Iceland: Horseback tours in saga land

by W. S. C. Russell

Eskifjörðr has long been a place for the cutting up and rendering of whales, in ancient times the Viking ships, after their long passage from Norway, found a haven in these eastern fiords. The place is renowned among geologists for pure crystals of calcium carbonate, Iceland spar, “double refracting spar.” From this fiord thousands of pieces of this transparent crystal have gone forth to shine in practically all of the science laboratories of the world. The vein has been worked since early in the seventeenth century. It is now nearly exhausted. The best deposit was in a basalt cavity thirty-six feet long, fifteen feet wide and ten feet high. It is on the farm called Helgustaðir an hour’s ride from the village. When discovered, the deposit filled the cavity. Some of the crystals were three feet across and were perfectly transparent. This is the material used in making the celebrated Nicol’s prisms and seldom has any spar suitable for this delicate work been found elsewhere than in Iceland. Good deposits have recently been located in the west of Iceland so that optical laboratories may still be supplied with this unique and valuable crystal. Doubtless other deposits will be found when the lavas have been thoroughly explored. Included crystals and pockets of crystals of various kinds are characteristic of the Icelandic lavas.

The east coast of Iceland is deeply indented with numerous fiords, each of a different formation though the prevailing rock is pre-glacial basalt with small outcrops of liparite and granophyre. All of the fiords are navigable and the head of each fiord receives a river which tumbles from the table lands in a series of grand waterfalls. Berufjörðr, Naked-Fiord, in the southeast is noted for its variegated lavas and the number and variety of its crystals. The meteorological station for the east coast is located here.

Faskrudsfjörðr, is one of the most beautiful of the east-coast fiords. It is a glaciated valley that rises to an elevation of 1000 feet, in a curve like the hull of a ship, where it meets the ragged pinnacles and summer snows. From this line the mountains rise in serrated ridges and frozen spires which are thrust up through the folds of perpetual fog. This fog blanket excludes the warmth of the sun, holding the snows throughout the summer. As a result scores of streams tumble down the naked gulches, leap from the precipices and cascade over the talus into the fiord. If one stands at the snow line on one side of the valley and looks across to the opposite side, he may sometimes obtain a momentary glimpse of the distant ridges when a chance gust of wind whirls through a mountain pass and sweeps away the fog mantle.

Out of the fog we came one morning into this quiet harbor after dodging about for hours between the basalt pillars at the entrance, those great, square piles of lava, the clanging rookeries of the east coast, where many a ship, more stanch than our little Matador, has broken her ribs on the jutting ledges. We anchored in midstream while the Ask, which had prior claim to the single wharf, took on board her cargo of fish. This gave the members of the Jan Mayen Expedition ample time to explore the valley and climb the steep sides of the fiord. We had twenty four hours and every hour was spent in tramping, photographing and taking samples of the lavas, crystals and flora.

This is the station of the French fishing fleet during the spring and summer. For a long time they have had rights in this fiord and in the adjacent waters and it is a virtual French colony, presided over by the Abbé and the French Consul, who is resident at Reykjavik. The treaty is with Denmark as Iceland can not make a treaty. It has been advantageous to the French but otherwise to the local Icelandic fishermen. The younger fishermen of Iceland have obtained power boats for fishing off the coast and they look upon the French as poachers upon their ancient domain and rightfully. The French do not confine themselves to their own territory but, like the English trawlers, poach extensively under the sheltering folds of the fog. An Icelandic sheriff and his deputies recently rowed out to an English trawler that was fishing within the international limit to expostulate with the captain. They were politely invited on board. The trawler steamed away and when these innocent men came to their senses they found themselves in a back alley of an English fishing port. The English often go ashore to steal sheep and commit other depredations upon the unprotected farmers of the remote districts. This has been going on for centuries and is the real reason why the Icelander does not love the English. As far as I could learn the French do not commit these acts of piracy on this shore. They maintain a company Trading Post and compete with the local shopmen in the village trade. The fact that the French fishermen are Roman Catholics is distasteful to the Icelanders, who are Lutheran, both in profession and practice. There is a large cemetery near the mouth of the fiord where many of the fisher folk of France for several generations have found a rest from their tiresome and lonely labor in the fog. How dreary it looks! How different from the places where their relatives of sunny France are laid away! It is simply a little enclosure on the soilless hillside with a rude wood slab upon which is placed a brief inscription and over all is hung the fog, the endless, pitiless fog in which they met their death. But what does it matter? They rest as well in these forgotten mounds as the greater ones of France within their marble mausoleum. The Abbé remains during the fishing season and has charge of a private hospital as well as an oversight of the spiritual affairs of his people. The hospital is a blessing. The life in the fog is lonesome, dreary, chilling, with labor at the hand lines day and night, with constant dread of being run down by steamers prowling through the fog, with no change month after month, unless sickness gives the fisherman a furlough in the hospital. It is one long monotonous toil which induces melancholia. Pierre Loti sensed the true situation and caught the local color in his Pêcheur d’Islande.

A great fault extends across the fiord. In the bed of a stream which flows through this ravine, the writer found some large and exceptionally valuable zeolites. Iceland is famed among geologists for these crystals. I have gathered them in many places in the country, north, east and west, but never have I found them in such beautiful formations and of so fine a quality as in this fiord. I also obtained excellent specimens of chalcedony embedded in the basalt as inclusions. The greatest find was a fossil tree, of the Tertiary Period, whose diameter was five inches. During the process of infiltration it was filled with minute crystals of zeolites and masses of chalcedony. After supper we rowed across the fiord, a distance of two miles to examine the other end of this same fault and to see the fine waterfall which comes down from the snow ravines above. Here the rock is thickly spattered with zeolites, the meanest of which would be a good find in other localities. One thing vexed my English friend sorely. At a depth of several feet in a basin of running water there is a cavity, hemispherical in form, with a diameter of fourteen inches, entirely lined with fine amethysts. He desired to take it back to England and I left him gazing at it earnestly and wondering how it could be obtained. He decided to leave it only when I threatened to return to the Matador with the boat and leave him to walk around the head of the fiord, a distance of ten miles.

At three in the morning we put to sea, bound for Jan Mayen. As we left the mouth of the fiord a dense fog, a fog so thick that our mast head light shone no brighter than a glowworm and the forms of the forward watch were not distinguishable from the bridge. The captain miscalculated his position, thinking he was well outside of the rookeries, and turned the yacht northward into the tide rips and cross-channels that characterize this, the most dangerous portion of the entire Icelandic coast. Whalebacks and skerries abound in these waters and there are no lighthouses, no bell buoys, no fog horns to warn the master. He must rely entirely upon himself and take long chances. In crossing the tide current between two of the small islands the Matador, now wallowed deeply in the trough of the wave and now rode airily upon its angry crest of curling and running water. It was here that the Matador and her little group of scientists nearly ended their ocean voyages. The lookout was doubled. We steamed with great caution, for the fog was thick. Suddenly the breakers boomed all around us. We jumped to the crest of an angry wave, growling and curling backwards with white breakers. Sideways the yacht slid downward into the yeasty trough. The ragged ridge, like an apparition clothed in steel-gray garments of shifting mists, suddenly loomed dead ahead and under the prow.

“Stop,” rang the signal in the engine room.

“Hard-a-port,” was the sharp order to the helmsman. Sideways we sheered from those yawning and serrated jaws, which have crunched many a Viking sea-horse in former days and many a fishing smack in the modern. Would the trough of the sea well up in season for our keel to clear that ridge? Our lives hung upon the favorable and instantaneous answer to that question which was in the mind of each observer of that horrid sight. With a roar as of impending doom the waters returned and smashed against our beam so fiercely that everything on board was moved which was not actually nailed down. The sleepers were tossed from their bunks, there was a clash and clatter of pots in the galley and a sizzle of hot steam from the upset kettles. The faces of the few who viewed those yawning, greedy jaws took on an ashy hue, the grayness and pallor of the fog itself. We recovered our breath in a long sigh of relief as the Matador with “full-speed-ahead” slipped through the foaming waters into the steady roll of the deeper sea. That was an experience which those who participated in it never wish to repeat.