THE LIFE OF A TREE
What different things are prized in different lands!
When walking round a beautiful park on an island in _Suomi_, the whole
of which and a lovely mansion belonged to our host, he pointed with
great pride to three oak trees, and said--
"Look at our oaks, are they not wonderful?"
We almost smiled. They were oaks, certainly, perhaps as big in
circumference as a soup plate, which to an English mind was nothing; but
the oak, called in Finnish _Jumalan Puu_, or God's tree, is a great
rarity in _Suomi_, and much prized, whereas the splendid silver birches
and glorious pines, which call forth such praise and admiration from
strangers, count for nothing, in spite of the magnificent luxuriance of
their growth.
The pine is one of the most majestic of all trees. It is so superbly
stately--so unbending to the breeze. It raises its royal head
aloft--soaring heavenwards, heedless of all around; while the silvery
floating clouds gently kiss its lofty boughs, as they fleet rapidly
hither and thither in their endless chase round this world. Deep and
dark are the leaves, strong and unresisting; but even they have their
tender points, and the young shoots are deliciously green and sweet
scented. Look at its solid stem--so straight that every maiden passing
by sighs as she attempts to imitate its superb carriage, and those very
stems are coloured by a wondrous pinky hue oft-times; so pink, in fact,
we pause to wonder if it be painted by Nature's brush, or is merely a
whim of sunset playing upon the sturdy bark.
Look beneath the pine; its dark and solid grandeur protects and fosters
the tenderest of green carpets. See the moss of palest green, its long
fronds appearing like ferns, or note those real ferns and coarser
bracken fighting the brambles for supremacy or trying to flout that
little wild rose daring to assert its individuality.
Pines and silver birches flourish on all sides.
Everything or anything can apparently be made of birch bark in
Finland--shoes, baskets, huge or small, salt bottles, flower vases--even
an entire suit of clothing is hanging up in _Helsingfors_ Museum,
manufactured from the bark of the silver birch.
The bark thus used, however, is often cut from the growing tree, but
this requires to be carefully done so as not to destroy the sap. As one
drives through the forests, one notices that many of the trees have
dark-brown rings a foot or more wide round their trunks, showing where
the bark has been stripped away. The ribband for plaiting is made, as a
rule, about an inch wide, although narrower necessarily for fine work,
and then it is plaited in and out, each article being made double, so
that the shiny silvery surface may show on either side. Even baby
children manipulate the birch bark, and one may pass a cluster of such
small fry by the roadside, shoeless and stockingless, all busily
plaiting baskets with their nimble little fingers. We often marvelled at
their dexterity.
What were those packets of brown paper securely fixed to the top of long
poles all over that field, we wondered?
"Why, sheets of birch bark," answered our friend, "put out to dry in the
sun for the peasants to plait baskets and boxes, shoes and satchels,
such as you have just seen; they peeled those trees before cutting them
down."
On another of our drives we noticed bunches of dried leaves tied at the
top of some of the wooden poles which support the strangely tumbledown
looking wooden fences which are found everywhere in Finland, and serve
not only as boundaries to fields but also to keep up the snow.
"What are those dead leaves?" we asked the lad who drove our _kärra_.
"They are there to dry in the sun, for the sheep to eat in the winter,"
was his reply, with which we ought to have rested satisfied; but
thinking that was not quite correct, as they were in patches round some
fields and not in others, we asked the boy of the second springless
vehicle the same question.
"Those," he said, "are put up to dry in the sun round the rye fields,
and in the autumn, when the first frost comes and might destroy the
whole crop in a single night, they are lighted, and the warmth and the
wind from them protect the crops till they can be hastily gathered the
next day."
This sounded much more probable, and subsequently proved perfectly
correct. These sudden autumn frosts are the farmer's terror, for his
crops being left out one day too long may mean ruin, and that he will
have to mix birch bark or Iceland moss with his winter's bread to eke it
out, poor soul!
The export of timber from Finland is really its chief trade.
+-----+------------------+--------------+----------------------+
| | Export of Wood, | Wood Pulp. | Paper, chiefly made |
| | Cubic Metres | Kilograms. | from Wood Pulp. |
| | (about 36 Cubic | | Kilograms. |
| | Feet). | | |
+-----+------------------+--------------+----------------------+
|1874 | 843,031 | 3,116,139 | 1,317,021 |
|1884 | 1,229,008 | 9,326,288 | 8,464,841 |
|1894 | 1,722,322 | 33,802,916 | 17,675,856 |
|1895 | 2,704,126 | 35,548,000 | .. |
|1896 | 2,136,888 | 39,096,000 | .. |
+-----+------------------+--------------+----------------------+
In 1909, 5,073,513 cubic metres of wood were exported, and 192,373,500
kilograms of pulp and paper.
From this table it will be seen that a large quantity of pulp is
exported, likewise a great deal of paper, and chiefly to our own
country.
England exports to Finland somewhat, but very little, of her own
produce, unfortunately; tea, coffee, sugar, and such foreign wares being
transhipped from England and Germany--principally from the latter to
Finland. The foreign inland trade of _Suomi_ is chiefly in the hands of
the Germans. "Made in Germany" is as often found on articles of
commerce, as it is in England. Well done, Germany!
We gained some idea of the magnitude of the Finnish wood trade when
passing _Kotka_, a town in the Gulf of Finland, lying between
_Helsingfors_ and _Wiborg_.
Immense stacks of sawn wood were piled up at _Kotka_, and in the bay lay
at least a dozen large ships and steamers, with barges lying on either
side filling them with freight as quickly as possible for export to
other lands.
The trees of Finland _are_ Finland. They are the gold mines of the
country, the props of the people, the products of the earth; the money
bags that feed most of its two million and a half of inhabitants. The
life of a Finnish tree is worth retailing from the day of its birth
until it forms the floor or walls of a prince's palace or a peasant's
hut. To say that Finland is one huge forest is not true, for the
lakes--of which there are five or six thousand--play an important part,
and cover about one-sixth of the country, but these lakes, rivers, and
waterways all take their share in the wood trade. Some of the lakes are
really inland seas, and very rough seas too. Tradition says they are
bottomless--anyway, many of them are of enormous depth. Tradition might
well say the forests are boundless, for what is not water in Finland is
one vast and wonderful expanse of wood.
Now let us look at the life of a tree. Like Topsy "it growed;" it was
not planted by man. Those vast pine forests, extending for miles and
miles, actual mines of wealth, are a mere veneer to granite rocks. That
is the wonderful part of it all, granite is the basis, granite
distinctly showing the progress of glaciers of a former period.
Such is the foundation, and above that a foot or two of soil, sometimes
less, for the rocks themselves often appear through the slight covering;
but yet out of this scant earth and stone the trees are multiplied.
Standing on the top of the tower of the old castle--alas! so hideously
restored--at _Wiborg_, one can see for miles and miles nothing but lakes
and trees, and as we lingered and wondered at the flatness of the land
our attention was arrested by patches of smoke.
"Forest fires, one of the curses of the land," we learned. "In hot
weather there are often awful fires; look, there are five to be seen
from this tower at one moment, all doing much damage and causing great
anxiety, because the resin in the pines makes them burn furiously."
"How do they put them out?" we asked.
"Every one is summoned from far and near; indeed, the people come
themselves when they see smoke, and all hands set to work felling trees
towards the fire in order to make an open space round the flaming woods,
or beating with long poles the dry burning mass which spreads the fire.
It is no light labour; sometimes miles of trenching have to be dug as
the only means whereby a fire can be extinguished; all are willing to
help, for, directly or indirectly, all are connected with the wood
trade."
Here and there where we travelled, the forests were on fire--fires
luckily not caused by those chance conflagrations, which do so much harm
in Finland, but duly organised to clear a certain district. Matters are
arranged in this wise: when a man wants to plough more land, he selects
a nice stretch of wood, saws down all the big trees, which he sledges
away, the next set (in point of size) he also hews down, but leaves
where they fall, with all their boughs and leaves on, till the sun dries
them. Then he makes a fire in their midst, the dried leaves soon catch,
and in a few hours the whole acreage is bare except for the tree trunks,
which are only charred and serve later for firewood. All the farm hands,
often augmented by neighbours, assist at these fires, for although a man
may wish to clear two or three acres, if the flames were not watched,
they would soon lay twenty or thirty bare, and perhaps destroy an entire
forest. The ashes lie on the ground and become manure, so that when,
during the following summer, he begins to plough, the sandy soil is
fairly well-fed, and ultimately mildly prolific. He is very ingenious
this peasant, and takes the greatest care not to let the flames spread
beyond his appointed boundary, beating them with huge sticks, as
required, and keeping the flames well in hand. The disastrous forest
fires, caused by accidental circumstances, spoil the finest timber, and
can only be stayed in their wild career, as we remarked elsewhere, by
digging trenches, over which the roaring flames cannot pass. Such fires
are one of the curses of Finland, and do almost as much harm as a
flight of locusts in Morocco.
"How old are those trees we see, twenty or thirty years?"
Our friend the _Kommerserådet_ smiled.
"Far, far more," he replied; "speaking roughly, every tree eight inches
in diameter twenty feet from the ground is eighty years old, nine inches
ninety years, ten inches a hundred years old, and so on."
We were amazed to think that these vast forests should be so old, for if
it took so long for a tree to grow, and so many millions were felled
every year, it seemed to us that the land would soon be barren.
"Not at all," our friend replied; "a forest is never cleared. Only trees
which have reached a proper girth are felled. In every forest but a
certain number of trees are cut each year, so that fresh ones are in a
continuous stream taking their places."
Rich merchants possess their own forests, their own saw-mills, their own
store houses, and even their own ships; but the bulk of exporters pay
for cut timber. In hiring a forest the tenant takes it on lease for so
many years with the right to fell all trees so soon as they reach
certain dimensions. The doomed trees are marked, and now we must follow
their after course.
In the autumn and winter they are felled and left for the first fall of
snow, when they are dragged, sometimes two or three logs one behind the
other fixed together with iron chains, to the nearest open road for
further conveyance by sledge when the snow permits.
No single horse could move such a weight in summer, but by the aid of
sledges and snow all is changed, and away gallop the little steeds down
the mountain side, pushed forward at times by the weight behind. By this
means the trees are conveyed to the nearest waterway.
Then the logs are stamped with the owner's registered mark and rolled
upon the ice of lake or river, to await the natural transport of spring.
Once the ice thaws the forests begin to move, for as "Birnam Wood
marched to Dunsinane," the Finnish forests float to other lands.
Imagine the helter-skelter of those thousands of trees over the roaring,
rushing waterfalls, or along the rapidly flowing cataracts and flooded
rivers. To prevent these wooden horses getting caught-up on the banks
along their watery course, men with long poles "personally conduct" huge
batches to the coast, or, where they are likely to get fixed, a sort of
wooden fencing is built in the river to direct their course. On, on they
voyage, those soldiers of the forest, for hundreds of miles to the
coast, till, finally arriving at such an enormous wood export town as
_Kotka_, they meet their doom.
Wherever the chain of waterways is composed of large lakes, the logs are
conveyed to the coast by means of enormous rafts. It is really most
ingenious; head and tail into a ring half-a-mile or more in
circumference float the pine trees, coupled together by iron clamps.
Inside these the newly-cut logs, which look like a rope of sausages,
are thrust end on end, until they make a perfectly solid floor floating
on the surface of the water. Now, as a raft of this kind contains many
thousand logs, which means a considerable amount of money value, it is
conveyed to the coast with the greatest care. At one end a small house
is built on the raft itself, on which live the two or three men who have
to escort this floating island across the lakes, attend to the logs that
get out of place, or secure the fastenings of the outside wood which
binds the whole together.
Naturally it takes some weeks for such a vast island to reach the coast,
and as it is sometimes necessary for various reasons to stop on the
journey, a horse goes on the raft so as to let down or pull up the
anchor when necessary. It is truly wonderful to think that on a floating
mass of tree trunks, merely bound together by a primitive barrier or
outside ring, men should live for weeks, and a horse should have its
stabling. Yet such is the case, and many times during our three months'
summer sojourn in Finland we passed these floating islands wending their
way to the coast.
Of course, it is understood rafts can only travel over the vast lakes,
and that on rivers the wood must go separately in the manner before
described. But in such a river as the _Uleå_, where the salmon fishing
is of as great importance, if not greater than wood, the latter are only
allowed to pass down until the day when salmon fishing commences. On the
completion of the floating season the stock logs at _Kotka_ often amount
to a million pieces. That alone gives some idea of this wonderful
industry. About a mile above _Kotka_ the logs are received by the
floating inspector and his trained sorters, who separate and distribute,
according to the marks thereon, the logs to their respective owners.
Large floating houses await their arrival, and as the back part of these
sheds are divided by half a dozen or so openings leading into the water
pens, the men at work quickly turn the timber over, see the owners'
names, and by means of a pole steer it into the space belonging to that
owner, so that in time each water pen becomes filled with the trees
belonging to its proprietor.
All this time the steam saw-mills are waiting for their prey, and, like
the pigs at Chicago who come out smoked and cooked hams, according to
tradition, the trees that go in have half a dozen saws run into them at
once, and out come boards and planks of various thicknesses and widths.
The middle bit--the plum of the cake--is the worst in this instance, for
it contains the heart, which is bad wood for working as it splits and
twists on drying; the rest is converted into deals, battens, and boards.
The outside slab pieces are made into staves for barrels, while the
general odds and ends that remain behind are used as fuel for engines,
steamboats, or private house consumption in Finland, where coal being
practically unknown, wood takes its place.
The sawn wood is stacked up for miles and miles along the waterside to
season ready for export, and, as a rule, the Finnish owners sell their
timber with the clause that it should be ready to be shipped at "first
open water," when away go the pines, cargo after cargo, the best being
sent to England, and other qualities to France, Germany, etc. Thus from
Finland comes much of the wood that makes our floors, our window frames,
our railings, and our doors, and lights our daily fires--it enters the
peasant hut, and it finds a place in the royal palace.
Another big trade is birch--a class of wood cut up into reels and
bobbins for England; and yet another is aspen, which wood is supplied to
Sweden in large quantities to make matches. Not only are matches pure
and simple made enormously in Sweden; but when leaving Gothenburg on our
homeward journey we saw hundreds of large cases being put on board our
steamer. Although very big, one man carried a case with ease, much to
our surprise, for anything so enormous in the way of cargo was generally
hoisted on board with a crane. What a revelation! These cases contained
match boxes, which are sent by thousands every week to England.
There is an enormous export of wood spirit made from sawdust; yet even
then, until lately, it was difficult to get rid of the superfluous
sawdust, a great deal of which was burned away in large furnaces.
Sawdust now plays an important rôle in the trade of Finland, and silk
factories have been started, for pulp; for our French friends have found
that beautiful fabrics can be made from wood, which takes dye almost
better than silk woven by a painstaking little worm, only costs a
fraction of the money, and sells almost equally well.
So that wood for building purposes, for matches or fuel, pulp for paper,
sawdust for spirit and silk, are the outcome of the life of a Finnish
tree. People can be clothed in wood, get drunk on wood, read print on
wood, and get warmed and their food cooked by wood.