“Oh! to keep off the amphibia and sea-monsters; they swarm upon this coast.”
As he spoke, the old gentleman contorted his countenance in such a manner that he, at all events, let alone the diver, was frightful to behold. Such was the effect of the mere thought of the amphibia and sea-monsters. Fortunately, his head was covered, or I can’t answer for it that each particular hair would not have stood on end like to the quills of the fretful porcupine. It struck me that he must have been reading of Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon hero, and his friend Breca, and how they had naked swords in their hands to defend them against the sea-monsters, and how Beowulf served the creatures out near the bottom of the sea (sae-grunde néah).
At Arendal, where the vessel stops for some hours, I take a stroll with a Norwegian schoolboy. Abundance of sycamore and horse-chesnut, arrayed in foliage of the most vivid hue, grow in the pretty little ravines about this Norwegian Venice, as it is called.
“What is the name of that tree in Norsk,” I asked of my companion, pointing to a sycamore.
“Ask, i.e. ash.”
“And of that?” inquired I, pointing to a horse-chesnut.
“Ask,” was again the reply.
Close to the church was the dead-house, where corpses are placed in winter, when the snow prevents the corpse being carried to the distant cemetery. In the little land-locked harbour I see a quantity of small skiffs, here called “pram,” which are to be had new for the small price of three dollars, or thirteen shillings and sixpence English. The vicinity of this place is the most famous in Norway for mineralogical specimens. Arendal has, I believe, the most tonnage and largest-sized vessels of any port in Norway. Ship-building is going forward very briskly all along the coast since the alteration in the English navigation laws. At Grimstead, which we passed, I observed eight vessels on the stocks: at Stavanger there are twenty.
The reader is perhaps not aware that, reckoning the fjords, there is a sea-board of no less than eight thousand English miles in Norway—i.e., there is to every two and a half square miles of country a proportion of about one mile of sea-coast. This superfluity of brine will become more apparent by comparing the state of things in other countries. According to Humboldt, the proportion in Africa is one mile of sea-coast to one hundred and forty-two square miles of land. In Asia, one to one hundred. In North America, one to fifty-seven. In Europe, one to thirty-one.
With such an abundance of “water, water everywhere”—I mean salt, not fresh—one would hardly expect to meet with persons travelling from home for the sake of sea-bathing. And yet such is the case. On board is a lady going to the sea-baths of Sandefjord. She tells me there is quite a gathering of fashionables there at times. Last year, the wife of the Crown Prince, a Dutch woman by birth, was among the company. She spent most of her time, I understood, in sea-fishing. Besides salt-water baths, there are also baths of rotten seaweed, which are considered quite as efficacious for certain complaints as the mud-baths of Germany. Landing at Langesund, I start for Skien on board the little steamer Traffic.