It was generally regretted that Dr Hjaltalín the Archiater, who was preparing for a trip in the “Diana” to Europe, did not take part in the festivities. I need say nothing about the scientific acquirements of this well-informed and most obliging Icelander, whose writings are known throughout Europe. He has travelled extensively in his own country; and I was the greatest loser by his departure, as otherwise he might have led me to the unexplored regions in the south-east. He was especially interested about coal, a subject which seems now to be undergoing revival in the north: a fresh impetus has been given to its exploration in Norway and Sweden: even in the Færoe Islands a Danish company proposes to exploit the beds. An expedition, accompanied by Professor Jonstrüp and a Silesian engineer, lately returned to Copenhagen, and revived the views of Professor Krazenstein, who in 1778 examined the Pröstefjeldt in the island of Suderoë. The report is that the people have used their coal as fuel for a century; that although not so easily fired as the English, it gives a stronger and more lasting flame, and that it is free from sulphur and other minerals injurious to the fabrication of steel and iron. But, after settling its calorific properties, the grand question is, whether the veins are in the real carboniferous formation, whose beds are thick enough to work profitably. Seams which occur in the nummulite-hippurite Jurassic formation mostly lead to loss, witness those which have been worked near Trieste, on the Adriatic coast, and in parts of the Libanus.
Dr Hjaltalín was sanguine concerning the coal lately found in the regions about Norðrá, a northern influent of the Western Hvítá River: the exact position is between the little tarns Vikrafell and Herðavatn in Norðrardal. He expects soon to settle a long-disputed question, “Has coal been produced in situ?” and the sister formation of the Færoe Islands, where a Danish officer, Captain Dahl, has bought a vein seven feet thick for $50,000, ought to aid in solving the mystery. It is found associated with the Surtar-brand,[387] a semi-mineralised lignite, common on the western coast of the island. Uno Von Troil tells us that cups and plates which take a fine polish are made of it at Copenhagen: this reminds us of the bitumen “finjans” from the Tomb of Moses, near the Dead Sea.
Uno Von Troil, Sartorius Von Waltershausen, and Professor Silliman maintain this Devil’s or black fuel to be a local produce of forests buried by ashes, and ripened by the superincumbent sand and humus. On the other hand, Professor Steenstrüp and M. Gaimard declare this “brown coal” to be flotsam and jetsam from the Gulf of Mexico. Professor Paijkull found in it some thirty kinds of growth: the vine and platanus, the tulip-tree and mahogany, associated with oak, elm, willow, alder, birch, walnut, fir, and other resinous vegetation. These items, if grown in situ, as they appear to be, suggest a change of temperature utterly unknown to historic times, and belonging to the flora of the upper Miocene, e.g., Madeira. Halley explained the intense cold of Behring’s Straits, by placing the Pole there before the earth’s axis had altered its direction. Others have attributed the change to the diminution of ecliptical obliquity, the excentricity of the earth’s orbit, the precession of the equinoxes, and the revolution of the apsides. Similarly the Markgraf F. Marenzi (Fragmente über Geologie) cuts the Gordian knot, by supposing an altered obliquity of the ecliptic, which may have acted, he says, in past ages even as the present ever-increasing excentricity of the orbit will in some 210,000 years produce another Glacial Period, and render Northern Europe uninhabitable. On the other hand, he remarks that however torrid may have been the hyperborean climates, they must ever have lacked the fructifying insects, peculiar to temperate, sub-equatorial, and equatorial zones. Judging from Miocene Greenland, the reverse would appear to be fact.
It is impossible to stay a week in Reykjavik without finding out that the world is split into two divisions, strongly marked as were our Whig and Tory of the last generation. The Danes are in the minority: they represent the utilitarian, the cosmopolitan, and, perhaps, the metropolitan side of politics; and they complain that whatever the mother country does for her distant dependency, the latter is ever clamorous for more. The majority is the Icelandic party, for whose political aspirations I can find no better name than “Home Rulers,”—warning readers, however, that the comparison must not be strained and identified with that of Ireland. The main difference of the movement, as far as I can see, appears simply this. Iceland is actually 1600 miles distant from Denmark, as far as London from Jamaica, and practically, when the post goes only seven times a year, as far as Australia from England. Again, the proportions of Iceland to Denmark (1,800,000) are 1:35, and the population is 1:25·70. England certainly would not refuse Home Rule to the Irish if they lived in New Zealand and numbered about 750,000. No wonder then that Iceland objects to be treated like a “Crown colony of a rather severe type.”
The islanders show a growing dissatisfaction with the Danish Government, which they declare to be, though mild, meddling and unintelligent—in fact, perpetuating the petty, “nagging,” and annoying policy which, lost the duchies. They might respect whilst they hated a strong despotism; but perpetual interference they despise as well as hate. They are urgent as Mr Butt, for leave to stand on their own legs, to manage their own affairs; the Danes have tried, they say, for centuries to govern them, and progress could hardly be less were they left to themselves. The worst that could happen to them would be to starve, in which case they would deserve their fate, and could blame none but themselves. They complain, and I think with justice, that individually the Dane is not sympathetic to them; whilst Icelanders learn Danish, which, however, they pronounce with their own accent, Danes disdain their language and will not even attend their church. Residents of twenty years declare that they never read the theogenic, cosmogenic, and mythic Eddas,[388] because they are literally “grandams’ tales;” whilst the Sagas or Sayings, moral and dogmatic, epic and historical, are a tissue of inventions, monotonous, moreover, sanguinary, immoral, and barbarous. The actual leader of the opposition, or Home Rule party, is Hr Jón Sigurðsson (nat. 1811), now in Denmark, a far-famed Norsk scholar, and an employé of the Danish Government. “White John,” as the popular nickname is, shows his clean shaven face everywhere, photographed for the patriot party. He owns advanced opinions, but he rests within constitutional limits; his followers, of course, go further afield, and not a few of them may be called republican. He has the honour to appear in the Millenary lithograph with the following notice: “President of the Althing, President of the Icelandic Literary Society, President of the Icelandic Thjóðvinafèlag; has distinguished himself as an uninterested and faithful champion of the national and political rights of the Icelanders; besides he has made himself conspicuous as a thorough scholar in the history and legislation of Iceland.”
There is also a small and uninfluential Norwegian faction which seems bent upon drawing the islanders to itself, chiefly, it appears to me, because Naddodd and Ingólfr discovered and colonised Iceland, and because she still speaks the Norræna-Túnga: a few distinguished names, literary and political, belong to this political category.
In the Introduction I have offered a few remarks on the pros and cons of Home Rule in Iceland. But the history of the world generally, and especially that of Italy, teaches one great lesson—how easy it is to divide and how hard to “unify” a country. The line between local and imperial measures is difficult to draw and facile to be overstepped at all times of popular excitement: a manner of dismemberment is proposed at the time when the condition of Europe seems to demand centralisation. Diets in Great Britain will only assimilate her with Austria, which exists by a political necessity: statesmen say that if she were not she would have to be invented. We can all distinguish the dim form which stands behind Home Rule in Ireland, and I venture to predict that in Iceland it will be the shortest path to separation from the mother state, and to the re-establishment of the old Norwegian Republic.
END OF VOL. I.
M‘Farlane, & Erskine, Printers, Edinburgh.
Index to Vol. I
[A], [B], [C], [D], [E], [F], [G], [H], [I], [J], [K], [L], [M], [N], [O], [P], [R], [S], [T], [V], [W], [Y], [Z]