IN NORTHERN MISTS 



in the North. The Moskenstrom by the Lofoten Islands may 

 in particular have given rise to much superstition at an early 

 time. In winter with a westerly wind it runs at a rate of as 

 much as six miles an hour, and with a rising tide it may be al- 

 together impassable. It may set up a high topping sea, which 

 breaks over the whole current so that it can be heard three or 

 four miles off.^ In later times, there are terrifying descriptions 

 of this dangerous current. Thus Olaus Magnus (1555) says 

 that between Rost and Lofoten 



"is so great an abyss, or rather Charybdis, that it suddenly swamps and 

 swallows up in an instant those mariners who incautiously approach " (see the 

 illustration, Vol. I, p. 158). ..." Pieces of wreckage are very seldom 

 thrown up again, and if they come to light, the hard material shows such signs 

 of wear and chafing through being dashed against the rocks, that it looks as if 

 it were covered with rough wool." And the natural force here manifested 

 exceeds all that is related of Charybdis in Sicily and other wonders. 



The Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, who made a voyage to 

 the White Sea in 1557, writes of it: ^ 



" Note that there is between the said Rost Islands & Lof oot, a whirle poole 

 called Malestrand, which from halfe ebbe untill halfe flood, maketh such a ter- 

 rible noise, that it shaketh the ringes in the doores of the inhabitants houses 

 of the sayd Islands tenne miles off. Also if there commeth any Whale within 

 the current of the same, they make a pitiful! crie. Moreover, if great trees 

 be caried into it by force of streams, and after with the ebbe be cast out againe 

 the ends and boughs of them have bene so beaten, that they are like the stalkes 

 of hempe that is bruised." 



Schonnerbol, in 1591, gives a more detailed description of the 

 current, in which the same things are reported 



of the iron ring "in the house door ... it is shaken hither and thither 

 by the rushing of the current"; of the whale, who when "he cannot go for- 

 ward on account of the strong stream, gives a great cry, as it were a great ox, 

 and then he is gone . . ."; and, finally, of great trees, spruce or fir, which 

 disappear in this current, and when at last they come up again, "then all the 

 boughs, all the roots and all the bark is torn off, and it is shaped as though 

 it had been cut with a sharp axe." He says that " many people are of the 



1 Cf. Amund Helland, Lofoten og Vesteraalen. Norges geologiske Under- 

 sogelse. No. 23. Christiania, 1897, p. 106. 



2 Hakluyt: Principal Navigations, Glasgow, 1903, ii. p. 415. 



