Stern View of the “St. Ebba” at Tonsberg
The “St. Ebba” in the Fiord of the Vikings
We now have salted ox on board, oxen grown at Kjolo and salted down last winter by Henriksen; and Larsen, the neighbour, brought us vegetables. He is almost a giant, and as he stood in our flat-bottomed dory with two men rowing he made a picture to be remembered, for he was surrounded by lance shafts, sacks of potatoes, red carrots and white onions, so that the dory was down to the water’s edge! I prayed she might not upset. Larsen himself stood amidships with three enormous green balloons in his arms—such giant cabbages I have never seen before—each seven-and-a-half kilos (fifteen pounds), in weight, the result of whale guano.
The children of the neighbourhood played on our decks; Henriksen’s two boys and daughter soon knew every corner of the ship, just as he learned every part of his father’s vessel when he lay at Kjolo, only in those days there were higher masts to climb, and yards to lie out on, and tops to pause in, to admire the view and get courage to go higher. Our crow’s nest on our pole-foremast is the highest they can attain to on the St Ebba. The aftermast—or mainmast, I suppose I should call it, as we are schooner rigged—is of hollow iron cut short above the top (this is technical, not a bull); this forms the exhaust from the engine. You see only a little vapour, still, it does seem a trifle odd even to see faint smoke coming out of a mast! We will rig up topmasts in the South Seas, and have topsails in fine winds and the Trades, when we do not need the motor, and will then look quite conventional.
Here is a photograph of some of the children that play on our decks and round about the St Ebba in boats. They are of the sea. “It is in the blood,” as Mrs Henriksen replied to me when I asked her how she got accustomed to her husband’s long voyages and absence from home. It is their tradition to go to sea, and Elinor, Henriksen’s daughter, will be surprised if her brothers William and Henrik do not follow their father to sea in a few years. In ancient days it was the same here, womenfolk thought little of the men who had not done four or five years’ Viking cruising, gathering gear from their own coast or from their neighbours’.
We hope that this Monday, the 22nd of September, will be our last day on shore, and it rains and rains, and we long for the shelter of board-ship where there is no soppy ground or puddles, and there will be the fun of going somewhere instead of inhabiting this one spot of earth for days, till days become weeks and weeks months for ever and for ever without getting anywhere farther.
We have now almost everything on board, books, charts, bags of clothes, but we have still to wait for some spare parts for the engine from the makers at Stockholm, which they advise us to get before going on a southern voyage. We intended to have got away in time to do a preliminary canter, as it were, for whales up north to the edge of the ice—not into it—for bottle-nose and finners, so as thoroughly to test our engine and crew before going to the Southern Seas. Now it is too late for that, so we shall only go “north-about” round Shetland, where we may be in time for the last of the whaling season, and then proceed south.
The spare parts of the motor arrived, but it rains and blows a fierce gale from S.W., and we could get out of our fiord but no farther against such a gale, so we cool our heels and Henriksen works at accounts, a serious matter. It is a new departure, a captain acting in so many capacities, manager, navigator, harpooneer, etc.