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It brings to these far-away regions quantities of floating material, such as the trunks of palm-trees, and other substances suitable for fuel, to which useful purpose they are put at the Lofoden Islands, and by the fishermen along the shore of the mainland. By the same agency West Indian seeds and woods are often found floating on the west coast of Scotland and Ireland.
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.
I found no scenery in the Bergenstift of so original and impressive a character as that of the Lofoden Isles. The day was Sunday, and we, of course, expect to see some evidence of it in the appearance of the people. Yet, during the whole day, we found but one clean person the hostess of an inn on the summit of Fille Fjeld, where we stopped to bait our horses.
"We are now," he continued, in that particularizing manner which distinguished him "we are now close upon the Norwegian coast in the sixty-eighth degree of latitude in the great province of Nordland and in the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain upon whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy.
By degrees, the froth and the rainbow disappeared, and the bottom of the gulf seemed slowly to uprise. The sky was clear, the winds had gone down, and the full moon was setting radiantly in the west, when I found myself on the surface of the ocean, in full view of the shores of Lofoden, and above the spot where the pool of the Moskoe-stroem had been.
His grandfather and his father before him had been clergymen in Denmark, the former in the town of West Egede, whence the name. Graduated in a single year from the University of Copenhagen, "at which," his teachers bore witness, "no one need wonder who knows the man," he became at twenty-two pastor of a parish up in the Lofoden Islands, where the fabled maëlstrom churns.
In regard to the depth of the water, I could not see how this could have been ascertained at all in the immediate vicinity of the vortex. The "forty fathoms" must have reference only to portions of the channel close upon the shore either of Moskoe or Lofoden.
During the whole trip we had not a drop of rain, the rarest good fortune in these latitudes, and were therefore twice enabled to enjoy, to the fullest extent, the sublime scenery of the Lofoden Isles and the coast of Nordland. This voyage has not its like in the world.
In and about Lofoden Islands alone, five thousand boats are thus regularly employed, giving occupation to twenty thousand men in the boats and a couple of thousand on the shore.
Poe must have suffered metempsychosis into the body of a blue-bottle, when he wrote his "Descent into the Maelström"; for such an insect, hanging midway down that treacherous, sticky descent, and seeing Death creeping up from the bottom to grasp him, might have a clear idea of what was undergone by the fisherman of Lofoden.
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