Ladies, and owner, and shore folk, had come down the river to give her a final “send off,” but these left at Greenhythe with the mud pilot, and from that began an easy voyage to the rim of the Polar Sea. The Windward was to go North as much as possible under her own canvas; but as some steam would certainly be required for head winds and other emergencies, she was to call in at Vardö at the entrance to the White Sea to rebunker, so as to have the largest possible supply of good Welsh steam coal for her final battle with the Northern ice. To this port, in the north-easternmost angle of Arctic Norway, the Windward carried as passengers Mr. Cecil Hayter, who drew pictures for this book, and another man, who wrote it.
Now, to say that we two had a vague notion of what was ahead of us was putting the matter mildly. We knew many of those concerned in the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition, and had always had an interest in the achievements of the Windward; and one night in somebody’s billiard-room we had talked vaguely over “going North and doing something up there” ourselves. We imagined this something might be to explore the Petchora or one of the lesser-known Northern Siberian rivers, to make the acquaintance of the Samoyede in his native choom, and incidentally to do some big game shooting. We knew remarkably little about the country, and so were quite unfettered in making some very appetising plans. This was six months before the Windward sailed, and though we met two or three times in the interval, the matter was only mentioned casually, and with merely a dilettante interest.
Finally, when Mr. Alfred Harmsworth wired “Are you going North with Windward?” and got a simultaneous reply of “Delighted” from each of us, the yacht was booked to sail in fifty hours’ time, and any preparations we wished to make were naturally hustled.
[Midnight] among the Lofötens.
When we actually did get under weigh, our outfit consisted of one inferior double-barrelled 12-bore shot-gun by an anonymous maker, one good Marlin ’45 repeating rifle carrying a long bullet, a small assortment of tinned foods and loaded cartridges, an imaginative map, the clothes we stood up in, and a brown canvas, seaman’s bag apiece containing sleeping sack, tooth-brush, spare shirt, and foreign office passport with a hieroglyphical Russian visé. But if our equipment was slender, the plan of our expedition was at least definite and concise. The Petchora and North Siberia were to be left undisturbed in their accustomed darkness. Even the virgin delights of Novaya Zemblya (to which island a steamer was alleged to be on the point of starting from Archangel) were to be left for another time. We were going to see the Lapp in that unmeddled-with country, Arctic Lapland.
It had been my luck to live en famille with some herder Lapps once before in North-Western Norway. I had some elk shooting and some fishing up there, and I came across the tribe one day poaching red char from one of my own hired lakes. I kept silence about my temporary proprietorship, and assisted to steal my own fish, after which I encamped with them for seven days, sleeping à la belle étoile, and providing my own nutriment. The tribe possessed some three hundred head of tame reindeer, and as my available luggage at the time was a Kodak camera, I managed to get some rather good photographs of the deer at close quarters.
It was these photographs which suggested going to see the Lapp in his own domains. The map showed the position of Lapland in large letters, and for the sake of definiteness we made up our minds to cross it from north to south, and take to the seas again at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia. That should be our expedition. It was delightfully simple in its scope and comprehensiveness.
Drawing from our own ignorance, and from the united ignorance of others (most freely and generously bestowed), we mapped out the details of the campaign with glibness and ease. At Vardö we were to purchase furs to wear and horses to ride. Russian horses, or rather ponies, they were to be: our friends told us all about them. And then we had merely to procure a guide and interpreter, and set off. There was a road along the north shore of the Varanger fjord to Vadsö, and from there a bridle path of sorts led to Næsseby and Puolnak, and down through the country by Lake Enare to Kittila, where it met a broad road which continued down by the side of the Torneo River as far as the coast. We knew all this because the large scale map which we bought at the best map shop in London said it was so. And there were plenty of villages—the map marked them with clearness and precision. At nights we would either sleep out in our furs and blanket sacks, or sleep in the villages.