When they had cooked their meal, they said: "Paul, eat with us simple fisher folk; we will give you the best we have; you are welcome." We had only one dish, and it was entirely new to me.
It was what the sailors called lobscouse, a sort of pudding made of ship biscuits, liver, and fish. I did not care much for it, but I said nothing to the fishermen. One said: "We eat this dish every day, and that will be your food when you are with us."
"Humph!" I said to myself. I remembered the elephants, the crocodiles, the snakes, and the monkeys, etc., I had had to eat while in Africa. The monkeys when fat were fine, and tasted so good I should have been willing to exchange a dish of lobscouse for a monkey.
After our meal we had coffee; each man owned his own cup. "We drink only coffee," they said, "for no spirits are allowed to be sold here, for fear some of the men while going to sea might become drunk, and endanger their lives, and the lives of those that are with them."
Our coffee drunk, we talked first about fish and their peculiar habits. The names of the four captains were John Ericksen, Hakon Johansen, Ole Larsen, Harald Andersen.
"Every spring," said Captain Ole, "salmon come up from the sea and ascend our rivers to spawn, and in time the little ones go to sea. As they grow up they continue to come every year to the same river where they were born, and nobody knows where they spend the interval."
After a pause, during which the fishermen filled their pipes, Captain Ericksen said: "Every year the codfish make their appearance in winter in vast shoals and countless millions on the Lofoden Islands banks to spawn. Then they migrate further north to the coast of Finmarken, then eastward as far as Russia. Then they disappear until the following winter. No one knows where they come from or where they go."
One of the men observed: "I have been a fisherman for over forty years, and it is wonderful how regularly the cod make their appearance on the fishing banks. We depend so much on their time of coming that we leave home every year at the same date. They must know their way in the ocean and recognize different marks on their journey, for they have to travel thousands of miles before they return to the fishing banks to spawn. The cod in their migration leave behind them a great many stragglers, which are caught all the year round. The number of cod caught on the banks of Finmarken and of the Lofoden Islands averages about forty to forty-two millions a year, and the total catch along the coasts of Norway amounts to about fifty millions a year. The land is barren, and if it were not for the fish we could not live in our country."
"Fifty millions of cod is a great number," I observed.
"Yes," he replied, "but these fifty millions are nothing but a small fraction compared with the great number that are not caught."