In these high latitudes, with their combination of ocean and mountains, one must expect cloudy and rainy weather. At times mist, clouds, and rain shut out all the beautiful scenery, and it was very disappointing; yet many views we lost going north, on account of bad weather, we enjoyed on our way back.
At Bodö we left the “island belt” and crossed the wide Vest fjord, where we soon began to feel the motion of the sea, to the Lofoden Islands, grouped in a curve resembling a horn. These islands are a bewildering collection of mountains, straits and bays, while thousands of rocky islets form, as it were, a fringe to the larger islands.
The view of the Lofoden Islands as we approached across the fjord is magnificent; long lines of mountains rise directly from the sea between three and four thousand feet high, their tops ending in sharply outlined pinnacles, with patches of snow on the summits and sides, and often a cloud floating upon the highest peaks. The mountains are great masses of dark rock wholly destitute of vegetation, except a covering of green moss which is luminous especially in damp weather.
All day we cruised along the islands, calling at the little fishing hamlets to leave mail, freight, and passengers. At a small settlement called Kabelvaag, as we threaded our way among a maze of rocky reefs and islands, we got aground, and it was nearly an hour before we were floating again; the water was so clear that we could distinctly see the rocks and ledges on the bottom, until it was stirred up by the steamer in trying to get free. At Svolvaer the scenery reached its climax; the mountains rose almost straight out of the water, their rugged walls of rock seamed and chiseled by nature into weird forms, with scarcely room at their base for the little collection of fishers’ huts and fish-packing houses, dwarfing everything by comparison with their lofty summits, thousands of feet high.
The Lofoden Islands are famous for their fisheries, as well as for their imposing scenery. From the middle of January until the middle of April millions of cod come to spawn off the east coast of the islands, and are caught with net and line by the twenty-five thousand fishermen, who flock there from all parts of Norway. The average annual yield is estimated to be twenty millions of fish, and some years as many as twenty-nine millions have been taken. Nearly six thousand boats congregate at the three principal fishing banks, a mile from the islands, for the winter fishing, which is often attended with great loss of life, when a gale prevents the boats from returning to the islands and drives them across the wide and stormy fjord, capsizing them before they reach the mainland.
The fish are nicely cleaned, split, and hung upon long wooden racks to dry, and others are slightly salted, carried to the mainland, where the atmosphere is less damp, and spread upon the rocks. They are shipped all over Europe, a great quantity being sent to Spain and Portugal. The vessels bring back Spanish and Portuguese wines on their return voyage at very cheap rates, and as a result you can buy port and sherry wines cheaper in Norway than in any other country in Europe, except where the wines are made.
Upon several of the islands factories have been erected, and the cods’ heads, which are first dried on the rocks, are pulverized and converted into fertilizers; at many places we saw great stacks and piles of fish drying on the rocks, and heaps of cods’ heads awaiting transportation to the factory, whose proximity was made known by the penetrating odor, sufficiently strong to travel to the North Pole.
The Lofoden Islands are also the seat of the great cod liver oil industry, and the choicest brands of this life-renewing cordial are sent on their errands of mercy, broadcast over the world.
The steamer bears us amid new and striking views of the grand scenery of the islands and also of the mainland, where across the fjord, which grows narrower as we go northward, long ranges of snow mountains in ever-changing forms rise from the water, and we are within a circle of giant peaks of savage and stupendous grandeur.