THE LOFODEN ISLES.

The northern summer soon teaches one fashionable habits of life.  Like the man whose windows Sidney Smith darkened, and who slept all day because he thought it was night, you keep awake all night because you forget that it is not day.  One’s perception of time contracts in some mysterious way, and the sun, setting at eleven, seems to be no later than when he set at seven.  You think you will enjoy the evening twilight an hour or two before going to bed, and lo! the morning begins to dawn.  It seems absurd to turn in and sleep by daylight, but you sleep, nevertheless, until eight or nine o’clock, and get up but little refreshed with your repose.  You miss the grateful covering of darkness, the sweet, welcome gloom, which shuts your senses, one after one, like the closing petals of a flower, in the restoring trance of the night.  The light comes through your eyelids as you sleep, and a certain nervous life of the body that should sleep too keeps awake and active.  I soon began to feel the wear and tear of perpetual daylight, in spite of its novelty and the many advantages which it presents to the traveller.

At Bodo we were in sight of the Lofoden Islands, which filled up all the northern and western horizon, rising like blue saw-teeth beyond the broad expanse of the West Fjord, which separates them from the group of the shore islands.  The next morning, we threaded a perfect labyrinth of rocks, after passing Groto, and headed across the fjord, for Balstad, on West-Vaagoe, one of the outer isles.  This passage is often very rough, especially when the wind blows from the south-west, rolling the heavy swells of the Atlantic into the open mouth of the fjord.  We were very much favoured by the weather, having a clear sky, with a light north wind and smooth sea.  The long line of jagged peaks, stretching from Vaeroe in the south west to the giant ridges of Hindoe in the north east, united themselves in the distance with the Alpine chain of the mainland behind us, forming an amphitheatre of sharp, snowy summits, which embraced five-sixths of the entire circle of the horizon, and would have certainly numbered not less than two hundred.  Von Buch compares the Lofodens to the jaws of a shark, and most travellers since his time have resuscitated the comparison, but I did not find it so remarkably applicable.  There are shark tooth peaks here and there, it is true, but the peculiar conformation of Norway ­extensive plateaus, forming the summit-level of the mountains ­extends also to these islands, whose only valleys are those which open to the sea, and whose interiors are uninhabitable snowy tracts, mostly above the line of vegetation.

On approaching the islands, we had a fair view of the last outposts of the group ­the solid barriers against which the utmost fury of the Atlantic dashes in vain.  This side of Vaeroe lay the large island of Moskoe, between which and a large solitary rock in the middle of the strait dividing them, is the locality of the renowned Maelstrom ­now, alas! almost as mythical as the kraaken or great sea snake of the Norwegian fjords.  It is a great pity that the geographical illusions of our boyish days cannot retrain.  You learn that the noise of Niagara can be heard 120 miles off, and that “some Indians, in their canoes, have ventured down it, with safety.”  Well, one could give up the Indians without much difficulty; but it is rather discouraging to step out of the Falls Depot for the first time, within a quarter of a mile of the cataract, and hear no sound except “Cab sir?” “Hotel, sir?” So of the Maelstrom, denoted on my schoolboy map by a great spiral twist, which suggested to me a tremendous whirl of the ocean currents, aided by the information that “vessels cannot approach nearer than seven miles.”  In Olney, moreover, there was a picture of a luckless bark, half-way down the vortex.  I had been warming my imagination, as we came up the coast, with Campbell’s sonorous lines: 

     “Round the shores where runic Odin
       Howls his war-song to the gale;
     Round the isles where loud Lofoden
       Whirls to death the roaring whale;”

and, as we looked over the smooth water towards Moskoe, felt a renewed desire to make an excursion thither on out return from the north.  But, according to Captain Riis, and other modern authorities which I consulted, the Maelstrom has lost all its terrors and attractions.  Under certain conditions of wind and tide, an eddy is formed in the strait it is true, which may be dangerous to small boats ­but the place is by no means so much dreaded as the Salten Fjord, where the tide, rushing in, is caught in such a manner as to form a bore, as in the Bay of Fundy, and frequently proves destructive to the fishing craft.  It is the general opinion that some of the rocks which formerly made the Maelstrom so terrible have been worn away, or that some submarine convulsion has taken place which has changed the action of the waters; otherwise it is impossible to account for the reputation it once possessed.

It should also be borne in mind that any accident to a boat among these islands is more likely to prove disastrous than elsewhere, since there are probably not a score out of the twenty thousand Lofoden fishermen who pass half their lives on the water, who know how to swim.  The water is too cold to make bathing a luxury, and they are not sufficiently prepossessed in favour of cleanliness to make it a duty.  Nevertheless, they are bold sailors, in their way, and a tougher, hardier, more athletic class of men it would be difficult to find.  Handsome they are not, but quite the reverse, and the most of them have an awkward and uncouth air; but it is refreshing to look at their broad shoulders, their brawny chests, and the massive muscles of their legs and arms.  During the whole voyage, I saw but one man who appeared to be diseased.  Such men, I suspect, were the Vikings ­rough, powerful, ugly, dirty fellows, with a few primitive virtues, and any amount of robust vices.  We noticed, however, a marked change for the better in the common people, as we advanced northward.  They were altogether better dressed, better mannered, and more independent and intelligent, but with a hard, keen, practical expression of face, such as one finds among the shoremen of New-England.  The school system of Norway is still sadly deficient, but there is evidently no lack of natural capacity among these people.  Their prevailing vice is intemperance, which here, as in all other parts of the country, is beginning to diminish since restrictions have been placed upon the manufacture and sale of spirituous liquors, simultaneously with the introduction of cheap and excellent fermented drinks.  The statistics of their morality also show a better state of things than in the South.  There is probably no country population in the world where licentiousness prevails to such an extent as in the districts of Guldbrandsdal and Hedemark.

A voyage of four hours across the West Fjord brought us to the little village of Balstad, at the southern end of West-Vaagoe.  The few red, sod-roofed houses were built upon a rocky point, behind which were some patches of bright green pasture, starred with buttercups, overhung by a splendid peak of dark-red rock, two thousand feet in height.  It was a fine frontispiece to the Lofoden scenery which now opened before us.  Running along the coast of West and East Vaagoe, we had a continual succession of the wildest and grandest pictures ­thousand feet precipices, with turrets and needles of rock piercing the sky, dazzling snow-fields, leaking away in cataracts which filled the ravines with foam, and mazes of bald, sea-worn rocks, which seem to have been thrown down from the scarred peaks in some terrible convulsion of nature.  Here and there were hollows, affording stony pasturage for a few sheep and cows and little wooden fisher-huts stood on the shore in the arms of sheltered coves.  At the village of Svolvaer, which is built upon a pile of bare stones, we took on board a number of ladies in fashionable dresses, with bonnets on the backs of their heads and a sufficiency of cumbrous petticoats to make up for the absence of hoops, which have not yet got further north than Drontheim.  In seeing these unexpected apparitions emerge from such a wild corner of chaos I could not but wonder at the march of modern civilisation.  Pianos in Lapland, Parisian dresses among the Lofodens, billiard-tables in Hammerfest ­whither shall we turn to find the romance of the North!

We sailed, in the lovely nocturnal sunshine, through the long, river-like channel ­the Rasksund, I believe, it is called ­between the islands of East-Vaagoe and Hindoe, the largest of the Lofodens.  For a distance of fifteen miles the strait was in no place more than a mile in breadth, while it was frequently less than a quarter.  The smooth water was a perfect mirror, reflecting on one side the giant cliffs, with their gorges choked with snow, their arrowy pinnacles and white lines of falling water ­on the other, hills turfed to the summit with emerald velvet, sprinkled with pale groves of birch and alder, and dotted, along their bases, with the dwellings of the fishermen.  It was impossible to believe that we were floating on an arm of the Atlantic ­it was some unknown river, or a lake high up among the Alpine peaks.  The silence of these shores added to the impression.  Now and then a white sea-gull fluttered about the cliffs, or an eider duck paddled across some glassy cove, but no sound was heard:  there was no sail on the water, no human being on the shore.  Emerging at last from this wild and enchanting strait, we stood across a bay, opening southward to the Atlantic, to the port of Steilo, on one of the outer islands.  Here the broad front of the island, rising against the roseate sky, was one swell of the most glorious green, down to the very edge of the sea, while the hills of East-Vaagoe, across the bay, showed only naked and defiant rock, with summit-fields of purple-tinted snow.  In splendour of coloring, the tropics were again surpassed, but the keen north wind obliged us to enjoy it in an overcoat.

Toward midnight, the sun was evidently above the horizon, though hidden by intervening mountains.  Braisted and another American made various exertions to see it, such as climbing the foremast, but did not succeed until about one o’clock, when they were favoured by a break in the hills.  Although we had daylight the whole twenty-four hours, travellers do not consider that their duty is fulfilled unless they see the sun itself, exactly at midnight.  In the morning, we touched at Throndenaes, on the northern side of Hindoe, a beautiful bay with green and wooded shores, and then, leaving the Lofodens behind us, entered the archipelago of large islands which lines the coast of Finmark.  Though built on the same grand and imposing scale as the Lofodens, these islands are somewhat less jagged and abrupt in their forms, and exhibit a much more luxuriant vegetation.  In fact, after leaving the Namsen Fjord, near Drontheim, one sees very little timber until he reaches the parallel of 69 deg..  The long straits between Senjen and Qvalo and the mainland are covered with forests of birch and turfy slopes greener than England has ever shown.  At the same time the snow level was not more than 500 feet above the sea, and broad patches lay melting on all the lower hills.  This abundance of snow seems a singular incongruity, when you look upon the warm summer sky and the dark, mellow, juicy green of the shores.  One fancies that he is either sailing upon some lofty inland lake, or that the ocean-level in these latitudes must be many thousand feet higher than in the temperate zone.  He cannot believe that he is on the same platform with Sicily and Ceylon.

After a trip up the magnificent Maans Fjord, and the sight of some sea-green glaciers, we approached Tromsoe, the capital of Finmark.  This is a town of nearly 3000 inhabitants, on a small island in the strait between Qvalo and the mainland.  It was just midnight when we dropped anchor, but, although the sun was hidden by a range of snowy hills in the north, the daylight was almost perfect.  I immediately commenced making a sketch of the harbour, with its fleet of coasting vessels.  Some Russian craft from Archangel, and a Norwegian cutter carrying six guns, were also at anchor before the town.  Our French traveller, after amusing himself with the idea of my commencing a picture at sunset and finishing it at sunrise, started for a morning ramble over the hills.  Boats swarmed around the steamer; the coal-lighters came off, our crew commenced their work, and when the sun’s disc appeared, before one o’clock, there was another day inaugurated.  The night had vanished mysteriously, no one could tell how.