60 WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 



cormorants, that are here as tame as chickens and numerous 

 as sparrows. Why they are allowed to exist is what we trout 

 and salmon fishers wonder at ; in Norway the Government 

 pays fourpence a head. I wish we were as fond of eating 

 them as the Norwegians are. 



On shore we got fairly messed up with red tape at the 

 Customs office. The officials were charmingly polite and 

 really wished to be of assistance, but duty first ; and the very 

 young man in authority showed us, with the utmost patience, 

 how essential it was for the interests of everybody that we 

 should be able to prove that the makers of the St Ebba made 

 it really for us, and that the British Consul in Norway should 

 also believe this, and certify that the Norwegian builders had 

 really built it, and also that they had done so to our order, 

 for if they had not done so, it might belong to someone else. 

 Consequently if they, his Majesty's Customs House officers 

 in Lerwick, were to register it as ours, and it wasn't ours, 

 many things might happen, and so on and so forth. And we 

 went back and forward to the ship to get papers and more 

 papers, and each helped, but each and all were smilingly 

 explained to be not absolutely the documents necessary to 

 satisfy his Majesty's Government that that we weren't 

 bloody pirates. So give us School Board education and 

 Socialist officialdom and we see the beginning of lots of 

 trouble. Finally, after much pow-wow, we telegraphed the 

 gist of this to Norway, asking the Consul there, in polite 

 language, why the devil he hadn't given us the papers needed 

 to prove we were we, and the St Ebba was the St Ebba, and 

 not another ship, and that it belonged to her owners that is, 

 to a little private British Whaling Company. 



And poor Henriksen, who had spent days and more days 

 getting all these formalities arranged with the Consul in 

 Norway (whilst I used to wait outside under the lime-trees 

 flicking flies off Swartzen), seemed to be almost at breaking- 

 point of patience, and I wondered in my soul how ships ever 

 got out and away to sea free from red-tape entanglements. 



A pleasing interlude and soothing was the pause we some- 

 times made between ship and office to watch the fish in the 

 clear green water along the edge of the quiet town. The 



