A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden Part 16

I certainly felt like a Lacedaemonian, and gave D---- credit for all the confidence of the Macedonian monarch. I was rowed on board in the jolly-boat.

A mob of many hundred persons surrounded the quay where the Iris was moored, charmed by the symphony of Jerome's fiddle, or astounded by the vociferous melody of the crew, as they tossed off a couplet or two of

"Rule Britannia!"

and then chanted with the recitative energy of truth,

"And there we lay, all the day, In the Bay of Biscay, O!"

On Sunday morning, R---- and P---- returned, unexpectedly, from Trolhattan, and, when they entered the cabin, they were so powdered with dust, and smeared with mud, that I hardly recognized them. They would not, at first, tell me the cause of their dirty plight, but I contrived to hear the whole account from King, who had accompanied them in the capacity of valet. When they arrived at Trolhattan, on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, being wearied, they strove to find some cottage where they might sleep, but failed; and it was, therefore, determined to visit the Falls, s.n.a.t.c.h a hasty meal, and return to Gottenborg the same evening.

Having beheld the awful cataract, and eaten their humble dinner, at set of sun they started.

The moon was bright, and, not having climbed half way up the Heavens, surety of her light was promised throughout the night. The strict enforcement of the laws had cleared the roads of robbers, and no ill was to be feared from bears or wolves, for the approach of summer had driven these animals to the farthest highlands of the kingdom to seek for food and coolness.

With minds at ease, then, and drowsy by the process of digestion, R---- and P----, hushed by the rolling of the carriage, fell fast asleep. The night crept on, and the moon began to go down on the other side of the sky, and, still, R---- and P---- slumbered; and, moreover, their pleasant snores, invading the ears of King, accustomed only to the l.u.s.ty roar of ocean, soon enticed him with a stupefying influence from his watchful att.i.tude on the box, and laid his head in similar forgetfulness on the shoulder of the coachman.

They might have slept for three hours, and King and the coachman for two, when the unguided carriage gave a violent jolt, a loud creak, a revolving motion, and fell, wheels uppermost, on the road-side. King awoke in an instant, but too late to resist being plunged to the top of a high, irritable bramble hedge that showed him no mercy, while R---- and P---- found themselves, in a state of perfect sensibility, on their knees and hands in a dry but deep ditch, with the cushions, the empty drawers, little pieces of old carpet, and all the other interior appointments of their travelling carriage piled mysteriously on their backs and the napes of their necks.

The riddle was soon solved. The horses being sensible of what was restraint and what was not, felt the reins dangling about their hocks, and, having had no food since they left their stables at Gottenborg, walked to the wayside, and began to crop the gra.s.s; but, as mindless of the vehicle at their tails, as desirous to swallow the green fare before their eyes, they approached too near the gutter, and one wheel, sliding plump into it, drew the other three wheels after, and immediately caused the accident I have mentioned.

With its tributary streams, a branch of the river Gotha flows through the main street, and lesser thoroughfares of Gottenborg; and along the banks are planted rows of trees, which give the town a lively appearance. As I crossed the bridges, I saw, on floating platforms, a shoal of washerwomen scouring and thrashing l.u.s.tily, with an instrument like a shuttle, the wardrobe of their customers. When I first arrived at Gottenborg, I thought myself in Holland, the mode of dress, and aspect of the town bearing so close a resemblance to Rotterdam.

On Tuesday morning, the 1st of June, at eleven o'clock, just one month after our departure from Greenwich, we left Sweden for Norway. The time had glided pleasantly and speedily away; and, wherever we had gone, kindness and hospitality always awaited us. We had brought from England few letters of introduction, and, at some places where we went, on our first arrival, knew no one; but here, as here at Gottenborg, not many hours would elapse before the doors of these simple and generous hearted people were opened to us; and, the greatest delight was evinced, when we entered their houses.

Gottenborg was founded by the great Gustavus Adolphus. The town is situated, like all the towns of Scandinavia, on a fiord of its own name, sleeping with all the placid beauty of a lake; but there is so much monotony in the romantic position of the Swedish and Norwegian towns, that, to describe one is to describe all. There are one or two fine buildings in Gottenborg; and the many villas in its neighbourhood, invariably bosomed in thickly wooded valleys, urged me to remember an old tradition among the Swedish Laplanders, which has not been lost on the Swedes. They maintain the Swedes and the Lapps were originally brothers. A storm burst; the Swede was frightened, and took shelter under a board, which G.o.d made into a house; but the Lapp, unappalled, remained without. Since that time, the Swedes dwell in houses, but the Lapps under the bare sky.

What Venice was to ancient Italy, Gottenborg was to Sweden, the national mart; but Time, with ravages and alterations, has swept away its traffic. A Swedish fisherman told me, that the herrings, which used to be so plentiful in the adjacent waters, are now scarcely to be caught; and Gottenborg feels the defection of their extensive sale. The same man a.s.serted, that our ships of war, going up the Baltic, were wont to fire salutes, and the noise had driven the fish away. The fisherman made this statement so roundly, that I could not have the heart to tell him how incredulous I was; but, when I got on board the yacht, I repeated the circ.u.mstance, as a jest, to the sailor who stood at the gangway to receive me.

"Well, your Honour," replied the man, after listening with attention to my narrative, "he arn't put his helm too hard a-port."

"What!" I said, "do you intend to tell me you believe that a salute will frighten herrings, from this fiord, or any other fiord, so that they never return?"

"Why, your Honour," answered the sailor, touching his hat, "I must run alongside this ere foreigner, and sequeeze [acquiesce] with him like; for when I was aboard the Racehorse, sloop o' war, we fired a salute off the Western coast of England, and I'm blowed, your Honour, if they didn't ax Sir Everard to cease the hullabaloo."

"Why?" I asked.

"Ay; your Honour," said the credulous tar, "that's just what I'm bearing up to--why, your Honour, bekase we frightened away the pilchards! May I never lift another handspike if that ain't gospel, that's all your Honour!"

"You be hanged!" I muttered.

"What! your Honour," exclaimed the man, warming with his faith, "have you never heerd, that the report of a cannon will make a lobster shake off his big, starboard claw?"

"No, nor you either," I answered walking away; for I thought the man was striving to palm off a joke.

"Ay; but it's gospel your Honour," I heard the man reply; and, I believe, sailors do hand down to each other a tradition of that kind; for there is a figure of speech, and it is nothing more, with which the English men-of-war's men used to hail the lobster smacks going up the Thames.

"Smack a-hoy! hand us a few lobsters, or--you know what'll happen!"

CHAPTER XI.

RETURN TO NORWAY--SAIL UP THE GULF--APPROACH TO CHRISTIANIA--ITS APPEARANCE FROM THE WATER--ANECDOTE OF BERNADOTTE--DESCRIPTION OF THE CITY--THE FORTRESS--CHARLES THE XIITH--THE CONVICTS--STORY OF THE CAPTURED CANNON--THE HIGHWAYMAN--PROSPECT FROM THE MOUNTAINS--THE NORWEGIAN PEASANT GIRL.

Wednesday dawned cloudless; and the round, red Sun rose on our right hand, and glared through his magnifying lattice, the mist, to see us come back again to Norway.

The smooth and gla.s.sy surface of the tideless Fiord, hemmed in by lofty mountains, stands forth the grand characteristic of Norway. The weather-beaten rocks, rising abruptly from the water, have beauty and boldness on their broad, blank fronts; and how infinite is the loveliness of innumerable islands, cl.u.s.tered together, bearing vegetation of all hues and odours!

Whether it were in the air which I breathed, or whether it were caught from the solemn magnificence of the scenery, the same feeling of sublimity came over me as when I first saw the land of Norway on my arrival from England; and, I do not know how to account for the impression, but during the whole time I remained in Norway, and whenever I was left alone to wander along its fiords, or over its mountains, I gave way, as in England, to no extreme sensations of delight or sorrow; but a consciousness of awe weighed eternally upon my mind, and, released from the tumultuous pa.s.sions of joy or dejection, a desire, created as it were by the visible perception of perfect natural beauty, was ever present to embody itself with the sights of grandeur that soared and sank above and below me.

Silently, as if without a breath of wind, the cutter crept up the Gulf, the beauties of which increased the farther we advanced; the bays--the vessels glancing among the rocks with their white sails in the sun--the cultivated patches of land--and the neat wooden farm-houses amid the desolation of the mountains, were novel and interesting objects. The great variety of the underwood, and the diversified colours of the foliage, were beautifully blended with the darker tints of the fir which grew along the sides, and on the tops, of the high hills; and how well does their sombre gloom mate with the stern magnificence of the rocks!

On the islands, the birch, the hazel, the alder, and the ash, cast their shadows over the water, and are there reflected in their minutest lineaments; nor are their trunks and branches more sharply defined in the air above, than they are imaged in the watery mirror below, the transparency of the water in no way yielding to the clearness of the atmosphere; since, as the abruptly-rising rocks tower proportionally into the air, their steep, bold sides are plunged perpendicularly into the sea, and seem to descend till the eye loses them in its green depth.

Here and there the islands are inhabited by peasants; and flocks of sheep and goats ceased, as the yacht pa.s.sed them, to browse on the low herbage which springs beneath the rocky coppice; and before the cottage-doors half-clad children stood still, and gaped, then called aloud to fishermen who were hanging out their nets to dry, or setting them for fish around the sh.o.r.es of their sea-girt homes.

Beyond this, nowhere are seen or heard the sights or sounds of man's habitation, and, hushed in painful tranquillity and profound solitude, the interior recesses of the fiord show no signs of life. With all their storm-beaten antiquity, gaunt and inhospitable, the skeletons of land rather than the land itself,--the grey and rugged crags--alone appear between the coppice and the short scanty gra.s.s which, ever when the wind came to breathe gently on our sails, sighed and moaned amid the general repose.

About twenty miles from Christiania the fiord narrows to two miles, and holds that breadth up to the city. The town of Christiania is hid by a small island from the sight of the traveller approaching it by water; but at a great distance we could, while winding up the fiord, catch a glimpse of the white houses sleeping in a valley, surrounded by high mountains. At eight o'clock in the afternoon--for there is not much night--we dropped anchor off the town.

Christiania stands low; but the land slopes gradually from the sh.o.r.e of the fiord till it loses itself on the hazy tops of the mountains. When the sky is partially obscured by ma.s.ses of clouds, the appearance of Christiania, seen from the deck of a vessel in the harbour, is very beautiful; that part of the town, near the water, shining brightly in the sunlight, while the remoter suburbs, at the back, being canopied by the heavy vapours that hang around the peaks of the mountains, look black as night.

As soon as the anchor was let go, we went ash.o.r.e, as usual, to make inquiries about salmon; and received as much encouragement as at Falkenborg and Kongsbacka. The time, however, had not yet quite arrived when the salmon-fishery commenced; and a few days devoted to Christiania would not debar us from any amus.e.m.e.nt attached to the long-desired sport. We brought several letters of introduction; and, among them, one to the Viceroy of Christiania; but we did not present our letter to the old Count, all the information and hospitality we desired being amply given to us by the British Consul-General.

There is nothing to see in Christiania, the most conspicuous object being the palace, which stands, like a manufactory, on the top of a rising piece of ground. It is an enormous pile of building, painted uniformly white; and I do not believe the interior is more commodious than the exterior is monotonous and void of architectural taste, since the late King, Bernadotte, once observed, when he entered it, that he saw a mult.i.tude of rooms, but would be glad to know which apartment he was to live in.

The same kind of mirrors that I had seen at Copenhagen and Gottenborg projected outside the windows here, so that no one need move from his chair to know all that occurs in the street; and this is also an important exemption, for the cas.e.m.e.nts of nearly all the houses in Christiania are double, for the purpose of warmth. Large archways lead to larger yards, into which the houses open, and street-doors are almost dispensed with. Neither do the buildings ascend to any great alt.i.tude, but two stories are, for the most part, considered the orthodox height.

The shop windows are not gay, and the name and pursuit of their owners are badly lettered, and in hieroglyphics I could not read.

The largest open place is the market, and that is not so large as Covent Garden. The streets are a little better paved than those of the more southern capitals of the North, but are not of greater width than Coventry Street, or St. Martin's Lane; and, being unlighted by gas, it is difficult at night, should it prove rainy and dark, to keep out of the gutters. At the point where four streets meet, you may generally observe a well, and around this well a knot of idlers, men and women, congregate and gossip, leaning against its palings; but the respectable portion of the inhabitants are never to be found in the streets, although they may be seen, on summer evenings, walking on the terrace of the fortress.

To one looking from the sea, the fortress is on the left of the town, and was the first object we caught sight of when sailing up the Fiord.

It is valueless as a place of defence; and I do not think it has been of any service to the Norwegians, except when Charles XII. attacked Christiania; and, then the Swedish monarch would have battered the town to atoms, had not his attention been distracted by wars on the other frontiers of his kingdom. There is a hill on the right, nearly double the alt.i.tude of that on which the fortress is built; and an enemy, making himself master of that spot, has the citadel under his feet, and may amuse himself by rolling stones into the town.

Running parallel with one part of the Fiord, and from the quay to the castle, is a raised terrace, broad enough to admit of fourteen or fifteen people walking abreast; and here, on the Sabbath summer's afternoon all the beauty, youth, and fashion of Christiania resort. It is sheltered on one side by a row of lime-trees, and, on the other, the cool air from the waters of the Fiord struggles to refresh the languor of a sultry evening.

In gangs of two and two, with drab slouch hat and jerkin, having one side of a darker colour than the other, and reaching half way down the body, the prisoners are led from their penal den, within this fortress, to their appointed toil. There were many old men among these culprits; and their great age rather sought and met with sympathy, than excited detestation of the crime that had brought them to servitude; and, perhaps, it would be a wiser enactment of the Norwegian Government to forego the system of task-work thus publicly, and adopt some other method of punishment less exposed to the popular eye; for, I believe, the spectacle of an old man submitted to daily penal labour, and burdened with clanking chains, is recognised by the public more with a tendency to sympathise with his fate, than to condemn his crime.

While viewing the fortress, we were shown a large cannon, which was captured, it is said, by the Norwegians from Charles XII. when he besieged Christiania; but the real history of the cannon is, that it did certainly belong to the Swedish army; but, Charles, as I have hinted before, being obliged to raise the siege of Christiania to march with his troops elsewhere, many field-pieces, as being too c.u.mbersome to move with celerity, were abandoned, and, among the number, this cannon was left on the heights above Christiania. The Norwegians, when Charles and his army had disappeared, scaled the summit of the hill; and, with much laudable perseverance, succeeded in removing the huge piece of ordnance to the fortress; and two sentinels ever keep guard over it, placed in a conspicuous position over which the Norwegian ensign waves, and point it out to the stranger as a trophy of the Norwegian army.

Contemplating, as we stood round the cannon, the broad expanse of the Fiord, and the distant blue mountains dissolving with the sky, a low building, like a powder magazine, arrested our attention; for numerous sentinels moved rapidly in every quarter round it, and many bra.s.s guns, ready primed, and bearing an earnest signification, flashed in the bright beams of the morning sun. In this dungeon, from which Beelzebub himself could not escape, it seems a notorious highwayman, called Ole, is confined. During the time he was master of his limbs and liberty, he struck such terror into the hearts of his countrymen, that he was imagined an immortal fiend. No prisons could hold him; and the magistrates were compelled to trust to his forbearance, and not to bolts and chains; but his depredations, at length, became so glaring, and increased, year after year, to such magnitude, even to the sacking of the bank, that, come what might, Ole was arrested. Fearful of his supernatural strength and devilish craft, his captors deemed no common dungeon sufficiently secure; and this miserable abode, a pandemonium above ground, bomb-proof, and proof against every thing else, was erected for the sole reception of Ole; and, lest he should burst asunder the stone walls, he is surrounded by alert sentinels and loaded guns, and here doomed to drag out the rest of his existence.

To the east of the town there is a road, which may be seen girdling a mountain's barren side, and, following its track a mile, or so, I took then a narrow foot-path, and, wandering through a forest of firs, reached a circular green sward where, in the middle, the remnant of some natural convulsion, a gigantic black stone lay. Seated there, I beheld the whole city of Christiania crouched at my feet; and, far as the eye could travel, the mountains rose one over the other, till my vision ached, and mistook their aspiring peaks for the azure heaven. On the left hand, serenely sleeping, wound, amid a thousand green islands, the leaden-hued Fiord, bearing on its quiet surface a fleet of lazy ships, whose white sails made them look, at distance so remote, like snowy swans, or froth from neighbouring rapid.

The sun had just sunk behind the mountains when I reached the spot; and, throwing myself on the gra.s.s, I watched its light, like a gold cap, blazing around the lofty summit of a mountain, rearing itself above the rest, and not less than forty miles distant to the north of the hill on which I reclined. The evening was calm as it was clear. The cathedral bells below had thrice told the approaching third hour before midnight, when I heard the voice of some one singing, in the monotonous, drawling, but melodious tone of prayer; and, at last, as the fitful evening zephyr stirred uneasily, I could distinctly catch the soft intonation of a female voice; and, whatever woman she was, she sang a sweet and touching melody.

There was no hut, or building of any kind at hand, so that I was perplexed to tell whence the voice came. I was not long in doubt. A young girl, walking quickly, with a light step, and bearing in her hand a bundle of dried sticks, came forth from the heart of the pine-forest.