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Passing the Naze, a high bluff point at the south-western extremity of Norway, and then losing sight of the rough, mountainous coast, intersected by innumerable arms of the sea, called FIORDS, penetrating inland for miles, we crossed the Skager-rack and entered the Cattegat Sea, which divides the western shores of Sweden from the coast of Jutland, and which is about a hundred miles in length and fifty miles in breadth.
Now he sees in the distance smoke from the funnel of a steamer, and in a couple of minutes he has tacked round the vessel and decided to follow it on its voyage to the north. To the east he has the coast of Chile, with its countless reefs and islands and deep fiords, and above it rises the snow-capped crest of the Andes.
After exploring the Sumdum and Tahkoo fiords and their glaciers, we sailed through Stephen's Passage into Lynn Canal and thence through Icy Strait into Cross Sound, searching for unexplored inlets leading toward the great fountain ice-fields of the Fairweather Range. Here, while the tide was in our favor, we were accompanied by a fleet of icebergs drifting out to the ocean from Glacier Bay.
Of all the sea-robbers who sailed from their rocky dwelling-places by the fiords of Norway, none enjoyed higher renown than Rolf, called the ganger, or walker, as tradition relates, because his stature was so gigantic that, when clad in full armor, no horse could support his weight, and he therefore always fought on foot.
It would be tedious to dwell on the magnificence, beauty, and silence of this Fiord; because it would only become a repetition of what I have already attempted to describe as native to the other Fiords. There can be no softer, and more soul-stirring scenery in the world than its small, rare, green valleys, and barren mountains.
Shall it find its old place on the shores of the Gulf of Salerno, or shall it mingle its rays with the northern aurora up among the fiords of Norway, or shall it be borne across the Atlantic and reach the banks of the Charles, where Agassiz and Wyman have taught, where Hagen still teaches, glowing like his own Lampyris splendidula, with enthusiasm, where the first of American botanists and the ablest of American surgeons are still counted in the roll of honor of our great University?
I was hoping that this question would be unanswerable; but I was mistaken. My uncle replied: "Follow my finger along the west coast of Iceland. Do you see Rejkiavik, the capital? You do. Well; ascend the innumerable fiords that indent those sea-beaten shores, and stop at the sixty-fifth degree of latitude. What do you see there?"
But in this wild romantic country, with its sparse population, rugged mountains, and gloomy fiords, very ordinary matters become invested with a character of awe and mystery quite foreign to the atmosphere of our own matter-of-fact world; and many of the Norwegians are as prone to superstition as the poor little Lapp pagans who dwell among them.
In all such and a hundred similar legends, easy to quote, we see the notion of strength, brute force, muscular power, was that deemed most appropriate to divinity, and that which he who would be godlike must most sedulously seek. When filled with the god, the votary felt a surpassing vigor. The Berserker fury was found in the wilds of America and Africa, as well as among the Fiords.
It was from Bluff that we ought to have cut across to the west coast and visited the New Zealand Switzerland, a land of superb scenery, made up of snowy grandeurs, anal mighty glaciers, and beautiful lakes; and over there, also, are the wonderful rivals of the Norwegian and Alaskan fiords; and for neighbor, a waterfall of 1,900 feet; but we were obliged to postpone the trip to some later and indefinite time.
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