I PROPOSED to go from Newcastle to Bergen, to go by Norwegian
steamer from Bergen to Vardö or Kirkenaes on the far north-eastern
limits of Norway, and then wait for some sort of boat to take me to
Ekaterina. In this I was successful, though it was not possible to book
any passage beforehand in England.
I left the night the first misleading news of the North Sea battle
was received. If that news had been correct it would have meant that
the German Fleet had broken through and was at large, and that each
war vessel had become a commerce trader. We stood a chance of being
revised by Germans and perhaps of all English of age being taken away.
A British captain said to me afterwards, “We received that first news
as we were leaving a South American port with a cargo of nitre. We
realised at once that the chances must now be considered against our
arriving safely at a home port.”
Because of the battle the mail boat which had been due in at Newcastle
in the morning, arrived only at nightfall, the revising officers were
late in coming from the examination of the one to the examination of
the other--the _Rhanvald Jarl_, due to go out from Newcastle that
night. I did not get to my cabin till half-past-one in the morning, and
had spent some hours among drunken sailors, one of whom was sick on the
stairs of the Aliens Officer’s room.
The journey to Bergen was not pleasant.
No one to breakfast, no one to lunch, no one to dinner. I doubt if any
one felt in the least anxious about German cruisers or stray mines.
There was other preoccupation.
At Bergen I stayed three days in a hotel. The news in the Norwegian
papers did not flatter the efforts of the Allies. Explanations of the
real significance of the North Sea battle began to appear, but they had
the suggestion of merely trying to give a better face to what was in
reality a very unpleasant happening. For the rest the Germans seemed
to be going ahead, and had captured the fort of Vaux. The only set-off
against these things was the first intelligence of the Russian advance
in Galicia.
I sailed northward in the _Vesteraalen_, the Norwegian mail boat
going to far Kirkenaes. Boats go four or five times a week the whole
distance of the Norwegian coast. They are slow, but, if time is no
object, it is a most interesting journey--the placid fiords and jolly
channels between mountains, the veritable gates in the rocks which
upon occasion you pass through, the many fishing villages and the
trawlers weighed down with herrings, the busy women with their knives
cleaning the fish and emptying barrelful after barrelful of entrails
into the sea, the thousands of gulls ever calling, dipping, screeching,
chasing one another, and then the Lofoten Islands with their mighty
heights, the increasingly stern more northern aspect of Nature, and the
dwellings of man, the passing of the Arctic line, the brilliant nights
with the sun still on the shoulder of the sky at midnight.
I fell in with an English Consul, a young man going to Vardö to
do special work in connection with the war. He was accompanied
by his wife, and she, for her part, had never been out of England
before. At every place the steamer stopped we got out and went for a
walk--sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for an hour or so, according
to the extent of the cargo that had to be discharged or taken on.
At Hammerfest, the most northern town in Europe, dirty snow still lay
on the edges of the streets. A wild place this Hammerfest, apparently
all men and no women, the roadway thronged with hardy sailors. A whole
forest of masts in the harbour, an all-pervading smell of cod liver oil
in the town, a grey and ugly port in June, whatever it may be later on.
Many Norwegians spoke English, though with an American accent, and
they were very friendly to us. I was interested, too, to observe their
love of their own land, a real attachment to the rocks of Norway. It
is majestic scenery all the way from Bergen to the North Cape, and
it has somewhat of the characteristic melancholy of the North. If
Russians lived in this land they would love it for its sadness. But the
Norwegians love its ruggedness, and they say that the wild and rugged
nature of their land has made them what they are. And I suppose Scots
would find there grandeur and the sublimity of Nature.
After the North Cape we entered a region of utter desolation, the coast
a line of snow, the sea grey and dead with the occasional black back of
a porpoise showing. The wind was cold and wintry. We knew that at Vardö
we should find no flowers, no vegetation.
At Vardö I left the boat as I had discovered that boats went to and
fro to Russia therefrom. An important place this Vardö, and a sharp
look-out on Germans should always be kept here. If a submarine
campaign against the shipping of Archangel broke out, there would
probably be some connivance on the part of Germans or neutrals resident
hereabout, and possible bases on this desolate coast.
A most forlorn region subject to terrific gales, cold and snowy. It has
a great number of grey wooden docks with grey fishing-boats; almost all
the houses are of wood, and are of the same grey complexion as boats
and quays, they are low and squat, and the dirty streets are wide.
Innumerable gulls are diving and dipping and fluttering--and shrieking
in chorus.
There are two hotels. One is called appropriately “The North Pole,”
the other is “Vinnans Hotel.” I stayed at the latter, and this,
astonishing to relate, is a first-class hotel with electric light and a
telephone in every room, though there is no one in the town with whom
you can communicate. There is an electric arrangement on the wall for
lighting your cigarette--you press a button and a disc becomes red-hot,
and at that you light up. I suppose some Christiania contractor had
put this up, faithful to the specification quoted in his tender. My
windows had scarlet blinds, and all night long the midnight sun poured
crimson light on my white bed, the huge wind howled and bellowed, and
innumerable gulls cried up and down, now this side, now that.
In the bleak and lonely cemetery are Russian graves with naïve carvings
of the Virgin and Child on the orthodox wooden crosses. Many a Russian
sailor and fisherman has perished on this side of his fatherland.
There are amusements in the town, two cinema shows packed every night,
a shooting saloon, an Aunt Sallie shy called “Amerikanske Sport.” I
hit down one ugly face and received as a reward a postcard picture of
a pretty Norwegian girl about to give a kiss to her beau; there are
band-of-hope meetings with the most excruciating music, and you see
advertised--raffles.
One day fifteen negroes arrived on a boat from Russia. They were the
crew of the American ship _R_---- which had brought ammunition to
Archangel, but was in such a bad condition that the negroes refused to
take it back, got their money and cleared off. At Vardö one of them had
quarrelled with the rest and was now said to be mad. No one would take
him in, all the girls being frightened, and the children aiming stones
at him. He was accommodated in the gaol.
At Vardö there is a most able Russian Consul who is not only most
useful to his own Government, but also to ours, affording him all
the help he can. And a Russian knows more of this neighbourhood
and its phenomena than an Englishman brought from Christiania or
London. Through him I learned that a boat would soon be sailing for
Alexandrovsk, the harbour of Ekaterina, and after a five-days’ stay at
Vardö I got away.
Over the sea once more! In twelve hours I was at the Russian Monastery
of Petschenga, and next day in a big snowstorm I came to the new
harbour.