The Land of the Long Night Part 20

The eggs or ova were put into barrels and salted, and Captain Ole Petersen, who was with me, said to me: "Each barrel contains the ova of three hundred cod. They are sent to Italy and France and used in the sardine fisheries of those countries." Other men were busy putting the livers into barrels, two barrels of fat liver yielding about one barrel of brown oil. The tongues of the cod were taken out of the heads, put into barrels and salted.

I visited the warehouses, built partly on piles projecting into the sea.

Along some of these were brigs and schooners loading.

What a sight was the inside of these warehouses! They were filled with long deep rows of freshly salted codfish, piled higher than a man and about the same width. These fish were to be put on board s.h.i.+ps and landed upon rocks, there to stay until they were dried and ready to be s.h.i.+pped to foreign countries. The cod is the gold of the people living on this desolate land.

The country around was covered with frames upon which fish were hanging.

Nets and lines were seen in every direction on the rocks, left to dry or ready to be mended. Wherever I turned the place was saturated with the blood of fish and offal. The sea was covered with offal; thousands of gulls were flying in every direction and feeding upon it, while great numbers of eider ducks, as tame as farm ducks, were swimming everywhere and feeding. They were not afraid, for no one is allowed to shoot them.

The bare rocks were black with hundreds of thousands of heads of cod that had been put there to dry.

These heads, with the bones of fish, are turned into a fertilizer, or used to feed cattle. The heads are boiled before they are given to the animals. "Cattle and sheep feeding on dried fish heads!" I exclaimed with astonishment to my companion, "I never heard of this before."

I asked one of the merchants how he could live in such a place. "The atmosphere that brings money," he replied, "never smells bad. Where there is no smell there is no business and no money with us."

Goodness gracious! what a smell there was in this fis.h.i.+ng settlement. It was far from pleasant, especially when compared with the pure air of the land over which I had travelled.

Several nice houses belonged to the merchants of the place. These were painted white and were very comfortable.

The cabins of the fishermen were scattered everywhere and were all alike. They were built of logs, with roofs covered with earth. I wanted to live with the fishermen and become acquainted with them.

CHAPTER XXVIII

AMONG THE FISHERMEN.--THEIR LODGINGS AND HOW THEY LOOK.--WHAT THEY HAVE TO EAT.--AN EVENING OF TALK ABOUT COD, SALMON, AND HERRING.--THE IMMENSE NUMBER OF FISH.--A SNORING MATCH.

Soon after Captain Petersen and I entered one of the houses of the fishermen. They had just returned from their fis.h.i.+ng. I asked them if I could live with them for a few days. "Yes," they all replied with one voice. They knew Captain Petersen, I was with him: that was enough for them.

Strange indeed was the room. Each fisherman's cabin had only one. The wall was surrounded by two rows of bunks, on top of each other. The room was arranged like the forecastle of a s.h.i.+p.

"Where are you from?" one of the fishermen asked me.

"From America," I replied.

"From America!" they all exclaimed at once. "Is that possible?"

"Yes, he is from America," said Captain Petersen.

"I have a brother in America, in Minnesota," exclaimed one.

A second said: "I have a sister in Dakota."

A third: "I also have a brother in America; he sails on the Great Lakes."

From that moment those fishermen and I were great friends. They asked me my name. I replied, "My name is Paul Du Chaillu."

"Why!" some of the younger fishermen said, "we have read in school the translation of your travels in Africa. Are you really he?"

"Yes," I replied.

Twenty-eight men, the crews of four boats, including the captains, lived together. A cooking-stove was in the centre of the room; a few wooden benches and a table composed the rest of the furniture, while a number of chests contained the garments of the men, several coffee kettles, a pan and a big pot, etc.

All these twenty-eight men insisted that I should have a whole bunk to myself--the occupant would s.h.i.+ft and go to another fellow. I must be comfortable, they said. I was not accustomed to living in their way.

A man took his things from his bunk. He was the captain of one of the boats. He said to me: "Paul, my bunk is yours." I had to accept.

When they had cooked their meal, they said: "Paul, eat with us simple fisher folk; we will give you the best we have; you are welcome." We had only one dish, and it was entirely new to me.

It was what the sailors called lobscouse, a sort of pudding made of s.h.i.+p biscuits, liver, and fish. I did not care much for it, but I said nothing to the fishermen. One said: "We eat this dish every day, and that will be your food when you are with us."

"Humph!" I said to myself. I remembered the elephants, the crocodiles, the snakes, and the monkeys, etc., I had had to eat while in Africa. The monkeys when fat were fine, and tasted so good I should have been willing to exchange a dish of lobscouse for a monkey.

After our meal we had coffee; each man owned his own cup. "We drink only coffee," they said, "for no spirits are allowed to be sold here, for fear some of the men while going to sea might become drunk, and endanger their lives, and the lives of those that are with them."

Our coffee drunk, we talked first about fish and their peculiar habits.

The names of the four captains were John Ericksen, Hakon Johansen, Ole La.r.s.en, Harald Andersen.

"Every spring," said Captain Ole, "salmon come up from the sea and ascend our rivers to sp.a.w.n, and in time the little ones go to sea. As they grow up they continue to come every year to the same river where they were born, and n.o.body knows where they spend the interval."

After a pause, during which the fishermen filled their pipes, Captain Ericksen said: "Every year the codfish make their appearance in winter in vast shoals and countless millions on the Lofoden Islands banks to sp.a.w.n. Then they migrate further north to the coast of Finmarken, then eastward as far as Russia. Then they disappear until the following winter. No one knows where they come from or where they go."

One of the men observed: "I have been a fisherman for over forty years, and it is wonderful how regularly the cod make their appearance on the fis.h.i.+ng banks. We depend so much on their time of coming that we leave home every year at the same date. They must know their way in the ocean and recognize different marks on their journey, for they have to travel thousands of miles before they return to the fis.h.i.+ng banks to sp.a.w.n. The cod in their migration leave behind them a great many stragglers, which are caught all the year round. The number of cod caught on the banks of Finmarken and of the Lofoden Islands averages about forty to forty-two millions a year, and the total catch along the coasts of Norway amounts to about fifty millions a year. The land is barren, and if it were not for the fish we could not live in our country."

"Fifty millions of cod is a great number," I observed.

"Yes," he replied, "but these fifty millions are nothing but a small fraction compared with the great number that are not caught."

After our talk on the cod was finished, Captain Ericksen spoke about herrings as follows: "If the number of codfish caught is great, the number of herring is far greater. The herrings make their appearance in immense shoals, and it is beyond the power and calculation of man to guess their number, for their millions are countless. The migration of the herring is often very irregular. They appear generally from January to March. The herring are known to have disappeared for years in some districts, then suddenly reappear."

"That is strange," I said. "Can you account for that?"

"No," the captain replied; "if I were a herring I probably could tell."

We all laughed when he said this.

I remarked: "The number of Norwegian fis.h.i.+ng boats is so great, how do you know when some are missing and have foundered at sea?"

Captain Ericksen replied: "Every fis.h.i.+ng district has its own letter on each boat belonging to it, and a number, and the name of every man composing its crew is registered; also his residence, the day of his birth, etc. This is necessary, for every year some poor fisherman's boat is lost and the crew drowned; thus the boat and crew missing can be identified. All the Norwegian men you see at the fisheries have homes--humble it is true--either on the fjords, by the coast, or on some little islands where there are a few patches of land which they can cultivate, raise potatoes and some grain, and where there is gra.s.s enough to keep a cow or two, sometimes more, some goats, and a few sheep to give us wool.

"That is the reason you see us so warmly clad. Our wives, daughters, or sisters, while we are absent from home think of us. They spin and weave the wool from our sheep into outer garments and underwear, knit stockings for us, and with some of the money we get from our catch of fish we buy waterproof clothing. With a good part of the money we save we buy things for our family and the provisions that we need, and put the rest in the bank."

It was time to retire, for we had to start up at five in the morning, if the weather permitted, for the fis.h.i.+ng bank. It was agreed among the fishermen that I should go net-fis.h.i.+ng in the boat owned by Captain Ole.

What music we had during the night! All the fishermen snored. I thought I had never heard such a snoring before! I amused myself by wondering which one of them would have received the prize had it been a snoring match.