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The marine shells are all of dwarfish size, like those now inhabiting the brackish waters of the Baltic; and the marl, in which myriads of them are embedded, is now raised more than 100 feet above the level of the Gulf of Bothnia.
Men of Sweden had gone to the crusades in Palestine, but here was a crusade of their own at home, and all were eager to take part in it. A great fleet was got together and set sail under the command of Birger Jarl. Its course lay up the Gulf of Bothnia, and where it came to land Birger erected a great wooden cross as a sign that he had come for the spread of the Christian faith.
The four principal towns of West and North Bothnia are thus characterised in an old verse of Swedish doggerel: Umeå, the fine; Piteå, the needle-making; Luleå, the lazy; and in Torneå, everybody gets drunk. We took some refreshment, pushed on and reached Abyn between nine and ten o'clock, having travelled seventy miles since morning. The sleighing was superb.
"It affects, more or less, the whole west of Europe, from the head of the Gulf of Bothnia to the most southern promontory of Sicily, from the Oder and the Adriatic to the Hebrides and to Lisbon.
The line follows the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia very closely, through a country well covered with small pine timber, which was being rapidly stripped until the government interfered by passing rigid regulations and appointing foresters to enforce them.
A tract of forest is usually attached to these farming-lands, from which the peasants derive their supplies of lumber and fuel. Saw-mills are numerous on all the rivers, and a large trade in lumber is carried on in the lake regions. The main lumber region lies north of Stockholm, on the various small rivers emptying into the Gulf of Bothnia.
The amber is sent to Turkey and Greece, and there manufactured into those splendid mouth-pieces, which it is the pride of these smoke-loving people to possess. Some of these are excessively gorgeous and proportionably valuable. I have heard of one being worth the enormous sum of 100l!" GEORGE. "Parts of Sweden are entirely separated by the Gulf of Bothnia.
This idea, however startling it may at first appear, is quite in accordance, as before stated, with the analogy of changes now going on in certain regions of the globe. Thus, in parts of Sweden, and the shores and islands of the Gulf of Bothnia, proofs have been obtained that the land is experiencing, and has experienced for centuries, a slow upheaving movement.
He made public a law that all who became Christians should be protected in life and property, and within two years he succeeded in introducing Christianity into that country perhaps more in appearance than reality. At any rate he built forts, and settled a colony of Swedes in East Bothnia, and thus did much towards making Finland a province of Sweden.
He was finally defeated at a little town in the southern part of Russia nearly a thousand miles away from home, and his great army was wiped out. After his time, Sweden sank to the level of a second class nation. The bodies of her best men had been strewn on battlefields reaching from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Black Sea.
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