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Updated: June 25, 2025
In seeing these unexpected apparitions emerge from such a wild corner of chaos I could not but wonder at the march of modern civilisation. Pianos in Lapland, Parisian dresses among the Lofodens, billiard-tables in Hammerfest whither shall we turn to find the romance of the North!
My next letter, please God, will be dated from Hammerfest. I suppose I shall be about fifteen or twenty days getting there, but this will depend on the state of the ice about Jan Mayen. If the anchorage is clear, I shall spend a few days in examining the island, which by all accounts would appear to be most curious.
The young fellows meant what they said; they were all the better for their roughing, and I wish the spindle-shanked youths who polk and flirt at Newport and Saratoga had manliness enough for such undertakings. We reached Hammerfest on the last day of July, and re-occupied our old quarters.
Ever since she had left Hammerfest, it had become too evident that a sea-going life did not agree with the goat. Even the run on shore at Spitzbergen had not sufficed to repair her shattered constitution, and the bad weather we had had ever since completed its ruin. It was certain that the butcher was the only doctor who could now cure her.
Most of the travellers who push as far north as Hammerfest content themselves with one experience of the midnight sun, and return with the same steamer to Drontheim. A few extend their journey to the North Cape, and, once a year, on an average, perhaps, some one is adventurous enough to strike across Lapland to Torneå.
It was in the streets of Hammerfest that I first set eyes on a Laplander. Turning round the corner of one of the ill-built houses, we suddenly ran over a diminutive little personage in a white woollen tunic, bordered with red and yellow stripes, green trousers, fastened round the ankles, and reindeer boots, curving up at the toes like Turkish slippers.
An installation of electric lighting and telephones led tourists close up to the polar ice-cap, beyond the level of the magnetic pole; and there the newer Teufelsdrockh sat dumb with surprise, and glared at the permanent electric lights of Hammerfest. He had good reason better than the Teufelsdrockh of 1830, in his liveliest Scotch imagination, ever dreamed, or mortal man had ever told.
"Nay, if it is indeed so urgent, noble Froeken," he replied, "do not trouble, for there is a means of making the journey. But for you, and in such bitter weather, it seems a cruelty to speak of it. A steam cargo-boat leaves here for Hammerfest and the North Cape to-morrow it will pass the Altenfjord.
It is the most northerly town in Europe, and is about sixty-five miles southwest of the North Cape. It is a town of about three thousand inhabitants, who appear to be industrious and intelligent. Even here, in this region of frost and darkness, we are glad to say, there are plenty of good schools and able teachers. From Hammerfest we continue our voyage northward along the coast.
Over one thousand vessels enter and depart from its harbor annually, which, however, is closed by ice three months in the year, though that of Hammerfest, situated a thousand miles further north on the same coast, is never frozen, owing to the genial influence of the Gulf Stream, an agent so potent as to modify the temperature of the entire coast of Scandinavia on its western border.
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