Through Arctic Lapland

It seems customary in a book of travel to make frequent allusions to other voyagers who have journeyed over the same ground, or at least the same district, and to make constant references to them, and give copious quotations from their works. Of course we ought to have gone to the British Museum before starting on our travel, and there read up all books which in the least bore upon the country which we were going to visit. We omitted to do this, firstly, because we preferred to observe things for ourselves, from our own individual standpoint, unprejudiced by the way in which other people had observed them; and, secondly, from the far more potent reason that we made our actual start in a great hurry, and had little enough time for any preparations whatever.
However, on our return to England we thought well to check the information we had garnered. So we duly provided ourselves with readers’ tickets for that institution, and went to the British Museum Library, and got down every book which seemed in any way to bear upon the country we had wandered over, regardless of the tongue in which it was written. It was a surprise to us to learn (and may we add that the surprise was not without its pleasant savour?) that of all the volumes in that collection not one covered the route which we took during summer through Arctic Lapland. Many had gone near it, from a gentleman of bygone date who wrote in Latin, to Mr. Paul du Chaillu, who chats about the larger part of the Scandinavian Peninsula. But we seemed to have stumbled across the one bit of Europe which has not been pilloried on paper at one time or another, and so we here venture to take up a couple of note-books which were originally made for personal gratification, and amplify them into a volume of letterpress and sketches which may haply interest others.

Note. —River in Norsk is Elv; in Qfensk, Joki. Lake in Qfensk is Järvi. J is pronounced as Y.


The wharves of Katherine Dock were black with many thousands of people, and all their eyes converged on a little auxiliary barque which was working out of the basin under her own gentle steam. The barque carried a white tub at her mainmast-head, was rigged with single topsails, bore many white double-ended boats upturned on skids amidships, and was decorated with sundry other matters which even to the shore eye would seem strange in London river. Stacked in her waist were bags of coal, crates, packing cases, a couple of ice-anchors, a tangle of trellis-work sledges, and other quaint trifles which had not yet been struck below.