[61] Nalle is the cant name for the bear kind, as with us Reynard is the cant name for a fox.
[62] “Rig,” the earthly name of Heimdall, the watcher of Heaven’s gate, when he disguises himself to go skylarking on earth. Hence the slang expression, “Running a Rig.”
[63] The Sun and Moon are continually pursued by the wolf Fenrir and her progeny, who sometimes nearly catch her. Hence the eclipses.
[64] The author will not answer for his orthography in the word “pein-compassen.” He can work a reckoning by it, but has never seen it spelt.
[65] There is no book so popular in Sweden as what they call “Peter Simpel aff Kapten Marrjatt.”
[66] In Preadamite times—that is to say, the times of Drake and Raleigh—this was the custom of the English service also; but it having been discovered that “what is everybody’s business is nobody’s business,” and that accidents and negligences were continually happening during the dog watch, a regular afternoon watch was established, and the dog watch reduced to four hours, and divided into two; so that the whole ship’s company could relieve one another systematically, and not, as before, by private arrangement; and that the whole could have two uninterrupted hours below, between four and eight in the evening, for their evening meal, or any other occupation. The whole afternoon watch was called the dog watch, because in the full light,—and Norwegian ships did not go to sea in the winter because they were frozen up,—the work was supposed to be so easy that the dogs were sufficient to keep it.
[67] Those drowned at sea, whose bodies are never found, are supposed to have been invited by the mermaids to their caves, and to have been fascinated by the beauty of their entertainers. Homer’s story of the Syrens enticing the comrades of Ulysses, has some such foundation.
[68] The words “smart” and “smartly,” which, at sea, have a signification very different from their shore-going meaning, are pieces of mis-spelling. They are evidently derived from the Norwegian words “snart” and “snartlig,” which bear precisely the same nautical meaning as our English words.
[69] This is a literal fact. Three weeks after sailing from Christiansand, and seventeen days after losing sight of land of any kind,—during which time there had been but two days in which the brig could lie her course,—the author was in the fore-rigging, on the look-out for the Outer Garboard buoy. He had but small hopes of seeing it, he admits, for the brig had been navigated by log, lead, and compass alone; nevertheless it is true, that within half-an-hour of his taking up his look-out place, and precisely in the direction in which he was looking, there was the buoy,—a little black speck, like a dancing boat. This, considering that the steamer in which he had gone out—a vessel commanded by a lieutenant in her Majesty’s navy—was fifty miles out of her reckoning, after a straight course of four days, seemed, to say the least, remarkable.