42 WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 



four or five years' Viking cruising, gathering gear from 

 their own coast or from their neighbours'. 



We hope that this Monday, the 22nd of September, will 

 be our last day on shore, and it rains and rains, and we long 

 for the shelter of boardship where there is no soppy ground 

 or puddles, and there will be the fun of going somewhere 

 instead of inhabiting this one spot of earth for days, till 

 days become weeks and weeks months for ever and for ever 

 without getting anywhere farther. 



We have now almost everything on board, books, charts, 

 bags of clothes, but we have still to wait for some spare 

 parts for the engine from the makers at Stockholm, which 

 they advise us to get before going on a southern voyage. 

 We intended to have got away in time to do a preliminary 

 canter, as it were, for whales up north to the edge of the ice 

 not into it for bottle-nose and finners, so as thoroughly to 

 test our engine and crew before going to the Southern Seas. 

 Now it is too late for that, so we shall only go " north- 

 about " round Shetland, where we may be in time for the 

 last of the whaling season, and then proceed south. 



The spare parts of the motor arrived, but it rains and blows 

 a fierce gale from S.W., and we could get out of our fiord but 

 no farther against such a gale, so we cool our heels and 

 Henriksen works at accounts, a serious matter. It is a new 

 departure, a captain acting in so many capacities, manager, 

 navigator, harpooneer, etc. 



This is my fifth week of waiting here, the most wearisome 

 time I have ever spent in my life. So much for whale-fishing 

 and its preliminaries ! The time actually spent in connec- 

 tion with the ship's affairs passes pleasantly enough, and 

 curiously the sense of weariness goes, once on board. Per- 

 haps getting off clay soil on to salt water accounts for this. 



The sea-water in the fiord here stands abnormally high 

 all these days. It came running in two days ago in calm 

 weather. So outside the North Sea and Skagerak we 

 knew it must be blowing hard. To-day, though finer, the 

 fiord water still remains high, so we know from that and the 

 newspapers that there is strong southerly wind outside. 

 For two days past a cloud has hung over us. Henriksen 



