CHAPTER IV
At last! on the 23rd of August, the St Ebba was ready to be taken away from the slip, and the town, and the noise of the builders’ yard, and one morning, with rain blotting out the grey stone hills and threshing the trees, and the country a swamp, Henriksen, Mrs Henriksen and the writer went into town for the last time about St Ebba’s affairs, motoring in our whale-launch nine knots through the spray. It shows how hard some people are to please, for Mrs Henriksen vowed she preferred her recollection of the motion of a Rolls Royce in Berwickshire on a dead smooth road. Fancy comparing metal springs and the hard high road to the silky rush over spuming surge down the fir-clad fiord, the wind right aft, and each wave racing to catch us.
So we took St Ebba from town and the grime of the quayside and cleaned her decks and laid her alongside a wooden pier a few miles from Tonsberg, brought a flexible pipe on board and filled her tanks with sixty tons of solar oil from an oil refinery, enough to take her at one ton a day to Australia without a call! That went on board in eight and a half hours, one man on watch with his hands in his pockets. How different from the work and dirt of coaling!
Then clang goes the bell for stand by—let go, fore, and aft—half-speed astern and we back away from the pier, with Henriksen on the bridge, our crew young and nimble as kittens and our young mate or styrmand forward alert and the picture of smartness. He is twenty-one, is Henriksen’s brother, and has held master’s certificate for three years.
Round we come with the wind out of shelter into rougher sea—half-speed ahead—full speed—and away we go, our first trip with no one but ourselves aboard, no pilot or town ties—ready for a year at sea.
But we have arrangements to make on board yet, arranging lines, and guns, and testing them, and a lot of small work with wood which we will do ourselves down the fiord opposite Henriksen’s home, a sheltered nook with fir-trees round, five miles from Tonsberg. Knarberg they call this little bay or arm at Kjolo, in Nottero, where long ago Viking ships were built, where Henriksen’s father sailed from, and his father before him in the days before steam. Now we revive the past glories with a split-new up-to-date six-cylinder Diesel motor-whaler!
We slide down the fiord before the wind and rain and squalls, smiling with pleasure at our freedom from the wharf-side. With a foremast tackle the port anchor is heaved up and hung over the side—the chain stopped by a patent catch; it is the first time we have gone through the manœuvre in the St Ebba, so even anchoring is full of interest. And in a few minutes more we swing to windward in the narrow Knarberg and drop port anchor and swing to starboard and drop starboard anchor, drop astern and lie where all the winds can blow and never move us.
One anchor might have been enough. But, as Henriksen said to his young brother: “Styrmand, you remember, father always put down two anchors, we will do the same.”
Then we open out the foresail and spread it over the boom above the main hatch, and our little crew gets to work, sheltered from the rain, shifting and arranging our goods and chattels below, laying timber balks over the tanks under our main hold so as to form a flooring to support the weight of casks and spare gear, furnace, anvils, lance shafts, etc., that must lie on top.
A glow comes up from the red-painted ironwork on to the faces of the crew that is almost like the effect of sunlight.
Our whaling lines we have to stow away carefully; it takes eight men with a tackle to lift one hank of line on deck, one hundred and twenty fathoms of five-inch rope. And there are stacks of fascinating harpoons, large and small, to be arranged.
We have adjusted the compass to-day by bearings, a long process requiring a specialist down from Tonsberg. The operation gave us a good chance to test our engines—so much backing and going ahead and turning in small circles, just the manœuvres we will require in pursuit of whales.
More homely work consisted in getting potatoes on board from Larsen’s farm—a retired American naval man—whose farm adjoins Henriksen’s. He has cut the spruce shafts in our wood for lances, light and pliable, carefully chosen for the quality of each stem, and so as to leave room for growth of the younger trees. And we have cut down a venerable oak, for we need a stout hole for our anvil, and other smaller pieces for toggles for whale-flensing. Anvil and forge are of goodly size, for we shall have heavy ironwork making straight the big harpoons (three-and-a-half-inch diameter) after they have been tied into knots by some strong rorqual. A turning lathe we must have, and an infinity of blocks, bolts, chains, and shackles. Veritably our little one-hundred-and-ten-foot motor, sailing, tank, whaling, sealing, cookery ship is multum in parvo, and parva sed apta.
We have got our ammunition on board. We brought it from Tonsberg yesterday ourselves, on our Bolinder launch, so saved freight and fright! for the local boat-owners were a little shy. Henriksen packed the powder in tins on the floor of our launch in the stern sheets, rifles and cartridges on top, and he himself with his pipe going sat on top of all. I think he smoked his pipe to ease my mind, to make me feel quite sure that he thought it was quite safe, now the ammunition is being stowed away under my bunk! Two thousand express rifle cartridges with solid bullets we have, for we will call on the sea-elephants at a seldom-visited island we know of just north of the Antarctic ice. One load we should surely get in a few weeks’ time: their blubber is about eight inches thick, and is worth £28 per ton; a load of one hundred and sixty tons (I think we could carry as much as that at a pinch) at £28 per ton will equal £4480, not a bad nest egg, and why not two or three loads in the season, not to speak of the excitement of landing through surf and the struggle through tussock grass. Man versus beast, with the chances in favour of man, but not always; men I know have been drowned, and others nearly drowned, in the kelp and surf that surrounds these islands in the far South Atlantic. Once I had to swim in it, and do not wish to do so again, and it’s one bite from a sea-elephant or sea-leopard and good-bye to your arm or leg.
Stern View of the “St. Ebba” at Tonsberg
The “St. Ebba” in the Fiord of the Vikings
We now have salted ox on board, oxen grown at Kjolo and salted down last winter by Henriksen; and Larsen, the neighbour, brought us vegetables. He is almost a giant, and as he stood in our flat-bottomed dory with two men rowing he made a picture to be remembered, for he was surrounded by lance shafts, sacks of potatoes, red carrots and white onions, so that the dory was down to the water’s edge! I prayed she might not upset. Larsen himself stood amidships with three enormous green balloons in his arms—such giant cabbages I have never seen before—each seven-and-a-half kilos (fifteen pounds), in weight, the result of whale guano.
The children of the neighbourhood played on our decks; Henriksen’s two boys and daughter soon knew every corner of the ship, just as he learned every part of his father’s vessel when he lay at Kjolo, only in those days there were higher masts to climb, and yards to lie out on, and tops to pause in, to admire the view and get courage to go higher. Our crow’s nest on our pole-foremast is the highest they can attain to on the St Ebba. The aftermast—or mainmast, I suppose I should call it, as we are schooner rigged—is of hollow iron cut short above the top (this is technical, not a bull); this forms the exhaust from the engine. You see only a little vapour, still, it does seem a trifle odd even to see faint smoke coming out of a mast! We will rig up topmasts in the South Seas, and have topsails in fine winds and the Trades, when we do not need the motor, and will then look quite conventional.
Here is a photograph of some of the children that play on our decks and round about the St Ebba in boats. They are of the sea. “It is in the blood,” as Mrs Henriksen replied to me when I asked her how she got accustomed to her husband’s long voyages and absence from home. It is their tradition to go to sea, and Elinor, Henriksen’s daughter, will be surprised if her brothers William and Henrik do not follow their father to sea in a few years. In ancient days it was the same here, womenfolk thought little of the men who had not done four or five years’ Viking cruising, gathering gear from their own coast or from their neighbours’.
We hope that this Monday, the 22nd of September, will be our last day on shore, and it rains and rains, and we long for the shelter of board-ship where there is no soppy ground or puddles, and there will be the fun of going somewhere instead of inhabiting this one spot of earth for days, till days become weeks and weeks months for ever and for ever without getting anywhere farther.
We have now almost everything on board, books, charts, bags of clothes, but we have still to wait for some spare parts for the engine from the makers at Stockholm, which they advise us to get before going on a southern voyage. We intended to have got away in time to do a preliminary canter, as it were, for whales up north to the edge of the ice—not into it—for bottle-nose and finners, so as thoroughly to test our engine and crew before going to the Southern Seas. Now it is too late for that, so we shall only go “north-about” round Shetland, where we may be in time for the last of the whaling season, and then proceed south.
The spare parts of the motor arrived, but it rains and blows a fierce gale from S.W., and we could get out of our fiord but no farther against such a gale, so we cool our heels and Henriksen works at accounts, a serious matter. It is a new departure, a captain acting in so many capacities, manager, navigator, harpooneer, etc.
This is my fifth week of waiting here, the most wearisome time I have ever spent in my life. So much for whale-fishing and its preliminaries! The time actually spent in connection with the ship’s affairs passes pleasantly enough, and curiously the sense of weariness goes, once on board. Perhaps getting off clay soil on to salt water accounts for this.
The sea-water in the fiord here stands abnormally high all these days. It came running in two days ago in calm weather. So outside the North Sea and Skagerak we knew it must be blowing hard. To-day, though finer, the fiord water still remains high, so we know from that and the newspapers that there is strong southerly wind outside.
For two days past a cloud has hung over us. Henriksen found a deficiency in his accounts, found that the outfit for the St Ebba cost 10,000 kroner more than the receipts vouched for, and went over and over accounts, till yesterday we made another pilgrimage to Tonsberg and interviewed a banker and said politely, “How the deuce can this be?” And he cast his eye over his account-book and found his clerk had merely omitted a figure in addition; a trifle of 10,000 kroner = £550! So we came away smiling, but it gave us a bit of a shake, rather an aggravating and superfluous piece of worry added to vexatious delays and bad weather.
We motored back in the launch much relieved, and on reaching the St Ebba practised big harpoon-gun drill. Henriksen and I are the only men on board who are familiar with its workings, but one or two of the crew have used the smaller bottle-nose or Right whale guns. It was interesting watching Henriksen’s demonstration to all hands. Smartly they picked up the drill; quickly, for all of them have served in the naval reserve or army, and anything to do with a tumble about or small craft they are familiar with from childhood to old age. Yesterday you could readily fancy one of these old Viking fights, for a boatload of ten small boys was fighting another boatload, a free fight, legs and arms in the air, a fearful turmoil, and two boatloads of yellow-haired girls smilingly looked on.
“Old Man Henriksen,” the oldest of the Tonsberg inhabitants, came down the fiord from Tonsberg to-night to wish us God-speed. He sailed down in his cutter single-handed, shot into the wind round our port bow, jibbed and swung alongside round our stern; seventy-eight years old and sailing his home-built, prize-winning twenty-footer as well as the best of his juniors. On board we had the tiniest skaal, which finished our last bottle of whisky, the remnant of our hospitality in the trial trip; we are drawing our beer and whisky teeth, as the sailors say, before taking the high seas.
Then he went off in the twilight, as the lights began to show in the gloom of the pines on shore, alone, sailing single-handed, against the wishes of the family, who say he is old enough and rich enough to employ a crew. He will spend the night alone on Faarman Holme, at the club he started there; in the morning he will dip his flag to us as we pass.
We all go for our last night on shore, walking home in the dark. Not all—I forgot. William and Henrik are curled up in their father’s bunk in great glee at being left to look after St Ebba, along with the crew for its last night in the fiord of the Vikings.
