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Seventy-one keels in all there were, and the smaller vessels led the way, right out into the open sea, nor waited to know which course the king should take, for all knew that they were homeward bound for Norway, and that although there were many ways, yet they all led north beyond Denmark, and so onward into the breezy Skager Rack. Little did Olaf see the need of keeping his fleet together.
Rear-Admiral Horace Hood, second in command of the battle-cruiser fleet, went down with the Invincible. Rear-Admiral Arbuthnot went down with the Defense. The great naval battle, which may go down in history as the battle of the Skager Rack, was fought in the eastern waters of the North Sea, off the coast of Denmark.
"Why, what time is it?" "Midnight." "Well, I shall turn in." "If you will take my advice," said the captain, "you won't leave any odds and ends lying about to-night. We shall have a dance before morning." "Think so?" said Claudius indifferently. "Why, Doctor, where are your eyes? You are a right Svensk sailor when you are awake. You have smelled the foam in Skager Rak as well as I."
Andrew Vedder and Hal Skager took his right arm and his left, and led him to his place in the funeral procession. It was only a small one. Those not closely connected with the Borsons went to their homes after the service; for, besides the storm, the hour was late and the night closing in.
The pirates of the Baltic were wrestling with the storms of the wild Cattegat and braving the sleety squalls of the Skager Rack, stretching far out from the land to colonize Iceland and the Faroes, to plant a mysteriously lost nation in Eastern Greenland, and to leave strange traces of themselves by the vine-clad shores of Narraganset Bay.
Southward he sailed, and as he came in turn to fiord after fiord many vikings and wealthy warriors joined him with their ships. When at length he stood out across the Skager Rack, he had a fleet of sixty longships and sixty smaller transports, and with these in his wake he sailed south along Denmark through the Eyr sound, and so to Wendland. This expedition was not made with any warlike intent.
Yes, I sailed there once, up through Skager Rack and Cattegat along up the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland, just edging along " He held out his hand again for the locket, and studied it carefully. "Russian, is she? I might 'a' known it," he said nodding. "She's the sort same look eager and kind o' waitin'." He looked up. "How'd you come to know her? You been there?" "In Russia? No.
Up at Memel they had had great difficulties to contend with, owing to the condition of the ice; and their bad luck seemed to be going to follow them, for in the Skager Rack they found themselves suddenly wedged into a field of drift-ice, with the prospect of having to remain where they were for weeks perhaps.
For it must be supposed that nobody is foolish enough to believe that Russia would offer us her aid say, against France without requiring from us a mutual service; that merely in order to inflict a punishment on Louis Napoleon for the recognition of the South, or the establishment of monarchy in Mexico, she would, still bleeding from the wounds inflicted by the Polish insurrection, madly launch her armies upon the Rhine, or start her hiding fleet from behind the fortified shelters of Cronstadt and Helsingfors, make it pass the Sound and Skager Rack, unmindful of the frowning batteries of Landscrona and Marstrand, pass the Strait of Dover, and the English Channel, and enter the Atlantic, quietly leaving behind Calais, Boulogne, Cherbourg, and Brest, and all this with the certainty of raising a storm which might carry the armies of France and her allies into the heart of Poland, and ultimately, by restoring that country, press czardom back, where it ought to be, behind the Dnieper.
A great bore of sea-water swept along the shores of the English Channel, and bursting through the Skager Rack, covered the lower end of Sweden, and rushed up the Gulf of Finland, burying St. Petersburg, and turning all Western Russia, and the plains of Pomerania into a sea. The Netherlands disappeared.
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