This is my fifth week of waiting here, the most wearisome time I have ever spent in my life. So much for whale-fishing and its preliminaries! The time actually spent in connection with the ship’s affairs passes pleasantly enough, and curiously the sense of weariness goes, once on board. Perhaps getting off clay soil on to salt water accounts for this.
The sea-water in the fiord here stands abnormally high all these days. It came running in two days ago in calm weather. So outside the North Sea and Skagerak we knew it must be blowing hard. To-day, though finer, the fiord water still remains high, so we know from that and the newspapers that there is strong southerly wind outside.
For two days past a cloud has hung over us. Henriksen found a deficiency in his accounts, found that the outfit for the St Ebba cost 10,000 kroner more than the receipts vouched for, and went over and over accounts, till yesterday we made another pilgrimage to Tonsberg and interviewed a banker and said politely, “How the deuce can this be?” And he cast his eye over his account-book and found his clerk had merely omitted a figure in addition; a trifle of 10,000 kroner = £550! So we came away smiling, but it gave us a bit of a shake, rather an aggravating and superfluous piece of worry added to vexatious delays and bad weather.
We motored back in the launch much relieved, and on reaching the St Ebba practised big harpoon-gun drill. Henriksen and I are the only men on board who are familiar with its workings, but one or two of the crew have used the smaller bottle-nose or Right whale guns. It was interesting watching Henriksen’s demonstration to all hands. Smartly they picked up the drill; quickly, for all of them have served in the naval reserve or army, and anything to do with a tumble about or small craft they are familiar with from childhood to old age. Yesterday you could readily fancy one of these old Viking fights, for a boatload of ten small boys was fighting another boatload, a free fight, legs and arms in the air, a fearful turmoil, and two boatloads of yellow-haired girls smilingly looked on.
“Old Man Henriksen,” the oldest of the Tonsberg inhabitants, came down the fiord from Tonsberg to-night to wish us God-speed. He sailed down in his cutter single-handed, shot into the wind round our port bow, jibbed and swung alongside round our stern; seventy-eight years old and sailing his home-built, prize-winning twenty-footer as well as the best of his juniors. On board we had the tiniest skaal, which finished our last bottle of whisky, the remnant of our hospitality in the trial trip; we are drawing our beer and whisky teeth, as the sailors say, before taking the high seas.
Then he went off in the twilight, as the lights began to show in the gloom of the pines on shore, alone, sailing single-handed, against the wishes of the family, who say he is old enough and rich enough to employ a crew. He will spend the night alone on Faarman Holme, at the club he started there; in the morning he will dip his flag to us as we pass.
We all go for our last night on shore, walking home in the dark. Not all—I forgot. William and Henrik are curled up in their father’s bunk in great glee at being left to look after St Ebba, along with the crew for its last night in the fiord of the Vikings.
