REYKJAVIK--LATIN CONVERSATION--I BECOME THE PROPRIETOR OF TWENTY-SIX HORSES--EIDER DUCKS--BESSESTAD--SNORKO STURLESON--THE OLD GREENLAND COLONY--FINLAND--A GENOESE SKIPPER IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY--AN ICELANDIC DINNER-- SKOAL--AN AFTER-DINNER SPEACH IN LATIN--WINGED RABBITS-- DUCROW--START OF THE BAGGAGE-TRAIN.
Reykjavik, June 28, 1856.
Notwithstanding that its site, as I mentioned in my last letter, was determined by auspices not less divine than those of Rome or Athens, Reykjavik is not so fine a city as either, though its public buildings may be thought to be in better repair. In fact, the town consists of a collection of wooden sheds, one story high--rising here and there into a gable end of greater pretentions--built along the lava beach, and flanked at either end by a suburb of turf huts.
On every side of it extends a desolate plain of lava that once must have boiled up red-hot from some distant gateway of hell, and fallen hissing into the sea. No tree or bush relieves the dreariness of the landscape, and the mountains are too distant to serve as a background to the buildings; but before the door of each merchant's house facing the sea, there flies a gay little pennon; and as you walk along the silent streets, whose dust no carriage-wheel has ever desecrated, the rows of flower-pots that peep out of the windows, between curtains of white muslin, at once convince you that notwithstanding their unpretending appearance, within each dwelling reign the elegance and comfort of a woman-tended home.
Thanks to Sigurdr's popularity among his countrymen, by the second day after our arrival we found ourselves no longer in a strange land. With a frank energetic cordiality that quite took one by surprise, the gentlemen of the place at once welcomed us to their firesides, and made us feel that we could give them no greater pleasure than by claiming their hospitality. As, however, it is necessary, if we are to reach Jan Mayen and Spitzbergen this summer, that our stay in Iceland should not be prolonged above a certain date, I determined at once to make preparations for our expedition to the Geysirs and the interior of the country. Our plan at present, after visiting the hot springs, is to return to Reykjavik, and stretch right across the middle of the island to the north coast--scarcely ever visited by strangers. Thence we shall sail straight away to Jan Mayen.
In pursuance of this arrangement, the first thing to do was to buy some horses. Away, accordingly, we went in the gig to the little pier leading up to the merchant's house who had kindly promised Sigurdr to provide them. Everything in the country that is not made of wood is made of lava. The pier was constructed out of huge boulders of lava, the shingle is lava, the sea-sand is pounded lava, the mud on the r is lava paste, the foundations of the houses are lava blocks, and in dry weather you are blinded with lava dust. Immediately upon landing I was presented to a fine, burly gentleman, who, I was informed, could let me have a steppe-ful of horses if I desired, and a few minutes afterwards I picked myself up in the middle of a Latin oration on the subject of the weather. Having suddenly lost my nominative case, I concluded abruptly with the figure syncope, and a bow, to which my interlocutor politely replied "Ita." Many of the inhabitants speak English, and one or two French, but in default of either of these, your only chance is Latin. At first I found great difficulty in brushing up anything sufficiently conversational, more especially as it was necessary to brn out the vowels in the high Roman fashion; but a little practice soon made me more fluent, and I got at last to brandish my "Pergratum est," etc. in the face of a new acquaintance, without any misgivings. On this occasion I thought it more prudent to let Sigurdr make the necessary arrangements for our journey, and in a few minutes I had the satisfaction of learning that I had become the proprietor of twenty-six horses, as many bridles and pack-saddles, and three guides.
There being no r in Iceland, all the traffic of the country is conducted by means of horses, along the bridle- tracks which centuries of travel have worn in the lava plains. As but little hay is to be had, the winter is a season of fasting for all cattle, and it is not until spring is well advanced, and the horses have had time to grow a little fat on the young grass, that you can go a journey. I was a good deal taken aback when the number of my stud was announced to me, but it appears that what with the photographic apparatus, which I am anxious to take, and our tent, it would be impossible to do with fewer animals. The price of each pony is very moderate, and I am told I shall have no difficulty in disposing of all of them, at the conclusion of our expedition.
These preliminaries happily concluded, Mr. J-- invited us into his house, where his wife and daughter--a sunshiny young lady of eighteen--were waiting to receive us. As Latin here was quite useless, we had to entrust Sigurdr with all the pretty things we desired to convey to our entertainers, but it is my firm opinion that that gentleman took a dirty advantage of us, and intercepting the choicest flowers of our eloquence, appropriated them to the advancement of his own interests. However, such expressions of respectful admiration as he suffered to reach their destination were received very graciously, and rewarded with a shower of smiles.
The next few days were spent in making short expeditions in the neighbourhood, in preparing our baggage-train, and in paying visits. It would be too long for me to enumerate all the marks of kindness and hospitality I received during this short period. Suffice it to say, that I had the satisfaction of making many very interesting acquaintances, of beholding a great number of very pretty faces, and of partaking of an innumerable quantity of luncheons. In fact, to break bread, or, more correctly speaking, to crack a bottle with the master of the house, is as essential an element of a morning call as the making a bow or shaking hands, and to refuse to take off your glass would be as great an incivility as to decline taking off your hat. From earliest times, as the grand old ballad of the King of Thule tells us, a beaker was considered the fittest token a lady could present to her true-love--
Dem fterbend feine Buble Einen goldnen Becher gab.
And in one of the most ancient Eddaic songs it is written, "Drink, Runes, must thou know, if thou wilt maintain thy power over the maiden thou lovest. Thou shalt score them on the drinking-horn, on the back of thy hand, and the word NAUD" (NEED--necessity) "on thy nail." Moreover, when it is remembered that the ladies of the house themselves minister on these occasions, it will be easily understood that all flinching is out of the question. What is a man to do, when a wicked little golden-haired maiden insists on pouring him out a bumper, and dumb show is his only means of remonstrance? Why, of course, if death were in the cup, he must make her a leg, and drain it to the bottom, as I did. In conclusion, I am bound to add that, notwithstanding the bacchanalian character prevailing in these visits, I derived from them much interesting and useful information, and I have invariably found the gentlemen to whom I have been presented persons of education and refinement, combined with a happy, healthy, jovial temperament, that invests their conversation with a peculiar charm.
At this moment people are in a great state of excitement at the expected arrival of H.I.H. Prince Napoleon, and two days ago a large full-rigged ship came in laden with coal for his use. The day after we left Stornaway, we had seen her scudding away before the gale on a due west course, and guessed she was bound for Iceland, and running down the longitude, but as we arrived here four days before her, our course seems to have been a better one. The only other ship here is the French frigate "Artemise," Commodore Dumas, by whom I have been treated with the greatest kindness and civility.
On Saturday we went to Vedey, a beautiful little green island where the eider ducks breed, and build nests with the soft under-down plucked from their own bosoms. After the little ones are hatched, and their birthplaces deserted, the nests are gathered, cleaned, and stuffed into pillow-cases, for pretty ladies in Europe to lay their soft, warm cheeks upon, and sleep the sleep of the innocent, while long-legged, brshouldered Englishmen protrude from between them at German inns, like the ham from a sandwich, and cannot sleep, however innocent.
The next day, being Sunday, I read prayers on board, and then went for a short time to the cathedral church,-- the only stone building in Reykjavik. It is a moderate-sized, unpretending place, capable of holding three or four hundred persons, erected in very ancient times, but lately restored. The Icelanders are of the Lutheran religion, and a Lutheran clergyman, in a black gown, etc., with a ruff round his neck, such as our bishops are painted in about the time of James the First, was preaching a sermon. It was the first time I had heard Icelandic spoken continuously, and it struck me as a singularly sweet caressing language, although I disliked the particular cadence, amounting almost to a chant, with which each sentence ended.
As in every church where prayers have been offered up since the world began, the majority of the congregation were women, some few dressed in bonnets, and the rest in the national black silk skull-cap, set jauntily on one side of the head, with a long black tassel hanging down to the shoulder, or else in a quaint mitre of white linen, of which a drawing alone could give you an idea, the remainder of an Icelandic lady's costume, when not superseded by Paris fashions, consists of a black bodice fastened in front with silver clasps, over which is drawn a cloth jacket, ornamented with a multitude of silver buttons; round the neck goes a stiff ruff of velvet, figured with silver lace, and a silver belt, often beautifully chased, binds the long dark wadmal petticoat round the waist. Sometimes the ornaments are of gold instead of silver, and very costly.
Before dismissing his people, the preacher descended from the pulpit, and putting on a splendid cope of crimson velvet (in which some bishop had in ages past been murdered), turned his back to the congregation, and chanted some Latin sentences in good round Roman style. Though still retaining in their ceremonies a few vestiges of the old religion, though altars, candles, pictures, and crucifixes yet remain in many of their churches, the Icelanders are staunch Protestants, and, by all accounts, the most devout, innocent pure-hearted people in the world. Crime, theft, debauchery, cruelty, are unknown amongst them; they have neither prison, gallows, soldiers, nor police; and in the manner of the lives they lead among their secluded valleys, there is something of a patriarchal simplicity, that reminds one of the Old World princes, of whom it has been said, that they were "upright and perfect, eschewing evil, and in their hearts no guile."
The law with regard to marriage, however, is sufficiently peculiar. When, from some unhappy incompatibility of temper, a married couple live so miserably together as to render life insupportable, it is competent for them to apply to the Danish Governor of the island for a divorce. If, after the lapse of three years from the date of the application, both are still of the same mind, and equally eager to be free, the divorce is granted, and each is at liberty to marry again.
The next day it had been arranged that we were to take an experimental trip on our new ponies, under the guidance of the learned and jovial Rector of the College. Unfortunately the weather was dull and rainy, but we were determined to enioy ourselves in spite of everything, and a pleasanter ride I have seldom had. The steed Sigurdr had purchased for me was a long-tailed, hog-maned, shaggy, cow-houghed creature, thirteen hands high, of a bright yellow colour, with admirable action, and sure-footed enough to walk downstairs backwards. The Doctor was not less well mounted; in fact, the Icelandic pony is quite a peculiar race, much stronger, faster, and better bred than the Highland shelty, and descended probably from pure-blooded sires that scoured the steppes of Asia, long before Odin and his paladins had peopled the valleys of Scandinavia.
The first few miles of our ride lay across an undulating plain of dolorite, to a farm situated at the head of an inlet of the sea. At a distance, the farm-steading looked like a little oasis of green, amid the grey stony slopes that surrounded it, and on a nearer approach not unlike the vestiges of a Celtic earthwork, with the tumulus of a hero or two in the centre, but the mounds turned out to be nothing more than the grass roofs of the house and offices, and the banks and dykes but circumvallations round the plot of most carefully cleaned meadow, called the "tun," which always surrounds every Icelandic farm. This word "tun" is evidently identical with our own Irish "TOWN-LAND," the Cornish "TOWN," and the Scotch "TOON,"--terms which, in their local signification, do not mean a congregation of streets and buildings, but the yard, and spaces of grass immediately adjoining a single house, just as in German we have "tzaun," and in the Dutch "tuyn," a garden.
Turning to the right, round the head of a little bay, we passed within forty yards of an enormous eagle, seated on a crag; but we had no rifle, and all he did was to rise heavily into the air, flap his wings like a barn-door fowl, and plump lazily down twenty yards farther off. Soon after, the district we traversed became more igneous, wrinkled, cracked, and ropy than anything we had yet seen, and another two hours' scamper over such a track as till then I would not have believed horses could have traversed, even at a foot's pace, brought us to the solitary farm-house of Bessestad. Fresh from the neat homesteads of England that we had left sparkling in the bright spring weather, and sheltered by immemorial elms,--the scene before us looked inexpressibly desolate. In front rose a cluster of weather-beaten wooden buildings, and huts like ice-houses, surrounded by a scanty plot of grass, reclaimed from the craggy plain of broken lava that stretched--the home of ravens and foxes--on either side to the horizon. Beyond, lay a low black breadth of moorland, intersected by patches of what was neither land nor water, and last, the sullen sea; while above our heads a wind, saturated with the damps of the Atlantic, went moaning over the landscape. Yet this was Bessestad, the ancient home of Snorro Sturleson!
On dismounting from our horses and entering the house things began to look more cheery; a dear old lady, to whom we were successively presented by the Rector, received us, with the air of a princess, ushered us into her best room, made us sit down on the sofa--the place of honour--and assisted by her niece, a pale lily-like maiden, named after Jarl Hakon's Thora, proceeded to serve us with hot coffee, rusks, and sweetmeats. At first it used to give me a very disagreeable feeling to be waited upon by the woman-kind of the household, and I was always starting up, and attempting to take the dishes out of their hands, to their infinite surprise; but now I have succeeded in learning to accept their ministrations with the same unembarrassed dignity as my neighbours. In the end, indeed, I have rather got to like it, especially when they are as pretty as Miss Thora. To add, moreover, to our content, it appeared that that young lady spoke a little French; so that we had no longer any need to pay our court by proxy, which many persons besides ourselves have found to be unsatisfactory. Our hostess lives quite alone. Her son, whom I have the pleasure of knowing, is far away, pursuing a career of honour and usefulness at Copenhagen, and it seems quite enough for his mother to know that he is holding his head high among the princes of literature, and the statesmen of Europe, provided only news of his success and advancing reputation shall occasionally reach her across the ocean.
Of the rooms and the interior arrangement of the house, I do not know that I have anything particular to tell you; they seemed to me like those of a good old-fashioned farmhouse, the walls wainscoted with deal, and the doors and staircase of the same material. A few prints, a photograph, some shelves, one or two little pictures, decorated the parlour, and a neat iron stove, and massive chests of drawers, served to furnish it very completely. But you must not, I fear, take the drawing-room of Bessestad as an average specimen of the comfort of an Icelandic interieur. The greater proportion of the inhabitants of the island live much more rudely. The walls of only the more substantial farmsteads are wainscoted with deal, or even partially screened with drift-wood. In most houses the bare blocks of lava, pointed with moss, are left in all their natural ruggedness. Instead of wood, the rafters are made of the ribs of whales. The same room but too often serves as the dining, sitting, and sleeping place for the whole family; a hole in the roof is the only chimney, and a horse's skull the most luxurious fauteuil into which it is possible for them to induct a stranger. The parquet is that originally laid down by Nature,--the beds are merely boxes filled with feathers or sea-weed,--and by all accounts the nightly packing is pretty close, and very indiscriminate.
After drinking several cups of coffee, and consuming at least a barrel of rusks, we rose to go, in spite of Miss Thora's intimation that a fresh jorum of coffee was being brewed. The horses were resaddled; and with an eloquent exchange of bows, curtseys, and kindly smiles, we took leave of our courteous entertainers, and sallied forth into the wind and rain. It was a regular race home, single file, the Rector leading; but as we sped along in silence, amid the unchangeable features of this strange land, I could not help thinking of him whose shrewd observing eye must have rested, six hundred and fifty years ago, on the selfsame crags, and tarns, and distant mountain-tops; perhaps on the very day he rode out in the pride of his wealth, talent, and political influence, to meet his murderers at Reikholt. And mingling with his memory would rise the pale face of Thora,--not the little lady of the coffee and buscuits we had just left, but that other Thora, so tender and true, who turned back King Olaf's hell-hounds from the hiding-place of the great Jarl of Lade.
In order that you may understand why the forlorn barrack we had just left, and its solitary inmates, should have set me thinking of the men and women "of a thousand summers back," it is necessary I should tell you a little about this same Snorro Sturleson, whose memory so haunted me.
Colonized as Iceland had been,--not, as is generally the case, when a new land is brought into occupation, by the poverty-stricken dregs of a redundant population, nor by a gang of outcasts and ruffians, expelled from the bosom of a society which they contaminated,--but by men who in their own land had been both rich and noble,--with possessions to be taxed, and a spirit too haughty to endure taxation,--already acquainted with whatever of refinement and learning the age they lived in was capable of supplying, it is not surprising that we should find its inhabitants, even from the first infancy of the republic, endowed with an amount of intellectual energy hardly to be expected in so secluded a community.
Perhaps it was this very seclusion which stimulated into almost miraculous exuberance the mental powers already innate in the people. Undistracted during several successive centuries by the bloody wars, and still more bloody political convulsions, which for too long a period rendered the sword of the warrior so much more important to European society than the pen of the scholar, the Icelandic settlers, devoting the long leisure of their winter nights to intellectual occupations, became the first of any European nation to create for themselves a native literature. Indeed, so much more accustomed did they get to use their heads than their hands, than if an Icelander were injured he often avenged himself, not by cutting the throat of his antagonist, but by ridiculing him in some pasquinade,--sometimes, indeed, he did both; and when the King of Denmark maltreats the crew of an Icelandic vessel shipwrecked on his coast, their indignant countrymen send the barbarous monarch word, that by way of reprisal, they intend making as many lampoons on him as there are promontories in his dominions. Almost all the ancient Scandinavian manuscripts are Icelandic; the negotiations between the Courts of the North were conducted by Icelandic diplomatists; the earliest topographical survey with which we are acquainted was Icelandic; the cosmogony of the Odin religion was formulated, and its doctrinal traditions and ritual reduced to a system, by Icelandic archaeologists; and the first historical composition ever written by any European in the vernacular, was the product of Icelandic genius. The title of this important work is "The Heimskringla," or world-circle, [Footnote: So called because Heimskringla (world-circle) is the first word in the opening sentence of the manuscript which catches the eye.] and its author was--Snorro Sturleson! It consists of an account of the reigns of the Norwegian kings from mythic times down to about A.D. 1150, that is to say, a few years before the death of our own Henry II.; but detailed by the old Sagaman with so much art and cleverness as almost to combine the dramatic power of Macaulay with Clarendon's delicate delineation of character, and the charming loquacity of Mr. Pepys. His stirring sea-fights, his tender love-stories, and delightful bits of domestic gossip, are really inimitable;--you actually live with the people he brings upon the stage, as intimately as you do with Falstaff, Percy, or Prince Hal; and there is something in the bearing of those old heroic figures who form his dramatis person, so grand and noble, that it is impossible to read the story of their earnest stirring lives without a feeling of almost passionate interest--an effect which no tale frozen up in the monkish Latin of the Saxon annalists has ever produced upon me.
As for Snorro's own life, it was eventful and tragic enough. Unscrupulous, turbulent, greedy of money, he married two heiresses--the one, however, becoming the COLLEAGUE, not the successor of the other. This arrangement naturally led to embarrassment. His wealth created envy, his excessive haughtiness disgusted his sturdy fellow-countrymen. He was suspected of desiring to make the republic an appanage of the Norwegian crown, in the hope of himself becoming viceroy; and at last, on a dark September night, of the year 1241, he was murdered in his house at Reikholt by his three sons-in-law.
The same century which produced the Herodotean work of Sturleson also gave birth to a whole body of miscellaneous Icelandic literature,--though in Britain and elsewhere aking was entirely confined to the monks, and merely consisted in the compilation of a series of bald annals locked up in bad Latin. It is true, Thomas of Ercildoune was a contemporary of Snorro's; but he is known to us more as a magician than as a man of letters; whereas histories, memoirs, romances, biographies, poetry, statistics, , calendars, specimens of almost every kind of composition, are to be found even among the meagre relics which have survived the literary decadence that supervened on the extinction of the republic.
It is to these same spirited chroniclers that we are indebted for the preservation of two of the most remarkable facts in the history of the world: the colonization of Greenland by Europeans in the 10th century, and the discovery of America by the Icelanders at the commencement of the 11th.
The story is rather curious.
Shortly after the arrival of the first settlers in Iceland, a mariner of the name of Eric the Red discovers a country away to the west, which, in consequence of its fruitful appearance, he calls Greenland. In the course of a few years the new land has become so thickly inhabited that it is necessary to erect the district into an episcopal see; and at last, in 1448, we have a brief of Pope Nicolas "granting to his beloved children of Greenland, in consideration of their having erected many sacred buildings and a splendid cathedral,"--a new bishop and a fresh supply of priests. At the commencement, however, of the next century, this colony of Greenland, with its bishops, priests and people, its one hundred and ninety townships, its cathedral, its churches, its monasteries, suddenly fades into oblivion, like the fabric of a dream. The memory of its existence perishes, and the allusions made to it in the old Scandinavian Sagas gradually come to be considered poetical inventions or pious frauds. At last, after a lapse of four hundred years, some Danish missionaries set out to convert the Esquimaux; and there, far within Davis' Straits, are discovered vestiges of the ancient settlement,--remains of houses, paths, walls, churches, tombstones, and inscriptions. [Footnote: On one tombstone there was written in Runic, "Vigdis M. D. Hvilir Her; Glwde Gude Sal Hennar." "Vigdessa rests here; God gladden her soul." But the most interesting of these inscriptions is one discovered, in 1824, in an island in Baffin's Bay, in latitude 72 degrees 55', as it shows how boldly these Northmen must have penetrated into regions supposed to have been unvisited by man before the voyages of our modern navigators:--"Erling Sighvatson and Biomo Thordarson, and Eindrid Oddson, on Saturday before Ascension-week, raised these marks and cleared ground, 1135:" This date of Ascension-week implies that these three men wintered here, which must lead us to imagine that at that time, seven hundred years ago, the climate was less inclement than it is now.]
What could have been the calamity which suddenly annihilated this Christian people, it is impossible to say; whether they were massacred by some warlike tribe of natives, or swept off to the last man by the terrible pestilence of 1349, called "The Black Death," or,--most horrible conjecture of all,--beleaguered by vast masses of ice setting down from the Polar Sea along the eastern coast of Greenland, and thus miserably frozen, we are never likely to know--so utterly did they perish, so mysterious has been their doom.
On the other hand, certain traditions, with regard to the discovery of a vast continent by their forefathers away in the south-west, seems never entirely to have died out of the memory of the Icelanders; and in the month of February, 1477, there arrives at Reykjavik, in a barque belonging to the port of Bristol, a certain long-visaged, grey-eyed Genoese mariner, who was observed to take an amazing interest in hunting up whatever was known on the subject. Whether Columbus--for it was no less a personage than he--really learned anything to confirm him in his noble resolutions, is uncertain; but we have still extant an historical manuscript, written at all events before the year 1395, that is to say, one hundred years prior to Columbus' voyage, which contains a minute account of how a certain person named Lief, while sailing over to Greenland, was driven out of his course by contrary winds, until he found himself off an extensive and unknown coast, which increased in beauty and fertility as he descended south, and how, in consequence of the representation Lief made on his return, successive expeditions were undertaken in the same direction. On two occasions their wives seem to have accompanied the adventurers; of one ship's company the skipper was a lady: while two parties even wintered in the new land, built houses, and prepared to colonize. For some reason, however, the intention was abandoned; and in process of time these early voyages came to be considered as aprocryphal as the Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa in the time of Pharaoh Necho.
It is quite uncertain how low a latitude in America the Northmen ever reached; but from the description given of the scenery, products, and inhabitants,--from the mildness of the weather,--and from the length of the day on the 21st of December,--it is conjectured they could not have descended much farther than Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or, at most, the coast of Massachusetts. [Footnote: There is a certain piece of rock on the Taunton river, in Massachusetts, called the Deighton Stone, on which are to be seen rude configurations, for a long time supposed to be a Runic inscription executed by these Scandinavian voyagers; but there can be now no longer any doubt of this inscription, such as it is, being of Indian execution.]
But to return to more material matters.
Yesterday--no--the day before--in fact I forget the date of the day--I don't believe it had one--all I know is, I have not been in bed since,--we dined at the Governor's;-- though dinner is too modest a term to apply to the entertainment.
The invitation was for four o'clock, and at half-past three we pulled ashore in the gig; I, innocent that I was, in a well-fitting white waistcoat.
The Government House, like all the others, is built of wood, on the top of a hillock; the only accession of dignity it can boast being a little bit of mangy kitchen-garden that hangs down in front to the r like a soiled apron. There was no lock, handle, bell, or knocker to the door, but immediately on our approach, a servant presented himself, and ushered us into the room where Count Trampe was waiting to welcome us. After having been presented to his wife, we proceeded to shake hands with the other guests, most of whom I already knew; and I was glad to find that, at all events in Iceland, people do not consider it necessary to pass the ten minutes which precede the announcement of dinner, as if they had assembled to assist at the opening of their entertainer's will, instead of his oysters. The company consisted of the chief dignitaries of the island, including the Bishop, the Chief justice, etc. etc., some of them in uniform, and all with holiday faces. As soon as the door was opened, Count Trampe tucked me under his arm--two other gentlemen did the same to my two companions--and we streamed into the dining-room. The table was very prettily arranged with flowers, plate, and a forest of glasses. Fitzgerald and I were placed on either side of our host, the other guests, in due order, beyond. On my left sat the Rector, and opposite, next to Fitz, the chief physician of the island. Then began a series of transactions of which I have no distinct recollection; in fact, the events of the next five hours recur to me in as great disarray as reappear the vestiges of a country that has been disfigured by some deluge. If I give you anything like a connected account of what passed, you must thank Sigurdr's more solid temperament; for the Doctor looked quite foolish when I asked him--tried to feel my pulse--could not find it--and then wrote the following prescription, which I believe to be nothing more than an invoice of the number of bottles he himself disposed of.
[Footnote: Copy of Dr. F.'s prescription :-- vin: claret: iii btls. vin: champ: iv btls. vin: sherr: 1/2 btl. vin: Rheni: ii btls. aqua vitae viii gls. trigint: poc: aegrot: cap: quotid: C. E. F. Reik: die Martis, Junii 27.]
I gather, then, from evidence--internal and otherwise-- that the dinner was excellent, and that we were helped in Benjamite proportions; but as before the soup was finished I was already hard at work hob-nobbing with my two neighbours, it is not to be expected I should remember the bill of fare.
With the peculiar manners used in Scandinavian skoal- drinking I was already well acquainted. In the nice conduct of a wine-glass I knew that I excelled, and having an hereditary horror of heel-taps, I prepared with a firm heart to respond to the friendly provocations of my host. I only wish you could have seen how his kind face beamed with approval when I chinked my first bumper against his, and having emptied it at a draught, turned it towards him bottom upwards, with the orthodox twist. Soon, however, things began to look more serious even than I had expected. I knew well that to refuse a toast, or to half empty your glass, was considered churlish. I had come determined to accept my host's hospitality as cordially as it was offered. I was willing, at a pinch, to payer de ma personne; should he not be content with seeing me at his table, I was ready, if need were, to remain UNDER it! but at the rate we were then going it seemed probable this consummation would take place before the second course: so, after having exchanged a dozen rounds of sherry and champagne with my two neighbours, I pretended not to observe that my glass had been refilled; and, like the sea-captain, who, slipping from between his two opponents, left them to blaze away at each other the long night through,--withdrew from the combat. But it would not do; with untasted bumpers, and dejected faces, they politely waited until I should give the signal for a renewal of HOSTilities, as they well deserved to be called. Then there came over me a horrid, wicked feeling. What if I should endeavour to floor the Governor, and so literally turn the tables on him! It is true I had lived for five-and-twenty years without touching wine,--but was not I my great-grandfather's great-grandson, and an Irish peer to boot? Were there not traditions, too, on the other side of the house, of casks of claret brought up into the dining-room, the door locked, and the key thrown out of the window? With such antecedents to sustain me, I ought to be able to hold my own against the staunchest toper in Iceland! So, with a devil glittering in my left eye, I winked defiance right and left, and away we went at it again for another five-and-forty minutes. At last their fire slackened: I had partially quelled both the Governor and the Rector, and still survived. It is true I did not feel comfortable; but it was in the neighbourhood of my waistcoat, not my head, I suffered. "I am not well, but I will not out," I soliloquized, with Lepidus [footnote: Antony and Cleopatra.]-- (Greek) "Sos moi ro prepov," I would have added, had I dared. Still the neck of the banquet was broken--Fitzgerald's chair was not yet empty,--could we hold out perhaps a quarter of an hour longer, our reputation was established; guess then my horror, when the Icelandic Doctor, shouting his favourite dogma, by way of battle cry, "Si trigintis guttis, morbum curare velis, erras," gave the signal for an unexpected onslaught, and the twenty guests poured down on me in succession. I really thought I should have run away from the house; but the true family blood, I suppose, began to show itself, and with a calmness almost frightful, I received them one by one.
After this began the public toasts.
Although up to this time I had kept a certain portion of my wits about me, the subsequent hours of the entertainment became henceforth developed in a dreamy mystery. I can perfectly recall the look of the sheaf of glasses that stood before me, six in number; I could draw the pattern of each remember feeling a lazy wonder they should always be full, though I did nothing but empty them,--and at last solved the phenomenon by concluding I had become a kind of Danaid, whose punishment, not whose sentence, had been reversed: then suddenly I felt as if I were disembodied,--a distant spectator of my own performances, and of the feast at which my person remained seated. The voices of my host, of the "Rector, of the Chief Justice, became thin and low, as though they reached me through a whispering tube; and when I rose to speak, it was as to an audience in another sphere, and in a language of another state of being: yet, however unintelligible to myself, I must have been in some sort understood, for at the end of each sentence, cheers, faint as the roar of waters on a far-off strand, floated towards me; and if I am to believe a report of the proceedings subsequently shown us, I must have become polyglot in my cups. According to that report it seems the Governor threw off (I wonder he did not do something else), with the Queen's health in French: to which I responded in the same language. Then the Rector, in English, proposed my health, under the circumstances a cruel mockery,--but to which, ill as I was, I responded very gallantly by drinking to the beaux yeux of the Countess. Then somebody else drank success to Great Britain, and I see it was followed by really a very learned discourse by Lord D., in honour of the ancient Icelanders; during which he alluded to their discovery of America, and Columbus' visit. Then came a couple of speeches in Icelandic, after which the Bishop, in a magnificent Latin oration of some twenty minutes, a second time proposes my health; to which, utterly at my wits' end, I had the audacity to reply in the same language. As it is fit so great an effort of oratory should not perish, I send you some of its choicest specimens:--
"Viri illustres," I began, "insolitus ut sum ad publicum loquendum, ego propero respondere ad complimentum quod recte reverendus prelaticus mihi fecit, in proponendo meam salutem: et supplico vos credere quod multum gratificatus et flattificatus sum honore tam distincto.
"Bibere, viri illustres, res est, quae in omnibus terris, 'domum venit ad hominum negotia et pectora:'
[Footnote: As the happiness of these quotations seemed to produce a very pleasing effect on my auditors, I subjoin a translation of them for the benefit of the unlearned:--
1. "Comes home to men's business and bosoms." --Paterfamilias, Times.
2. "A long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together."--Nelson at the Nile.
3. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." --Jeremy Bentham.
4. Apothegm by the late Lord Mountcoffeehouse.
5. "Love rules the court, the camp, the grove." --Venerable Bede.]
(1) requirit 'haustum longum, haustum fortem, et haustum omnes simul:' (2) ut canit Poeta, 'unum tactum Naturae totum orben facit consanguineum,' (3) et hominis Natura est--bibere (4).
"Viri illustres, alterum est sentimentum equaliter universale: terra communis super quam septentrionales et meridionales, eadem enthusiasma convenire possunt: est necesse quod id nominarem? Ad pulchrum sexum devotio!
"Amor regit palatium, castra, lucum: (5) Dubito sub quo capite vestram jucundam civitatem numerare debeam. Palatium? non Regem! Castra? non milites! lucum? non ullam arborem habetis! Tamen Cupido vos dominat haud aliter quam alios,--et virginum Islandarum pulchritudo, per omnes regiones cognita est.
"Bibamus salutem earum, et confusionem ad omnes bacularios: speramus quod eae carae et benedictae creaturae invenient tot maritos quot velint,--quod geminos quottanis habeant, et quod earum filiae, maternum exemplum sequentes, gentem Islandicam perpetuent in saecula saeculorum."
The last words mechanically rolled out, in the same "ore rotundo" with which the poor old Dean of Christchurch used to finish his Gloria, etc. in the Cathedral.
Then followed more speeches,--a great chinking of glasses, --a Babel of conversation,--a kind of dance round the table, where we successively gave each alternate hand, as in the last figure of the Lancers,--a hearty embrace from the Governor,--and finally,--silence, daylight, and fresh air, as we stumbled forth into the street.
Now what was to be done? To go to bed was impossible. It was eleven o'clock by our watches, and as bright as noon. Fitz said it was twenty-two o'clock; but by this time he had reached that point of enlargement of the mind, and development of the visual organs, which is expressed by the term "seeing double,"--though he now pretends he was only reckoning time in the Venetian manner. We were in the position of three fast young men about Reykjavik, determined to make a night of it, but without the wherewithal. There were neither knockers to steal, nor watchmen to bonnet. At last we remembered that the apothecary's wife had a conversazione, to which she had kindly invited us; and accordingly, off we went to her house. Here we found a number of French officers, a piano, and a young lady; in consequence of which the drum soon became a ball. Finally, it was proposed we should dance a reel; the second lieutenant of the "Artemise" had once seen one when his ship was riding out a gale in the Clyde;--the little lady had frequently studied a picture of the Highland fling on the outside of a copy of Scotch music;--I could dance a jig--the set was complete, all we wanted was the music. Luckily the lady of the house knew the song of "Annie Laurie,"--played fast it made an excellent reel tune. As you may suppose, all succeeded admirably; we nearly died of laughing, and I only wish Lord Breadalbane had been by to see.
At one in the morning, our danseuse retiring to rest, the ball necessarily terminated; but the Governor's dinner still forbidding bed, we determined on a sail in the cutter to some islands about three-quarters of a mile out to sea; and I do not think I shall ever forget the delicious sensation of lying down lazily in the stern-sheets, and listening to the rippling of the water against the bows of the boat, as she glided away towards them. The dreamy, misty landscape,--each headland silently sleeping in the unearthly light,--Snoefell, from whose far-off peaks the midnight sun, though lost to us, had never faded,--the Plutonic crags that stood around, so gaunt and weird,--the quaint fresh life I had been lately leading,--all combined to promise such an existence of y and excitement in that strange Arctic region on the threshold of which we were now pausing, that I could not sufficiently congratulate myself on our good fortune. Soon, however, the grating of our keel upon the strand disturbed my reflections, and by the time I had unaccountably stepped up to my knees in the water, I was thoroughly awake, and in a condition to explore the island. It seemed to be about three-quarters of a mile long, not very br and a complete rabbit-warren; in fact, I could not walk a dozen yards without tripping up in the numerous burrows by which the ground was honeycombed: at last, on turning a corner, we suddenly came on a dozen rabbits, gravely sitting at the mouths of their holes. They were quite white, without ears, and with scarlet noses. I made several desperate attempts to catch some of these singular animals, but though one or two allowed me to come pretty near, just as I thought my prize was secure, in some unaccountable manner--it made unto itself wings, and literally flew away! Moreover, if my eyesight did not share the peculiar development which affected that of the Doctor's, I should say that these rabbits flew in PAIRS. Red-nosed, winged rabbits! I had never heard or read of the species; and I naturally grew enthusiastic in the chase, hoping to bring home a choice specimen to astonish our English naturalists. With some difficulty we managed to catch one or two, which had run into their holes instead of flying away. They bit and scratched like tiger-cats, and screamed like parrots; indeed, on a nearer inspection, I am obliged to confess that they assumed the appearance of birds, [Footnote: The Puffin (Alca arctica). In Icelandic, Soe papagoie; In Scotland, Priest; and in Cornwall, Pope.] which may perhaps account for their powers of flight. A slight confusion still remains in my mind as to the real nature of the creatures.
At about nine o'clock we returned to breakfast; and the rest of the day was spent in taking leave of our friends, and organizing the baggage-train, which was to start at midnight, under the command of the cook. The cavalcade consisted of eighteen horses, but of these only one-half were laden, two animals being told off to each burthen, which is shifted from the back of the one to that of the other every four hours. The pack-saddles were rude, but serviceable articles, with hooks on either side, on which a pair of oblong little chests were slung; strips of turf being stuffed beneath to prevent the creature's back being galled. Such of our goods as could not be conveniently stowed away in the chests were fitted on to the top, in whatever manner their size and weight admitted, each pony carrying about 140 lbs. The photographic apparatus caused us the greatest trouble, and had to be distributed between two beasts. As was to be expected, the guides who assisted us packed the nitrate of silver bath upside down; an outrage the nature of which you cannot appreciate. At last everything was pretty well arranged,--guns, powder, shot, tea-kettles, rice, tents, beds, portable soups, etc. all stowed away,--when the desponding Wilson came to me, his chin sweeping the ground, to say--that he very much feared the cook would die of the ride,--that he had never been on horseback in his life,--that as an experiment he had hired a pony that very morning at his own charges,--had been run away with, but having been caught and brought home by an honest Icelander, was now lying down--that position being the one he found most convenient.
As the first day's journey was two-and-thirty miles, and would probably necessitate his being twelve or thirteen hours in the saddle, I began to be really alarmed for my poor chef; but finding on inquiry that these gloomy prognostics were entirely voluntary on the part of Mr. Wilson, that the officer in question was full of zeal, and only too anxious to add horsemanship to his other accomplishments, I did not interfere. As for Wilson himself, it is not a marvel if he should see things a little askew; for some unaccountable reason, he chose to sleep last night in the open air, on the top of a hen- coop, and naturally awoke this morning with a crick in his neck, and his face so immovably fixed over his left shoulder, that the efforts of all the ship's company have not been able to twist it back: with the help of a tackle, however, I think we shall eventually brace it square again.
At two we went to lunch with the Rector. The entertainment bore a strong family likeness to our last night's dinner; but as I wanted afterwards to exhibit my magic lantern to his little daughter Raghnilder, and a select party of her young friends, we contrived to elude doing full justice to it. During the remainder of the evening, like Job's children, we went about feasting from house to house, taking leave of friends who could not have been kinder had they known us all our lives, and interchanging little gifts and souvenirs. With the Governor I have left a print from the Princess Royal's drawing of the dead soldier in the Crimea. From the Rector of the cathedral church I have received some very curious --almost the first printed in the island; I have been very anxious to obtain some specimens of ancient Icelandic manuscripts, but the island has long since been ransacked of its literary treasures; and to the kindness of the French consul I am indebted for a charming little white fox, the drollest and prettiest little beast I ever saw.
Having dined on board the "Artemise," we adjourned at eleven o'clock to the beach to witness the departure of the baggage. The ponies were all drawn up in one long file, the head of each being tied to the tail of the one immediately before him. Additional articles were stowed away here and there among the boxes. The last instructions were given by Sigurdr to the guides, and everything was declared ready for a start. With the air of an equestrian star, descending into the arena of Astley's Amphitheatre, the cook then stepped forward, made me a superb bow, and was assisted into the saddle. My little cabin-boy accompanied him as aide-de-camp.
The jovial Wilson rides with us tomorrow. Unless we get his head round during the night, he will have to sit facing his horse's tail, in order to see before him.
We do not seem to run any danger of falling short of provisions, as by all accounts there are birds enough in the interior of the country to feed an Israelitish emigration.
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