Owing to the fog we dared not go too near land, so kept out to sea, till at last, towards morning, the fog lifted somewhat, and the pilot found his bearings between Farsund and Hummerdus. We put into Lister Fjord, intending to anchor there and get into better sea trim; but as the weather improved we went on our way. It was not till the afternoon that we steered into Ekersund, owing to thick weather and a stiff breeze, and anchored in Hovland’s Bay, where our pilot, Hovland,[1] lived. Next morning the boat davits, etc., were put in good working order. The Fram, however, was too heavily laden to be at all easy in a seaway; but this we could not alter. What we had we must keep, and if we only got everything on deck shipshape and properly lashed, the sea could not do us much harm, however rough it might be; for we knew well enough that ship and rigging would hold out.
Adolf Juell
(From a photograph taken in December, 1893)
It was late in the evening of the last day of June when we rounded Kvarven and stood in for Bergen in the gloom of the sullen night. Next morning when I came on deck Vågen lay clear and bright in the sun, all the ships being gayly decked out with bunting from topmost to deck. The sun was holding high festival in the sky—Ulriken, Flöiren, and Lövstakken sparkled and glittered, and greeted me as of old. It is a marvellous place, that old Hanseatic town!
In the evening I was to give a lecture, but arrived half an hour too late. For just as I was dressing to go a number of bills poured in, and if I was to leave the town as a solvent man I must needs pay them, and so the public perforce had to wait. But the worst of it was that the saloon was full of those everlastingly inquisitive tourists. I could hear a whole company of them besieging my cabin door while I was dressing, declaring “they must shake hands with the doctor!”[2] One of them actually peeped in through the ventilator at me, my secretary told me afterwards. A nice sight she must have seen, the lovely creature! Report says she drew her head back very quickly. Indeed, at every place where we put in we were looked on somewhat as wild animals in a menagerie. For they peeped unceremoniously at us in our berths as if we had been bears and lions in a den, and we could hear them loudly disputing among themselves as to who was who, and whether those nearest and dearest to us whose portraits hung on the walls could be called pretty or not. When I had finished my toilette I opened the door cautiously and made a rush through the gaping company. “There he is—there he is!”[3] they called to each other as they tumbled up the steps after me. It was no use; I was on the quay and in the carriage long before they had reached the deck.
At 8 o’clock there was a great banquet, many fine speeches, good fare and excellent wine, pretty ladies, music, and dancing till far into the night.
Next morning at 11 o’clock—it was Sunday—in bright, sunshiny weather, we stood northward over Bergen Fjord, many friends accompanying us. It was a lovely, never-to-be-forgotten summer day. In Herlö Fjord, right out by the skerries, they parted from us, amid wavings of hats and pocket-handkerchiefs; we could see the little harbor boat for a long while with its black cloud of smoke on the sparkling surface of the water. Outside, the sea rolled in the hazy sunlight; and within lay the flat Mangerland, full of memories for me of zoological investigations in fair weather and foul, years and years ago. Here it was that one of Norway’s most famous naturalists, a lonely pastor far removed from the outer world, made his great discoveries. Here I myself first groped my way along the narrow path of zoological research.
The “Fram” leaving Bergen