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Updated: September 12, 2024
I never, therefore, was in a capital where there was so little appearance of active industry; and as for gaiety, I looked in vain for the sprightly gait of the Norwegians, who in every respect appear to me to have got the start of them.
You will be surprised to hear me talk of liberty; yet the Norwegians appear to me to be the most free community I have ever observed. The mayor of each town or district, and the judges in the country, exercise an authority almost patriarchal.
The passengers were chiefly Norwegians, most of whom were bound for the Lofoten Islands, where the great annual fair was about to be held. In the saloon my companions from Trondhjem were two young Frenchmen, bent, like myself, upon visiting the North Cape, and an Austrian, attached to the Court at Vienna, who, for some inscrutable reason, was fired with the same ambition.
To get a better view of the feat, some of the Dutchmen and Norwegians had mounted the shrouds of their vessels, and appeared to take as much interest in the trial as we did. "'Bout!" a second time exclaimed the pilot, and turning towards the helmsman, made a rotary motion with his hand to bring the cutter right round at once.
The Swedes have all the honesty which the Norwegians claim for themselves, more warmth and geniality of character, and less selfish sharpness and shrewdness. Mügge tells a story of a number of Swedes who were at a dinner party in Paris, where the health of "the King of Sweden and Norway" was proposed and drunk with great enthusiasm. One glass was observed to be untouched.
No wonder old whalemen despise the easier and safer methods of steam whaling practised by the Norwegians in Canadian and other waters at the present day. And yet steam whaling is not without some thrilling risks. The steamers are speedy, handy, small, about one hundred tons or so, with the latest pattern of the explosive harpoon gun originally invented by Sven Foyn in 1880.
Behold us now in Norway; and I could not avoid feeling surprise at observing the difference in the manners of the inhabitants of the two sides of the river, for everything shows that the Norwegians are more industrious and more opulent.
But the Norwegians of the ninth century had as yet no national feeling; and they regarded King Harold's prohibition against plundering their own shores as absurd and arbitrary. Rollo or Rolf, the son of the king's best friend, Ragnvald, Earl of Möre, undertook to disregard the order.
The King hastened with his household troops to the north and repulsed the Norwegians in a decisive overthrow at Stamford Bridge, but ere he could hurry back to London the Norman host had crossed the sea and William, who had anchored on the twenty-eighth of September off Pevensey, was ravaging the coast to bring his rival to an engagement.
The mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock rocked. I threw myself upon my face, and clung to the scant herbage in an excess of nervous agitation. "This," said I at length, to the old man "this can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelstroem." "So it is sometimes termed," said he. "We Norwegians call it the Moskoe-stroem, from the island of Moskoe in the midway."
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