WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 31 



soon forget the long walk home across our island, the low 

 mist, the warm, dark night, and wringing wet fields. 



There is one place in Tonsberg of which I must make a 

 note before I come back to our shipbuilding. It is the 

 Britannia. Anyone who wishes to learn all there is to know 

 about modern whaling must get an introduction to that cosy, 

 old-world club. It is a low-roofed wooden house, with low- 

 roofed rooms ; one big room adjoins a kitchen, in which 

 broad, kindly Mrs Balkan, wife of my friend the engineer 

 on the whaler Haldane, sits behind a long counter and rules 

 supreme. You leave the shipyard and drop in there for mid- 

 dag-mad, or shelter if it rains. It seemed to rain very often 

 in August. The " old man " Henriksen's portrait and one 

 of the great Svend Foyn are, of course, in evidence, and 

 Svend Foyn's whaling successors come there for middag-mad 

 or aften-mad, and some of them drink, I dare say, a silent 

 skaal of gratitude to the memory of Svend Foyn, who gave 

 them the lead to success, to become small landholders, each 

 with his home, farm, and family. 



Burly fellows are his successors, the pick of Norse sailor 

 captains. One is just home from the South Shetlands. I saw 

 these desolate, unhabitated, snow-clad islands many years 

 ago, and saw there finner whales, thousands of them ! and 

 knew they must some day be hunted, but I did not calculate 

 to a penny that there would be over a million pounds sterling 

 invested in whaling stations there to-day ; in one bay alone 

 in Clarence Island, and that round these islands in 1911, 

 twenty-two whalers would bag 3500 whales. So whaling 

 here is an assured industry. In Britain the few who hear 

 about it call it a speculation. 



Another ruddy-faced, broad-shouldered, fair-haired cap- 

 tain comes from South Georgia and tells me of my friend 

 there, Sorrensen, the bigger of two big brothers, both great 

 harpooneers they are both quite wealthy men now. They 

 whaled with us from our Shetland station a few years ago, 

 and between hunts we talked of a whaling station we were 

 going to start in South Georgia ; two or three years at this 

 station has set them up for life. 



Most of the men who come into the Britannia have been 



