Then it’s hey! and it’s ho! for Scotland, chilly Lerwick and the Shetlands and kindly English-speaking people. My heart warms at the prospect of seeing our western hills and heather and relatives and a language we know.
It rains again, tropical rain. We stand and bid farewell in the homestead, round the little dining-room table, each with a liqueur glass in hand. Suddenly I see eyes are wet, and the stranger nearly pipes an eye too, for it is a bit harrowing even to cold hearts to see married people with children still lovers. My host has been, for him, at home so long, nearly eleven months now! So the parting from wife, children, homestead, farm, woods, horse and hound, all of which he loves, must be sore for however hardened a seafarer.
Our last cargo from home goes to the ship on a hand-cart towed by the children and Rex the collie in great glee—curious luggage—Japanese wicker-work baskets and parcels of foreign-looking clothes for their father. The writer goes ahead with them, leaving the lovers to follow their lone, past the little home they built after Henriksen’s first success at whaling, on a three months’ spell from sea, down the road and past the school in the birches where they played as children together, down to the brig or rocks where their fathers before them careened their ships and made the same sad partings.
Perhaps the captain is the only sad man to-day. From first mate downwards eyes are sparkling, in spite of the dull day of rain, at the prospect of the rough, bracing, salt seas in front of us. We think nothing just now of cold, wet, dark, dangerous nights; the future is all couleur de rose, whale-hunting, new lands and people, sea-elephants, movement and life for us, death to them and profit for us all!
Was it lucky or unlucky that our anchors held to Norway and the sea-maids’ hair or grass, like grim death? A sailor would be interested, perhaps, in a description of how the two chains were fouled or twisted, how one shackle opened and the starboard chain went slap into the water. I thought, we are in for more delay, trying to pick it up. But Henriksen spotted that it had caught on the port chain, and his young brother, our mate, promptly slid down it—a nice muddy slide down and to his waist in water—got a rope through its links and stopped it on the port chain, and so we got both back. All the sea fairies of Norwegian seas could not have given us more trouble in taking our British ship from the Norse anchorage.
As we motored from sheltered Knarsberg to Christiania fiord we passed Faarman Holme and the yacht club and dipped our Union Jack, and saw the Norse flag dipped in return, no doubt by old Henriksen, who had stopped the night there to flag us adieu in the morning.
There was more heart-string-breaking before we left. Mrs Henriksen and the children, and Hansen the steward’s newly married wife, came part of the way, and we dropped them a few miles down the fiord in a motor-launch we had in tow. There are tender hearts in Norway, tender and brave.
And now we are out of the great Christiania fiord or firth, passing Færder Light that marks its entrance, Norway faint on our right and Sweden over the horizon to our left, the sun shining for the first day this summer. The sea has a silky swell. We have shaken off all things earthy except a little mud on our anchors now being stowed away, and three or four green oak leaves and moss on the hole of the oak-tree brought for the anvil.
Henriksen and I stand for a little on the bow and rejoice in the heave and send, and compare the movement of St Ebba with that of the Haldane and other whalers we know, and we think that she makes good. There is sun, sea, cloud-land, rippling swell and fresh, cold air, with a luxurious roll; and we feel an hour of such a day at sea is reward for all the months of worry and waiting and planning on shore.
A pleasure in store for us will be setting our new sails. But even now, with the motor alone and fully loaded—with sixty tons of fresh water alone—we make nine and a half knots! but with our canvas unloosed and a light breeze behind us might even reel off eleven to twelve.