The cod yields the largest monetary returns. This fish migrates to the coast of Norway to spawn and in search of food. The best cod fisheries are in Romsdal, Nordland, and Tromsö counties, the Lofoten islands in Tromsö alone furnishing employment to more than four thousand men. The cod weighs from eight to twenty pounds and measures from five to six feet in length. Some are merely dried after having been cleaned. This is done by hanging them by the tail on wooden frames. The others are sent to the salting stations where they are salted and dried on flat rocks. A fish weighing ten pounds will yield two pounds of salted cod, the loss being due to the removal of the head and entrails and the drying out of the water.
There are numerous secondary products from the cod, the most valuable being the cod liver oil. The livers of the fish are exposed to a jet of superheated steam which destroys the liver cells and causes the small drops of oil to run together. The roe are salted and sent to France to be used for bait in the sardine fisheries.
In the matter of the handicraft industries carried on in the homes, Norway has long taken high rank. As early as the ninth century her artisans were skilled in the manufacture of arms, farming implements, and boats, and her women in cloth weaving and embroidery. During recent times the ease and cheapness with which foreign products could be obtained caused a marked decline in home industries; but at the present moment an effort is being made to rehabilitate them through a national domestic industry association, organized in 1891, which has taken up the manufacture of hand-carved articles, sheath-knives, skis, sledges, and woven and embroidered woolen and linen goods after the old Norwegian patterns.
The manufacture of lumber and wooden ware is one of the leading industrial pursuits. With the exception of the two most northern counties, practically every section of the country is represented by sawmills and planing mills. Ship-building in recent times has attained considerable importance, and the manufacture of paper of the chemical wood-pulp variety has become one of the leading industries. There are a few cloth, rope, and jersey mills at Bergen and Christiania, but the textile industries of Norway are relatively unimportant. On the other hand, leather, India rubber, glass, metal, and chemical industries have become important of late years.
Norway is not rich in mineral products. The combined mining industries do not yield more than two million dollars a year, and they furnish employment to less than four thousand men. The Kongsberg silver mines have been operated for more than three hundred years, but the recent fall in the price of silver has reduced the output. The copper mines at Rorös have been operated for two hundred and fifty years, and there are less important copper mines in Nordland, Telemarken, and the Hardanger. There are iron mines at Arendal and elsewhere, but the rise in the cost of charcoal, due to the scarcity of wood, has greatly crippled the iron industry. There are important soapstone quarries in the Gudbransdal and the Trondhjem basin; green colored slate in the Valders and at Vossevangen; and granite, syenite, and porphyry in many parts of the country.
Measured by population and national wealth, the commerce of Norway is relatively important, due in a large measure to her enormous merchant marine and the efficiency of her hardy seamen. Relatively to the population of the country, Norway has the largest merchant fleet in the world, and in the matter of steamships and sailing vessels she is surpassed only by three countries—Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Not only is her fleet large, but her service is efficient. Norwegian seamen the world over are esteemed for ability and honesty, inspiring all commercial nations with confidence that goods carried in Norse bottoms will be carefully and conscientiously treated; and her seamen are everywhere sought to man foreign vessels.
In industries, the Swedes excel in the manufacture of iron. To fully appreciate the value of this industry, one should visit Gefle, the most important shipping point on the eastern coast of Sweden. Here there is a fine harbor, with docks and warehouses owned by the government. From this port the ore from the mines of central Sweden is shipped to all parts of the world and handled by Brown hoisting machinery, which is made in Cleveland, Ohio—the same that you see on the ore docks at South Chicago and at Cleveland, Buffalo, Ashtabula, and other points on the Great Lakes where iron ore and coal are handled.
At Gefle, too, an annual industrial exposition is held, where you may see on exhibit all the utensils manufactured or used by the people—all kinds of machinery, tools, and implements, recent novelties in patents, weaving, wood-carving, and a large part of the exposition building is given up to beautiful articles in iron, in the manufacture of which we have said the Swedes excel.
A little west of Gefle is the town of Fahlun, which is the headquarters of the Kopparberg Mining Company, the, oldest industrial corporation in the world. The buildings date back to the seventeenth century and the mines are even more ancient. A mortgage bond was filed upon them in the year 1288 by a German company, and the records show that in 1347 the privilege of working them was sold by the king of Sweden to a syndicate of Lubeck miners. But these documents which are on file in the archives of the town are comparatively modern, because the copper deposits at Fahlun were known and worked in prehistoric times, and from them the Vikings obtained the sheathings for their ships and the material from which their copper armor, implements, and utensils were made. An immense amount of copper was used and worked with great skill in Scandinavia even before the Christian era, and the most of it came from the great deposits at Fahlun.
The iron industry is old in Sweden. Isaac Breant, a tradesman in Stockholm, founded a company and received a charter from Charles XI in 1685. He built the first blast furnace in Sweden, and died in 1702, leaving the property to his son, who died in 1720. The heirs sold out in 1722 to a man named Grill, in whose family the property remained until 1800, when it was purchased by the ancestors of the present owners.