Long, however, it was before they neared it,—hour after hour; and Birger’s everlasting wheels went grinding on, and the mountains seemed no higher and no plainer than they were when the Parson had first descried them. But the day had become much more enjoyable, the wind had moderated, and the swell was less felt, as the land began to afford some protection.
The Captain and his friend Birger had by this time established themselves on the break of the poop, with their sketch-books in their hands, nominally to sketch the outline of the land, really to caricature the Russian magnates during their hours of marine weakness. While Monsieur Simonet, one of the numerous tutors, a venturesome Frenchman, climbed warily up the main shrouds to get a better view, creeping up step by step, ascertaining the strength of each rattlin before he ventured his weight upon it, and holding on to the shrouds like grim Death. Quietly and warily stole after him the Mate, with a couple of stout foxes hitched round his left arm.
“Faith,” said Birger, “they are going to make a spread-eagle of him. Well, that is kind; it will prepare him for his new country; it is in compliment to Russia, I suppose, that they turn him into the national device.”
But the Mate had reckoned without his host. The Frenchman made a capital fight for it, and in the energy of his resistance, entirely forgot his precarious position; he kicked, he cuffed, he fought gallantly, and finally succeeded in seizing his adversary’s cap, a particularly jaunty affair with gold lace round it, in imitation of her Majesty’s navy, of which the Mate was especially proud. This, the Frenchman swore by every saint the Revolution had left in his calendar, he would heave overboard; and before the Captain had completed the little sketch he was taking of the transaction, a capitulation was entered into by the belligerents upon the principle of the statu quo, and the discomfited Mate descended, leaving his adversary to enjoy at once his position and his victory.
By this time sails, unseen before, had begun to dot the space which still intervened between the steamer and the iron-bound coast before it, which now rose stern and rugged, and desolately beautiful, clothed everywhere with a sort of rifle-green, from the dark hues of the fir and juniper, for none but the hardy evergreens could bear the severe blasts of even its southern aspect; few and far between were these sails at first, and insignificant did they seem under the abrupt and lofty mountains which rose immediately out of the sea, without any beach or coast-line, or low-land whatever; but, as they neared the land, the moving objects assumed a more conspicuous place in the landscape.
There was the great heavy galliasse with pigs from Bremen or colonial produce from Hamburg—a sort of parallelogram with the corners rounded, such as one sees in the pictures of the old Dutch school two hundred years ago—not an atom of alteration or improvement in its build since the days of old Van Tromp; the same flat floor and light draft of water—the same lumbering lee-boards—the same great, stiff, substantial, square-rigged foremast, with a little fore and aft mizen, which looked like an after-thought; she might be said to be harrowing the main instead of ploughing it, according to our more familiar metaphor, with a great white ridge of foam heaped up under her bows, and a broad, ragged wake like that of a steamer.
And there was the Norwegian brig returning from Copenhagen with a cargo of corn for Christiansand; rough and ill-found, nine times in ten not boasting so much as a foretop-gallant sail, yet tight and seaworthy, and far better than she looked; built after the model of a whale’s body, full forward and lean aft, with a stern so narrow that she looked as if she had been sailing through the Symplegades, and had got pinched in the transit.
Then came a fleet of a dozen jagts from the north, the tainted breezes advertising their fishy cargo, as they came along. These were the originals of the English yacht, which unspellable word is merely the Norwegian jagt, written as it is pronounced in the country, for Norway is the only nation besides England that takes its pleasure on the deep sea. With their single great unwieldy sails, their tea-tray-shaped hulls, and towering sterns, they looked like a boy’s first essays in the art of ship-building.
But Bergen furnishes a far more ship-shape description of craft—sharp fore and aft vessels are the Bergeners, looking as if they had all been built on the same lines, with little, low bulwarks, and knife-like cutwaters, as if they were intended to cut through the seas rather than to ride over them, sailing almost in the wind’s eye, and, when very close hauled indeed, a point on the other side of it—at least, so their skippers unanimously assert, and they ought to know best,—at all events, ensuring a wet jacket to every one on board, be the weather as fine as it may, from the time they leave the port to the time they return to it.
Then came, crowding all sail and looking as if they were rigged for a regatta, with their butterfly summer gear and tapering spars, the lobster smacks from Lyngör, and Osterisö, and Arendahl, and Hellesund: and a regatta it was on a large scale, with the wide North Sea for a race-course, omnivorous London for the goal, and its ever-fluctuating markets for a prize. These were sharp, trim-looking vessels, admirably handled, and not unworthy of a place in the lists of any Royal Yacht Club for beauty or for speed; somewhat less sharp, perhaps, than the Bergeners, but scarcely less weatherly or sitting less lightly on the seas.