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Updated: May 12, 2025
Taking a path across the rugged desert of rocks and bogs, extending for some miles back of Thorshavn, I quickly began to ascend a barren range of hills, abounding in greenstone trap-rock and zoolites, from the summit of which there is a magnificent view of the whole surrounding country, with glimpses of the cloud-capped summits of the neighboring islands.
Having thus pleasantly occupied a few hours at Kirk Goboe, I bade adieu to the worthy family who had so hospitably entertained me, and was about to set out for Thorshavn, when young Petersen, not content with the directions he had given me, announced his intention of seeing me safe over the mountain.
Niels Ryberg Finsen, whose name I am sure you have heard because his scientific research gave us the "light-cure" which has been established at the London Hospital by our Queen Alexandra, who generously gave the costly apparatus required for the cure in order to benefit afflicted English people was born at Thorshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands.
The wind blew in such fierce gusts over the bleak and desolate range of crags on which I stood that I was glad enough to seek shelter down on the leeside. It now occurred to me to go in search of a ruined church of which I had read in some traveler's journal said to be within four or five miles of Thorshavn.
Hard by the town of Thorshavn, in the Faröe islands, a little lad sat one day carving his name on a rock. His rough-coated pony cropped the tufts of stunted grass within call. The grim North Sea beat upon the shore below. What thoughts of the great world without it stirred in the boy he never told. He came of a people to whom it called all through the ages with a summons that rarely went unheeded.
The anchorage is insecure at all times, especially during the prevalence of southerly and easterly gales, when it often becomes necessary to heave up and put to sea; and the dense fogs by which the approach to land is generally obscured render navigation about these islands extremely perilous. Of the town of Thorshavn little need be said.
In addition to the standing population of Thorshavn, the fortifications an abandoned mud-bank, a flag-staff, and a board shanty are subject, in times of great public peril, to be defended by a standing army and navy of twenty-four soldiers, one small boat, one corporal, and the governor of the islands, who takes the field himself at the head of this bloody phalanx of Danes still reeking with the gore of slaughtered fish.
Go he would, and go he did; and when we parted on the top of the mountain, in plain sight of Thorshavn, he cordially shook me by the hand, and said many kind words, which I could only interpret to mean that he and all his kith and kin wished me a pleasant voyage to Iceland, and many years of health and happiness.
Shortly after the Arcturus had cast anchor, the party of British sportsmen already mentioned went ashore with their dogs and guns, and began an indiscriminate slaughter of all the game within two miles of Thorshavn, consisting of three plovers, a snipe, and some half a dozen sparrows.
Two fair specimens of the rising generation, a little boy and girl, made an excellent speculation on the occasion of my visit to Thorshavn.
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