CHAPTER V 



THEN it's hey ! and it's ho ! for Scotland, chilly 

 Lerwick and the Shetlands and kindly English- 

 speaking people. My heart warms at the pros- 

 pect of seeing our western hills and heather and relatives 

 and a language we know. 



It rains again, tropical rain. We stand and bid farewell 

 in the homestead, round the little dining-room table, each 

 with a liqueur glass in hand. Suddenly I see eyes are wet, 

 and the stranger nearly pipes an eye too, for it is a bit 

 harrowing even to cold hearts to see married people with 

 children still lovers. My host has been, for him, at home 

 so long, nearly eleven months now ! So the parting from 

 wife, children, homestead, farm, woods, horse and hound, all 

 of which he loves, must be sore for however hardened a 

 seafarer. 



Our last cargo from home goes to the ship on a hand-cart 

 towed by the children and Rex the collie in great glee 

 curious luggage Japanese wicker-work baskets and parcels of 

 foreign-looking clothes for their father. The writer goes ahead 

 with them, leaving the lovers to follow their lone, past the little 

 home they built after Henriksen's first success at whaling, 

 on a three months' spell from sea, down the road and past 

 the school in the birches where they played as children 

 together, down to the brig or rocks where their fathers before 

 them careened their ships and made the same sad partings. 



Perhaps the captain is the only sad man to-day. From 

 first mate downwards eyes are sparkling, in spite of the dull 

 day of rain, at the prospect of the rough, bracing, salt seas 

 in front of us. We think nothing just now of cold, wet, dark, 

 dangerous nights; the future is all couleur de rose, whale- 

 hunting, new lands and people, sea-elephants, movement and 

 life for us, death to them and profit for us all ! 



Was it lucky or unlucky that our anchors held to Norway 

 45 



