CHAPTER IX 



THE LOFODEN ISLANDS, 1915 



Five days after leaving England the traveller 

 passes the Norwegian town of " Bodo " and arrives 

 at the Vestfjord, from which, just to the north, the 

 jagged, tooth-like peaks of the central Lofoden 

 Islands come into view. Away to the west is 

 Norkemaes, at whose southern extremity lies the 

 " maelstrom," long since celebrated in the sensa- 

 tional works of Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe, 

 a tumbling mass of meeting currents whose waters 

 are now scarcely regarded as a bar to navigation 

 or even a danger to small craft. Two days before 

 our advent the auxiliary cruiser India had been sunk 

 by a German submarine with a loss of a hundred and 

 twenty men of her gallant crew, and some of the 

 crippled survivors, saved by the Gothaland, were at 

 that moment struggling for life in the houses of 

 kindly fishermen. In the great World War the 

 Norwegians to a certain extent had enlisted their 

 sympathies on the side of their old friends, the 

 English, but the whole country had been so flooded 

 with German news of victory, and explanations of 

 German greatness and " kultur," that there were 

 not only many admirers, but active adherents to 

 the Teutonic cause. We had evidence that in all 

 towns, especially in the far Arctic regions, agents — 

 German and Norwegian — were industriously at work 



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