Soon after dropping anchor those agreeable and necessary officials, the Customs officers, came on board, in oilskins, which they discarded, disclosing blue jumpers and his Majesty’s brass buttons, all showing the effect of the climate, and they set to work overhauling our stores most carefully. If officials are to be maintained work must be found for them and we must all pay; we have assisted the Norwegian and British governments incalculably for weeks and months past. They earn their country’s pay by overhauling poor mariners’ tobacco and provender, only intended to be chewed and eaten far away in the North or the Southern Seas. Their chief, I knew at once, came from our west or north coast, by his soft accent, which was much to my taste; how much there must be in a voice if it makes even a seafarer almost welcome a Customs officer!
As he opened the stores and checked coffee and tobacco, we “tore tartan” a little. I said my heart was in Argyll but my people came from Perthshire, and suggested he might be from Islay. And from Islay he came! the island of Morrisons and whisky. But MacDiarmid was his name. “But that’s a Perthshire name,” I said. “Yes, yes,” said he, “to be sure, from Perthshire my people came.” “And from Glen Lyon, possibly?” I said, “and the Seven Kings?” And “Yes, yes,” he said, “to be sure, and it is Glen Lyon you know? Well, well, and that is the peautiful glen—and that wull be suxty poonds of coot tobacco, and wan hundred and suxty poonds of black twust. And did you see the Maclean was back to Duart Castle? Aich, aich! it was a ferry fine proceeding! You see, his mother’s grandmother’s daughter’s niece she would come from Glen Islay, and so it wass they came to their own again. Noo hoo much tae will you have here—we must mark it a’ doon seeing you may be callin’ at another Brutish port or in the back parts o’ Mull or maybe in Ireland too.”
His junior was Irish, with a Bow Bells accent, and the speech of both was very pleasant to me after months of Norse. The junior leant against the galley door as I had morning coffee, and leisurely interviewed our very busy cook—told him about Lerwick, asked him, “Did yew ’ave a good viyage, stooard?” to which pale Hansen with the golden hair answered, “Yah, yah, goot,” indifferently, but he brightened up when told of the fish to be had in Lerwick. “Wy, yuss, for a shillin’ you can git as much ’ere as will feed all ’ands, woy, for a sixpence or fourpence you can git a cod ’ere of saiy fourteen or sixteen pounds!” “Yah, yah, but vill it be goot?” said incredulous Hansen. “Yuss, you bet y’r loife. Ain’t no Billinsgaite fish ’ere, matey! wot I mean is you git ’em ’ere ’alf aloive! But did ye git any wyles?” he continued, “on yer weigh accrost?” “Wyles?” repeated Hansen. “Wy, yuss, wyles, wyles I say; you’re a wyler, ain’t yer?” and it dawned at last on Hansen—“Vales! nay, nay, ikke vales—no seed none.”
We went ashore with the brass-bounders rowing hard against wind over the fizzling sea amongst hundreds of tame herring gulls, most of them in their young brown plumage, and amongst armies of these sea-robbers, scarts, or cormorants, that are here as tame as chickens and numerous as sparrows. Why they are allowed to exist is what we trout and salmon fishers wonder at; in Norway the Government pays fourpence a head. I wish we were as fond of eating them as the Norwegians are.
On shore we got fairly messed up with red tape at the Customs office. The officials were charmingly polite and really wished to be of assistance, but duty first; and the very young man in authority showed us, with the utmost patience, how essential it was for the interests of everybody that we should be able to prove that the makers of the St Ebba made it really for us, and that the British Consul in Norway should also believe this, and certify that the Norwegian builders had really built it, and also that they had done so to our order, for if they had not done so, it might belong to someone else. Consequently if they, his Majesty’s Customs House officers in Lerwick, were to register it as ours, and it wasn’t ours, many things might happen, and so on and so forth. And we went back and forward to the ship to get papers and more papers, and each helped, but each and all were smilingly explained to be not absolutely the documents necessary to satisfy his Majesty’s Government that—that—we weren’t bloody pirates. So give us School Board education and Socialist officialdom and we see the beginning of lots of trouble. Finally, after much pow-wow, we telegraphed the gist of this to Norway, asking the Consul there, in polite language, why the devil he hadn’t given us the papers needed to prove we were we, and the St Ebba was the St Ebba, and not another ship, and that it belonged to her owners—that is, to a little private British Whaling Company.
And poor Henriksen, who had spent days and more days getting all these formalities arranged with the Consul in Norway (whilst I used to wait outside under the lime-trees flicking flies off Swartzen), seemed to be almost at breaking-point of patience, and I wondered in my soul how ships ever got out and away to sea free from red-tape entanglements.
A pleasing interlude and soothing was the pause we sometimes made between ship and office to watch the fish in the clear green water along the edge of the quiet town. The water was clear as glass above white sand, and against the low stone quay or sea face were driven, by cormorants, shoals of fish, dark, velvety-green compact masses, of saith or coal-fish, actually as thick as fish in a barrel. These ugly dusky divers paid little heed to people on shore, but in regular order circled round the shoals, coming to within eight yards of us, and every now and then one would dive under the mass of fish and fill itself as it went, and an opening through the mass would show its horrid procedure as it straddled across white sand under the fish, till it came up with a bounce at our feet, shaking its bill with satisfaction and then go back to do its turn at rounding up, whilst another of its kind took its turn at eating the piltoch.
No wonder, with this wealth of fish and fowl round the shore, that the Norsemen rather hanker after their old islands; they cure these saith and eat them through winter, and very good they are, and they also eat the cormorants (I give you my word, they are bad; I’ve eaten many kinds of sea-fowl and the cormorant is the worst). The reader may have heard that Norwegians claim the Shetlands, for they say Scotland only holds them in pawn, for the dowry of Margaret Princess of Denmark, wife of King James III., estimated at 50,000 florins, which has not yet been paid. So when Norway offers the equivalent, plus interest, which now amounts to several million pounds sterling, the islands may be returned to Norway. Possibly international law, recognising the amalgamation of the two companies, Scotland & Co. and England & Co., into Great Britain & Co., may not now admit the claim.
A specimen of a really stout Shetlander came on board with the Customs House men, Magnus Andersen, a burly, ruddy type, not so intellectual or finely drawn as the typical Shetlander—a pilot by profession—what seamen call a real old shell-back, with grizzled beard and ruddy cheeks—about a hundred years old and straight as a dart, stark and strong, with a bull’s voice and a child’s blue eyes. I said: “Why don’t you have an oilskin on?” It was raining a little and blowing. “I’ve been at sea all my days,” he said, smiling, “and never wore an oilskin”; one of the old hardy school, with a look of “Fear God, but neither devil, man, nor storm.”
He spoke of all the lines he’d been on—old flyers like the Thermopylae, and others, sailing cracks that we read of, Green & Smith companies, and the old tea traders, and then he told me he had been at the Greenland whaling, and mentioned a Captain Robertson, and I said: “D’ye mean ‘Café Tam’?” and he looked at me with a little surprise, but was so pleased to hear the nickname of his old skipper. “Why,” I said, “I was with him on board his last ship, the Scotia, in Dundee, not a year ago, and, bar a slight limp, he’s as good as a two-year-old.” And from that we started off yarning for as long as there was time, which was not much. Old “Bad-Weather” and B⸺ Davidson I asked about. He knew them from their boyhood: old B.-W. came here to Lerwick on his last voyage and ordered Magnus on board. He was to go whether he did a hand’s turn of work or not. Magnus admired B.-W., even though he had the common failing; but now he has gone——? may peace be with him. Magnus blamed the steward and mate for his end, on that last voyage, blamed them for not having his temptation in greybeards thrown overboard. My opinion is that the ice finished him. Take a boy as a mill hand and let him struggle through the fo’c’sle to be bos’n—second mate—first mate and master, then keep him whaling year after year with ice perils and whaling problems and the intense strain and excitement of Arctic ice navigation, and he must die before seventy! Ice navigation is a severe strain.