Through Finland in Carts

by Mrs. Alec-Tweedie

Imagine the helter-skelter of those thousands of trees over the roaring, rushing waterfalls, or along the rapidly flowing cataracts and flooded rivers. To prevent these wooden horses getting caught-up on the banks along their watery course, men with long poles "personally conduct" huge batches to the coast, or, where they are likely to get fixed, a sort of wooden fencing is built in the river to direct their course. On, on they voyage, those soldiers of the forest, for hundreds of miles to the coast, till, finally arriving at such an enormous wood export town as Kotka, they meet their doom.

Wherever the chain of waterways is composed of large lakes, the logs are conveyed to the coast by means of enormous rafts. It is really most ingenious; head and tail into a ring half-a-mile or more in circumference float the pine trees, coupled together by iron clamps. Inside these the newly-cut logs, which look like a rope of sausages, are thrust end on end, until they make a perfectly solid floor floating on the surface of the water. Now, as a raft of this kind contains many thousand logs, which means a considerable amount of money value, it is conveyed to the coast with the greatest care. At one end a small house is built on the raft itself, on which live the two or three men who have to escort this floating island across the lakes, attend to the logs that get out of place, or secure the fastenings of the outside wood which binds the whole together.

Naturally it takes some weeks for such a vast island to reach the coast, and as it is sometimes necessary for various reasons to stop on the journey, a horse goes on the raft so as to let down or pull up the anchor when necessary. It is truly wonderful to think that on a floating mass of tree trunks, merely bound together by a primitive barrier or outside ring, men should live for weeks, and a horse should have its stabling. Yet such is the case, and many times during our three months' summer sojourn in Finland we passed these floating islands wending their way to the coast.

Of course, it is understood rafts can only travel over the vast lakes, and that on rivers the wood must go separately in the manner before described. But in such a river as the Uleå, where the salmon fishing is of as great importance, if not greater than wood, the latter are only allowed to pass down until the day when salmon fishing commences. On the completion of the floating season the stock logs at Kotka often amount to a million pieces. That alone gives some idea of this wonderful industry. About a mile above Kotka the logs are received by the floating inspector and his trained sorters, who separate and distribute, according to the marks thereon, the logs to their respective owners.

Large floating houses await their arrival, and as the back part of these sheds are divided by half a dozen or so openings leading into the water pens, the men at work quickly turn the timber over, see the owners' names, and by means of a pole steer it into the space belonging to that owner, so that in time each water pen becomes filled with the trees belonging to its proprietor.

All this time the steam saw-mills are waiting for their prey, and, like the pigs at Chicago who come out smoked and cooked hams, according to tradition, the trees that go in have half a dozen saws run into them at once, and out come boards and planks of various thicknesses and widths. The middle bit—the plum of the cake—is the worst in this instance, for it contains the heart, which is bad wood for working as it splits and twists on drying; the rest is converted into deals, battens, and boards. The outside slab pieces are made into staves for barrels, while the general odds and ends that remain behind are used as fuel for engines, steamboats, or private house consumption in Finland, where coal being practically unknown, wood takes its place.

The sawn wood is stacked up for miles and miles along the waterside to season ready for export, and, as a rule, the Finnish owners sell their timber with the clause that it should be ready to be shipped at "first open water," when away go the pines, cargo after cargo, the best being sent to England, and other qualities to France, Germany, etc. Thus from Finland comes much of the wood that makes our floors, our window frames, our railings, and our doors, and lights our daily fires—it enters the peasant hut, and it finds a place in the royal palace.

Another big trade is birch—a class of wood cut up into reels and bobbins for England; and yet another is aspen, which wood is supplied to Sweden in large quantities to make matches. Not only are matches pure and simple made enormously in Sweden; but when leaving Gothenburg on our homeward journey we saw hundreds of large cases being put on board our steamer. Although very big, one man carried a case with ease, much to our surprise, for anything so enormous in the way of cargo was generally hoisted on board with a crane. What a revelation! These cases contained match boxes, which are sent by thousands every week to England.

There is an enormous export of wood spirit made from sawdust; yet even then, until lately, it was difficult to get rid of the superfluous sawdust, a great deal of which was burned away in large furnaces. Sawdust now plays an important rôle in the trade of Finland, and silk factories have been started, for pulp; for our French friends have found that beautiful fabrics can be made from wood, which takes dye almost better than silk woven by a painstaking little worm, only costs a fraction of the money, and sells almost equally well.

So that wood for building purposes, for matches or fuel, pulp for paper, sawdust for spirit and silk, are the outcome of the life of a Finnish tree. People can be clothed in wood, get drunk on wood, read print on wood, and get warmed and their food cooked by wood.