their miles of long-lines. And then a rain squall drove down, blotting out the view, and we cowered under the green canvas dodger in front of the wheel on the little coaster's spar deck, and shivered at the chill.

But presently, out of the grayness of the rain squall there came an old familiar scent, and the mate at the wheel pulled lustily at the syren string to advertise our whereabouts. An answering hoot came back, and then through the mist a small green-painted steamer of some thirty tons burden loomed out, slowly bearing down upon us. Her pace was almost imperceptible, but a cumbersome harpoon-shell gun on her stem-head gave us the necessary hint as to her occupation, and presently we could make out two towing hawsers astern of her, and a bloated finner whale made fast, tail foremost, to each.

The fish were blown up like balloons with decomposition, and like balloons they were striped with longitudinal gores. Their jaws were just awash, and oil oozed from them in a slimy fan. The smell of them was almost past endurance. The little green whaler had killed, perhaps, three hundred miles away, and was towing her catch back to the home factory for realisation. And a valuable catch it was too. The big black bull was worth all of £250; and although the cow whale, which showed her ivory-white belly, was smaller, she would probably fetch her £200 with bone at its then enormous price.

This fishery of the blue-finned whale, or, as he is more technically named, the finner, is an industry of comparatively modern birth, and has its centre in these bleak Northern seas. The right whale and the sperm whale have been hunted for how many centuries I do not know; the mist of ages has closed over the first capture, and not many more years will pass before the last score is nicked in the tally. The right whales have been chased almost entirely from the face of known waters; they are searched for from Davis Straits to the Kara Sea; ships have looked for them amongst the tabular bergs of the Antarctic, but the fishery is on its last legs. Even with bone at £40 a ton, the Nantucket and the Peterhead owners are dropping out of what they consider a dying business. This newer fishery has, however, increased by such leaps and bounds that in 1894 the kill amounted to 1500 head. And all the credit is due to a Norwegian skipper, one Svend Foyn.

The finner is no stranger in the North. Whalers of all countries have seen him spout and gambol for three hundred years, and have cursed him with maritime point and fluency. Occasionally some harpooner, disbelieving tradition, made fast to a finner, and experienced that sensation which the _vaquero_ found when he lassoed the Mexican State Express. And as fishing implements developed, they shot at him with harpoon guns and riddled him with explosive lances. But the end was always the same, it was either "cut" or "swamp," and there was another white-painted whale boat losing way over the swells, with a white-faced crew, no harpoon, and an empty tub of line.

Until 1865 the finner whale defied the fishermen of the world, but in that year Captain Svend Foyn went North with new ideas for conquering the brute's prodigious vitality; and though he did not succeed at first, though, indeed he was constantly at shoulder-touch with sudden death, he figured out the right scheme at last, and then reaped a harvest well earned. He died, only a year or two back, the richest man in Norway.

Captain Svend Foyn went into this matter in middle life and already rich. He had two objects in view. In the first instance he wished to be successful where all the world had failed, and conquer the only animal remaining which man had not subdued. And in the second place he was desirous of making money. He was a man scientifically ignorant; he was quite uneducated beyond the narrow lines of his own craft; but he was full of wooden-headed pluck, and possessed of a mule's determination.

He started in the right way. He discarded the slow, clumsy, single-topsail, wooden barque, with auxiliary steam, and her fleet of carvel-built rowing-boats, and set off in a steamer of fifty tons, which would tow in the wake of a harpooned finner without breaking the line. He believed that this would not only tire out the whale with quickness, but would also prevent the carcase from sinking to the bottom when life had gone, after its usual fashion.

Captain Svend Foyn's first experiences must have been exciting. He was frequently towed by some maddened fish at a twenty-knot rate through a heavy sea, with his fore-deck smothered with water up to the bridge. On these occasions the engines would be rung to "full astern," and the little steamer would hang on in tow for twelve hours at a stretch, and to the jaded sportsman, in search of a new sensation, this method of hunting may be recommended with confidence. But the conclusion was always the same; either Captain Foyn was forced to cut, or the harpoon drew; or the finner died and sunk: at any rate, he never gathered his game.

Time after time his harpoons made fast, and ninety tons of agonised living flesh plucked the little steamer, like a dragging child, across those desolate plains of ocean. Years came and the years went, each dull with disappointment. But yet he did not give in. He mounted artillery, and bombarded the finner with heavy shot, and still without effect; he tried plot after plan, and plan after plot; he expended £20,000 and human limbs in his experiments, and finally, out of all the failures he evolved success. He mounted on the stem-head of his steamer a stunted heavy-breeched gun, which carried an explosive bomb with a huge harpoon, weighing together over eighty English pounds. The idea of playing the finner like a trout was abandoned once and for all. The explosion of the bomb shot it dead; its huge vitality was snapped in a second, and a three-inch warp made fast to the harpoon kept it from sinking, where a thinner whale line would have been snapped.

The strongest fish that swam in all the seas was beaten, and Captain Svend Foyn patented his tactics and took off his oilskins. Then the business part of him came in, and, until his monopoly ceased, his launches were catching a hundred finners a year, which may be valued at £250 apiece.

The fishery has spread since that monopoly granted by law has run out, and other people are permitted now to profit by the schemes evolved from Captain Svend Foyn's brain. Anywhere where the rice-like animacula on which the whale feeds are to be found, there the little whaling steamers may be seen also, with a look-out man peering from the crow's nest at their foremast head. In the fjords and bays which lie round that grim coast to eastwards of the North Cape, in Iceland, and even up some of the snug inlets of the Varanger Fjord, are numberless stations where the little steamers can bring their catch for caldrons and axes to resolve into its commercial elements. The finner soon swells after he is dead, and lies on the water like a half-submerged balloon, striped, too, balloon fashion, with gore-like seams. The tail flukes are cut adrift, and he is towed ignominiously stern first, with a wake of oil fanning out from his jaws, and a smell which grows with the days, and beats down the crisp sea air. But when the finner is beached, and the axes and spades strip off the blubber from the pink beef below, and cut away the whalebone from the head, then there arises a stink which poisons heaven. Still, custom is everything. The workers toil at the trying-out the oil, at resolving the carcase into manure, and tinned meats, and cow-fodder, and at packing the precious bone, and it never strikes them that a smell is abroad which is almost palpable in its solidness. But use is everything in tackling these sort of scents. We were beginning to find that out for ourselves.

Meanwhile the cold was making us blue. We had amplified our wardrobes by the purchase of a leather coat apiece in Vardö, and we had on these, and slop-chest oilskins, but the frosty gale beat through them all as though they had been gossamer silk. To go below was impossible. The coaster's 'tween decks was an Aceldama of unfettered sea-sickness. The only warm spot on the spar deck was the engine-room skylight, and that was occupied by a festive Jew carousing with the skipper and a couple of farmers from the Russian side. We did not feel inclined to rejoice with them just then, for, to tell the truth, we were deadly tired. It was ten o'clock at night, and staring daylight, of course. But then it had been staring daylight with us continuously since we crossed the Arctic circle a fortnight before, and as it is hard to put in regular sleep with the sun burning high in the heavens, we had missed many a regular watch below. And the reaction was on us then. So we turned in on the deck planks below the green canvas dodgers in front of the coaster's wheel, and slept solidly and refreshingly for two whole hours.

The hoot of the syren roused us. We had crossed the broad waters of the fjord, and were close in to the other side. High bare mountains covered with snow that was dappled with hummocky rock rose sheer up from the surf. The sky above was gray and cold. The place was indescribably sterile and savage. At one point, cowering at the foot of the mountains, a little white building stood out like some roosting sea-fowl against a background of dark craggy rock. We were heading towards it, and gradually as we closed with the coast it shaped itself into a church. It was Oscarkirche, which marks the sea end of the frontier line which delimits Russia and Norway.

We shut off steam here, and a boat came out to us from the beach. There is a Russian fishing village in a masked bay to the eastward, to which we sent a pedlar ashore with a travelling box of buttons and German knives. Poor man, he did not seem to anticipate a large rush of business, if one could judge from his face as he lowered himself and his pack into the dancing boat. And yet probably his coming was the event of the summer. It is hard to conceive a more desolate place than that Russian fishing village. But it was a summer settlement only. In winter it was deserted. And the Russian Government do their best to foster its puny trade. It is a free port; there is no customs duty on either imports or exports: canny Russia does not wish to thrust available trade into the hands of its Norwegian neighbour next door.

Away we steamed again just outside the spouting reefs, towards the Jacob's Elv. The wind was blowing straight down on us from Polar ice, and the cold was bitter. A whale swam parallel to us, some half mile to seaward, sending up at intervals spouts of feathery gray-blue fog.

We put into many dreary little coves, where a handful of fisher-folk, with their backs against the snow and the grim walls of stone, dragged a small living from the cold waters which lapped against their thresholds. We lay off the beaches whilst these came off and did their traffic, and then on again through the reefs to the next stop. Wretched as these villages were, their populace had always spirit on hand to wrangle over politics, and no Irish Nationalist could hate his "dacent Protestant" neighbour as thoroughly and efficiently as one of these semi-savages who held "Left" opinions could loathe another who belonged to the "Right." And they carried this distaste beyond their social relations. They had the "boycott" in full working order; "Right" would not trade with "Left" under any pretence whatever; and if Left could push "Right" a little farther towards starvation than his normal half-fed average, he considered he was doing the State a personal service.

At another time we could have moralised over this self-hindrance principle with weight and dignity, but just then we were too wrapped up in our own discomforts and the prospects of worse to follow to worry very much over the foolishness of other fools. The chill was making us shudder. The grim, savage hills of stone seemed to speak of an infinity of hardships and wretchedness before we sighted the waters of the Bothnia. And each of us told the other so often that he "liked it," that the very repetition of the statement gave it the lie. Alone of all the ship's company the Jew did not mind. He sat down below, and nipped brandy all the live-long night, and roared songs in all the tongues of Pentecost. He was a most cheery fellow.

We were off the entrance to Jarfjord a little after midnight. The sun was high above the poop-staff. The air was clear and icy, and spray leaped in jets from reefs on every side of us. The entrance to the fjord lay amongst a huddle of glacier-worn rocks, with a great table mountain set up in the middle of them, all snow-clad, all entirely sterile. The little coaster wound in and out amongst the reefs with easy confidence. Two small whitened islets, alive with sea-fowl, masked the entrance; and spouts of mist like the blowing of whales rose up from reefs awash on either beam. It was a giddy piece of pilotage. In the crevices, snow lay down to the water's edge, all browned with dust. It was hard to imagine any spot more savage, and grim, and desolate.

But a change came swiftly. Once we had passed the mouth of this sea-river, and green tints grew on the rock walls, which deepened as we steamed on. It was only slime at first, but then came patches of moss, then bosky lawns of grass, and dwarf shrubs in the more sheltered corries. The snow line on the hillsides rose towards the summits. The snow patches in the crevices below grew smaller and more few. Then in a tiny bay we saw a cabin of logs set in a glow of green. Here was young rye sprouting. And yet that horrible coast line of the Varanger which we had just left was only two miles distant, and by straining the eye we could see the horizon whiten where the seas creamed over the guardian reefs.

The walls of the fjord were still high and some quarter of a mile apart. The lane of water ran between them, straight as a canal. But always as we went on mountains grew lower. Presently at the mouth of a contributory valley we opened out on a small settlement of felt-roofed wooden houses, with what looked like colossal pink sausages drawn up on the beach before them. As we drew nearer a waft of odour came to us down a slant of the wind, and we laughed in pleasure because we were going to meet again old friends that we thought we had left behind for good. The pink sausages were flensed Finner whales. In the wooden buildings they were trying out the blubber, sorting and packing the precious bone, and working up the beef into its many useful shapes. And the smell of it all filled the air till one could almost dredge it out in handfuls.

Once more we steamed on, beyond sight of the sea now, with the mountains drooping to mere uplands on the fjord sides, with the scrub trees replaced by forests of graceful twenty-foot birches, which covered the gentle slopes. The air was warm--warm as an English summer. And, note well the occasion, the first mosquito came to us. We hailed him as a friend then. Hayter had seen him last in Florida, I had heard his music a year before on the Gold Coast, and we both mentioned that the mosquitoes had no power over us, that our skins were invulnerable. Little did we know the biting power of this Northern monster; bitterly were we to learn it.

The fjord narrowed, the little steamer anchored, and we put ashore with some score of others. Our slender baggage was to go round to Elvenaes, on the Syd Varanger, but we had elected to walk across the intervening neck of land.

And now with the memory big in us of that grim savage coast not a dozen miles away, we stepped out down a veritable country lane between slender birches, with linnets singing behind the foliage on either hand. There were oak ferns and bracken under the trees, and in the open meads, buttercups, pansies, cow-parsley, forget-me-nots, wild pelargonium, dandelions, ranunculi, bright pink campions, and cranberries, with everlasting moss, and other mosses, and grotesque lichens in all abundance. The comely woods were musical with birds, and portioned off by rustic fences. Here and there were gates, slung on hinges, and then would come a fine trim house of logs covered with painted weather boarding. We might have been walking in the Tyrol. And when we remembered that the Arctic circle was over two hundred miles farther to the southward, and the desolation we had come through still close at hand to the north, we had to grant that Nature could perform more white magic than we ever credited her with before.

The narrowing fjord ended in a rolling bay, and against a boat-house built there was a great cemetery of reindeer horns, heaped up as things of no beauty or value. A stream went on beside the road, babbling into idyllic trout-pools. Cow-bells tinkled from within the woods. The passengers from the coaster had branched off singly and in groups till only seven of us were left: the roystering Jew, a gloomy young farmer in high boots, with his sick wife, a nondescript girl, and our two selves. At intervals we talked, and the Jew gathered flowers for the women, and then we came to a large house of wood.

It was exactly three o'clock in the morning, but in this sunlit land no one troubles much with bed, and the owner was standing in his doorway to take the air. The Jew made discourse--all tongues seemed equally facile to him,--and the householder came out and shook us all by the hand, and insisted that we should come inside. The women went off in charge of his women-kind, but us men he took into the parlour, where we gazed upon a picture of Martin Luther, some Sloyd work, and an elaborate stove, and watched the farmer grow drowsy over yarns of bear-hunting in the winter months. But presently our host set before us beer--delicious Bayersk öl--which we all drank standing, with a heartfelt cry of "skaal"! We wanted that beer badly, and it came to us as a pleasant surprise. We fancied we had left such luxuries behind us for many a long week; for Lapland is what they call in America "a Prohibition State."

The Jew by this time had quite assumed our chaperonage, and though inclined to linger over his beer and to hint at another bottle, said he would come with us when we decided to start. Our fellow-travellers came to the door to see us off. The sick woman had grown quite a pretty colour from her walk and from the mild excitement of drinking milk. And we took leave of them all with handshakes as though they were ancient friends. Finally, the Jew tore himself away, and we set out again towards Elvenaes under his convoy.

He was a truly joyous creature, this strayed Hebrew, full of carnal appetites, but revelling in the beauties of this Arctic oasis which we were passing through. He discoursed poetry, time-tables, natural history, and the price of furs all in the same breath. He was full of surprising moods (and I fear a trifle drunk), and he swung his brandy-bottle in one hand, and carried a black umbrella tucked under the other arm. He knew all about our expedition and bubbled with advice: there were no horses procurable even if horses would have been any good; there was a Russian Boundary Commission at work in the neighbourhood, which had mopped up all the horses, and all the boats, and all the available men; the Neiden route to Enare was quite impracticable: our way was to push up the Pasvik Elv, and if we would leave it to him he would see that we got both boats and men, even if he had to impress Russian soldiers for our carriers. He was a most liberal Jew--with promises, and other people's beer.

Pines were growing by the wayside now, and heath, and delicate shrubs. The road was a real road, metalled and embanked, with wooden bridges over the streams, and stone culverts to carry away the water. Low wooded hills rose on either side, and the notes of cuckoos floated down to us faintly over their tree-tops. The scenery was delicately beautiful. We might have been walking through a park, suitable (as the advertisements say) for a nobleman or country gentleman.

The one drawback to our perfect pleasure were the thickening swarms of mosquitoes. The Jew suffered from them terribly. But even they did not damp his spirits. He slapped the insect pests from his crimson face with a whisk of green leaves, whistled a stirring march, waved the brandy-bottle as a drum major waves his cane, and stepped out finely.

As we went on, higher mountains came into view ahead, violet-tipped on their wooded summits. The road wound stolidly on over bridges, and embankments, and hollows. Lakes appeared round which we had to skirt, and then other lakes with wooded islands, and cascades tinkling down into them from the hills. The Jew struck up the Soldier's March out of Gounod's _Faust_ to words of his own to put spirit into the pace, and grew more hot, and slapped at the mosquitoes more busily than ever. He gave us names for all the lakes we passed, and all the rivers, and all the hills, and even went so far in his courtesy as to invent titles for streams that did not negotiate a dozen gallons of water to the hour. The guide mania was strong in him, and he was touching us on a tender place.

Gradually, by failing to notice his remarks, and by skirmishing off the road to hunt for the nests of birds, we contrived to let the festive one draw ahead, and for the next two miles we marched on together in peaceful enjoyment. We had crossed the divide; we were heading down into the beautiful valley of the Pasvik Elv where it joins the Syd Varanger; and we were almost within touch of this mysterious Lapland, which the wise of Vardö had done so much to keep us away from.

But we had not done with the Jew yet. A dip of the road and a sudden turn brought us in view of a gorgeous vista up the wooded Pasvik valley. The silver river sat between two sloping walls of greenery, from which the cuckoos called; and where it forked, a white turreted chapel reared up from beneath an umber cliff. In the distance beyond, the whole river leaped down rocks in a cascade of foaming cream. And there on a bench by the roadside sat our Hebrew incubus waiting for us. He raised the brandy bottle, swigged out the dregs, and quoted Heine. Then "Boris Gleb" said he, and waved the empty flagon towards the pure white tracery of the chapel. And "Russia" quoth he, and flung the bottle towards the rearing wall of trees beyond the river. He slid off on to the turf, and settled himself luxuriously for a doze, and we annexed the bench. We stayed there an hour absorbing the beauties of that scene, and I think speculating not a little on the unknown Lapland which lay beyond. And then the tinkle of a bell roused us. A horse came past, trotting up the road; and after him came a Lapp, with a bridle in his hand, trying to catch the horse.

We got up and moved away. The Jew was still sleeping on the turf under the sunlight. It was the last we ever saw of him, and although we are in his debt for beer and fiction, I do not think we ever want to see him more. A little farther on we came across a big shingle-roofed house with outbuildings, set on a neck of land above the narrows, which commands a prospect up and down the river; and there we found entertainment. It was half-past seven in the morning, so we had supper and went to bed.

We made the most of those two unexpected beds. We did not come across beds again for many a weary mile.