Our greetings come, from isle and strand,
From forest, hill and dale.
Wherever Finland’s folks may rest,
Their debt for all they value best,
In love to thee they pay.”
This excursion into Swedish history is longer than I intended, and has prevented me from telling you before that I left Stockholm last night on one of the delightful little steamers that ply across the Gulf of Bothnia from Sweden’s capital to Åbo, the ancient capital of Finland.
It is a charming sail. Much of the time we were within sight of land, and some of the most picturesque land in the world. A perfect swarm of islands of all sizes and shapes guard the coasts both of Finland and Sweden. Some of these islands are tree-clad down to the water’s edge; others are bare, gaunt, smooth rocks, whose surface has been washed by ten thousand storms—I was about to say ten thousand tides when I remembered that the Baltic is almost a tideless sea. It is a sea, too, that is being constantly conquered by the land, for, through some unexplained action of mighty subterranean forces, without volcanic shock or earthquake tremor, the land both of the Swedish and Finnish shores is gradually rising. On the northern end of the Baltic the land gains on the water at the rate of about four feet in a hundred years, and that the sea is at a very different level from what it was some thousands of years ago is shown by the fact that the remains of viking ships are found on the tops of very considerable hills at some distance from the shores.
After sailing across a strip of clear water free from islands, between which we thread our way for three hours after leaving Stockholm, we come to Mariehamn, about halfway between the two shores. Then comes another little stretch of clear water, and then another great archipelago like the one on the Swedish shore, and between hundreds of little islands and great islands our steamer makes its way to its berth in the port of Åbo.
Very much like its neighboring shore on the opposite side is the approach to Åbo. Some of the islands are mere bare rocks, sticking their heads only a few feet above the surface of the sea, while others contain farms and forests and a considerable population. Many beautiful villas adorn some of these islands, and a rare place they afford for a holiday or a summer residence.
But the Finnish shore can boast islands enough to furnish one for every day of a decade, and before the next decade is over very likely some new ones will arise above the surface of the water, like the one which had almost come to the surface in 1907, but not near enough to be charted, or to prevent the wreckage of the Czar’s yacht upon it.