Through Arctic Lapland

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

Happily for ourselves a ceremony was taking place outside which began to draw off the audience. Between the red house and the lake shore was a building of blackened logs, from the doorway of which smoke had been issuing ever since our arrival. It was a Finnish vapour-bath, and when it was heated up, our carriers and the entire population of Ischinlisvuoni went in in squads to enjoy it.

The Finn of the North seldom or never anoints his person with water in the ordinary way. But still, on the whole, as back-block tribes go, one could not call him an uncleanly person. Almost every farm has its bath-house, and it is very rarely that a fortnight passes without this being heated and used. The bath at Ischinlisvuoni was typical of all the lot, for the pattern varies but little. It was a house of logs, twenty feet by fifteen, and some eighteen feet up to the pitch of the roof. Along one side, half-way up to the eaves, there ran a broad shelf of smoothed wood. The floor was of beaten earth, and at one corner beside the door was a large bee-hive-shaped mound of rubble stones, with a fireplace in the middle to admit burning logs. This primitive stove is heated, and the smoke either escapes by the doorway, or remains inside and blackens the roof. Gradually the air of the place warms, and then water is thrown on to the glowing stones to saturate it with steam. The bathers undress at the dwelling-house, and run across the intervening ground in their birthday attire. Both sexes and all ages bathe together. They douche with cold water first, stand about on the earthen floor for a minute or so, and then climb on to the raised shelf and lie down. Every one has a green birch of sweet-smelling Arctic willow shoots, with which he (or she) switches his neighbour, and so stimulates the circulation. And there they stay for twenty minutes or half an hour. Then out they rush, and if there is snow on the ground they roll on it, or if not, they dip into the coldest water attainable; and then they go back into the house again to cool down.

All through that evening, and till three o’clock the next morning, the bathers in every stage of undress, from the complete to the partial, were sitting about in the kitchen which was next our room. It never seemed to strike any of them that the sight for alien eyes might be a trifle quaint. At the great white Russian stove a woman was cooking circular cakes of rye with a hole in the middle, and threading them on a stick as fast as they were baked. Another woman was roasting coffee, and a man beside her was grinding the beans as they were browned. Half-clad children were sprawling about the floor, and two or three were asleep in a corner. A naked man was contemplatively browsing on tobacco before the stove, and a woman was treading at a spinning-wheel in the middle of the room. By the window our two boatmen squatted on the ground with palm and needle, mending the split sail, and beside them the humpback was playing jigs on a cheap accordion. These were all Finns. The only two Lapps in the place were supping in a corner, off curdled milk and flinty rye cakes.

Ethnographically the Lapps and the Finns are not very distinct races, except in the matter of height. The nose of the district is usually turned up at the point, the cheek-bones are high, and the skull is well drawn towards the back. But in the item of clothes they are always different. The Lapp wears on his back in summer the distinctive matsoreo, which is an outer garment of gray, brown, or electric blue, closely woven cloth, that reaches down to the knees. It has a high standing collar more or less profusely embroidered, with other decorations in colour on both back and front. It is belted about the middle by a broad surcingle, from which depends the inevitable knife and tar-bottle, and the more slack there is bunched up forward and aft, the greater dandy is the wearer. The nether limbs are clad in tight sarre of ivory-white flannel; and on the feet are lappellinin, which are short roomy boots peaked up at the toe, stuffed with grass, and drawn up over the ankle and made fast over the ends of the sarre by a narrow red figured bandage, after the fashion of the East Indian putty. The head-gear varies. The orthodox square-topped cap of cloth with its head-band of fur is rare, and usually appears only in winter or on festivals. It is picturesque, hot, and expensive, and for daily use a soft round hat of felt is preferred, or for sea work a sou’-wester. And the outer clothing of the women is very much the same, except that the matsoreo is a trifle longer, and the head-gear is merely a simple handkerchief. The winter garments of skins differ a good deal from these, but they will be spoken of in their place.

The Finn, on the other hand, is much more ordinary in his attire and much less picturesque. Take away his high boots and he might be almost anybody. The boots, however, are certainly a feature. They are peaked at the toe like the Lapp’s, heelless, and have soles and sides all in a piece. The leg part is of soft leather, and can be drawn up above mid-thigh if wished; but it is generally worn telescoped, with the baggy top well below the knee-cap, after the fashion of mediæval villains in Surrey-side melodramas. For the rest, he is clothed in a coat, waistcoat, and trousers, scanty of buttons, and with a cut suggestive of a Leeds clothing factory; carries a thin moustache; and more infrequently than not wears some physical deformity. His woman-kind are distinctly his better half, and probably keep him from starvation. They are bustling and active, utterly devoid of any pretence to figure, and as a rule gratuitously ugly. They affect, in the summer, garments of checked cotton, which they weave themselves, and though they also wear the high boots, the tops of these are discreetly hidden by a skirt of decent length.

We smoked complacently deep into that sunlit night, and thought with pleasure of the sail which was to come amongst the islands of the great lake. But we were not done with our old carriers yet. They wanted payment, and the squint-eyed man came in to say so. We had the money ready for him, counted out, in rouble notes. It lay trimly in a heap. We pointed it out. He inspected, and at once began to object. He desired payment in kroner or marks; and not having either, we could not well give it to him. We pointed out (using the words of the Russian consul at Vardö) that in Russian territory the rouble was legal tender. He seemed partially to grasp this, and suggested exchange at the rate of one rouble (which is worth some two-and-a-penny, English) for the Norwegian krone (which may be valued at thirteen-pence-halfpenny), and became abusive when we declined to fall in with his ideas. He was not a person to whom we owed any gratitude or much consideration, but I think he was surprised at the pace with which he was ejected from the room.

The community here at Ischinlisvuoni had reindeer, which they pastured in the forest, but they did not meddle with these much during the summer months. Indeed they looked upon them much as capital to be drawn upon in time of need during the winter. During the six months of day they lived, to a large extent, on the produce of the cows, the curdled milk, butter, and butter milk, eked out with fish from the lake. But these fish, with some natural perversity, they never ate fresh. The spoils of the nets were always gutted, split open, perfunctorily dried, and then devoured raw in a partly decayed state. There is something in the theory: salmon, boiled or fried, is the most nauseating dish in the world if one has too much of it, as witness the bargain in the old days of the Newcastle apprentices, that they were not to dine off salmon more than twice a week. Salmon, well kippered, and eaten in thin slices, raw, does not cloy one nearly so much. But when the kippering is imperfect, not to say sketchy; or when the fish is not kippered at all, but merely more or less dried, and, moreover, is not salmon or any of his relatives, but some little soft, white fish like a sloppy trout; then the theory falls to the ground.

Their fishing-tackle for the summer was simple. It consisted merely of short small-mesh nets with floats of birch-bark rolls coiled along the head rope, and pebble sinkers to the foot; and the catches were small. It was in the dark months that they were more successful. Then they were able to spear by torchlight, and secured the heavier fish. We saw the apparatus used lying on foreshore. It consisted of an iron cresset (parrila) with four spear-headed prongs and a long curved iron stem, which ended with a fork of wood to make fast to the canoe’s bow. Long pitch-pine splinters are laid lengthwise between the prongs, and lit at the outer end. The wind, or the canoe’s motion through the air, keeps them blazing. The paddler sits in the stern facing forward. The fisher stands in the bows behind the parrila, watching for the fish as they are attracted upwards by the glare. His weapon is the arrina, which is very like the grains we use here at home for spearing eels. The shaft is of wood, eight feet long, and fitting into a socket at the head. There are six spears to the head, the outer two the heaviest, all barbed inwards, and all converging from the bottom inwards. It is a formidable implement, and once one gets the knack, very deadly. But it is no child’s play to acquire that said knack, as many an energetic British poacher can vouch. I fancy, though, that the average fisherman from these sporting islands would prove himself pretty deadly if he could take his own tools to the lakes and rivers of Arctic Lapland.

We did not go to sleep that night very confident of a peaceful start down-lake on the morrow. The squint-eyed man and his friends had been making irruptions into our room at intervals all through the evening, noisily, and flatly refusing to be satisfied with their lawful wage. We, on the other hand, had quite made up our minds not to pay three shillings for one, and so expected that next morning they would try to put in force the local equivalent of a ne exeat regno. In which case there would be trouble. Because come what might we were firmly determined to get under way.