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The fish trade of Norway is not, however, confined to cod and the Lofödden Isles, for in many other parts fishing is the chief industry of the people, and hundreds of thousands of barrels of salted herrings and sprats leave the country every year, while sardines and anchovies are tinned or potted in the factories at Stavanger and other large seaports.
How the ministers came to locate us at Sr. Svenson's I never knew, as neither of us had ever been at Stavanger. The names of the two ministers calling us were Johnson and Jornsen of the Christian church. We called first at Brother Johnson's where we were warmly welcomed.
The traveller drives himself, and the little horses are so brisk that, whatever the state of the road may be, they run down the mountains as fast as they can clatter, and so sure-footed that they are scarcely ever known to fall; but a person of weak nerves has no business to be the rider. From Christiansand to Stavanger is about 200 miles, which took us four days.
After being present at another public meeting in Stavanger, and in a parting interview with the Friends of the town, he went with William Robinson direct to Kiel. John Yeardley had two or three more meetings in the neighborhood of Stavanger, where the desire of the people to attend was more remarkable than ever.
From Hamerfest to Stavanger there was the same complaint of the same wrongs, the same quiet insistence upon the same remedy. Nor was it only the subjects of King Oscar who spoke; Norwegians settled in France, in England, or in America either hurried home to vote or sent their vigorous endorsement of the revolutionary proceedings.
From thence, John Yeardley and Asbjön Kloster went by the road to Stavanger, leaving Peter Bedford and William Robinson to follow by steam-vessel, the former being unable to bear the motion of the Norwegian carriages. John Yeardley, in one of his letters, in a lively manner describes the mode of travelling:
About the eighth century and probably earlier, immigrants from the southern shores of the Baltic pressed the Norse westwards in Norway, and later on over-population in the sterile lands which lie along Norway's western shores, drove its inhabitants forth from its western fjords north of Stavanger and from The Vik or great bay of the Christiania Fjord, whence they may have derived their name of Vikings, across the North Sea to the opposite coasts of Shetland, Orkney and Cat, where they found oxen and sheep to slaughter on the nesses or headlands, and stores of grain, and some silver and even gold in the shrines and on the persons of those whom they attacked, and in still later days they sought new lands over the sea and permanent settlements, where they would have no scat to pay to any overlord or feudal superior.
We offered them money, but they turned from it; and when acceptance of it was pressed, their change of countenance indicated anger. They understood nothing but the Finnish language. On their return to Stavanger, Peter Bedford felt that his share in the work was accomplished, and that it was not his part to accompany John Yeardley in the service which remained for the latter to do in Norway.
The boys in the Elite poolroom stand grinning in the doorway. Old Norske Tobias is on a tear again, his red face shining with the memory of Stavanger storms, his beard bristling like a north cat's back. An Odin in caricature. They watch him pass. Drunker than a fiddler's wench. Drunker than a bootlegger's pal. Drunk as the devil himself and roaring at the top of his voice: "Belay, there!
But the long, dark lamp-lit evenings are come, and this shoal of fish which I must write to you about and ask what the end is going to be; for now we almost think that the sea up north Stavanger way must be choke-full, as it was of herrings in the good old days that are no more, but it is now big with coal-fish, mostly north by the Reef, they say, but the undersigned and old Velas, who is a still older man, got about four boxes of right nice coal-fish yesterday, a little to the south-east.
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