24 
TENTH REPORT. 
voyage from Spain to the West Indies. Down the steady trades by the 
African coast to the Cape Verds and thence on the same steady winds they 
sped across the Atlantic, on pleasant sunlit seas. Anything that would 
float was a ship, anyone that would go was a crew, anything was a sail that 
would hang on the yards and catch the breeze to waft them oversea to the 
land of gold. To return against the wind was less easy always, but then 
they would be rich and what matter the discomforts of the voyage? No 
sailors these; they had no need to be. How different in the North! On 
storm-swept seas with shifting wind's in fog and mist. Sea-faring is a trade 
here that only the bold-hearted venture on. The weak and the incompetent 
succumb to the dangers of the sea or flee from them in terror. No school of 
seamanship could be sterner nor finer than the North Atlantic. This was 
the school in which the Norsemen learned their trade, here the Dutch and 
the English sailed the seas. For them the voyage to America was a constant 
struggle against head winds varied by furious storms. It could not be long 
before they met the Spaniard on his southern waters and wrested from him 
the treasures he brought from Mexico or Peru. Presently the Invincible 
Armada appeared in the English Channel and the English, sailing out in 
their snug, staunch little ships, met them and drove them down the gale 
fairly around the British islands to perish — with Spain’s pretension to rule 
the seas. It is significant, it seems to me, that the handful of Norsemen 
who learned the sea-path in the middle ages should spread their name and 
deeds so widely and even anticipate Columbus in reaching the new world. 
Among continentals of this period there was much wandering of armed men 
as there had been even in Caesar’s day. But these were land wanderings, 
the horse was the costly means of movement and the knights or horsemen 
are even today in those lands the upper class of society. Nobility was abol- 
ished in Norway in 1821, but the essential noble class in the land is its sea- 
farers. Sunday throngs at the boat landings in West Norway show a true 
peasant class, dull, heavy faced and slow of movement. But the boat officers 
or even the crew are another type of man, men in whose bearing one sees 
their possession of the freedom of the earth. At home they had hardly a 
foothold on a rugged coast. They were not numerous enough to colonize: 
they founded no empire as did the English whose land is generous enough 
to support three hundred and sixty people on every square mile. In Norway 
only three per cent of the land is fit for cultivation, the rest is bare moun- 
tain, rock or forest. Eighteen inhabitants to the square mile are crowded 
there after a thousand years. In our new land we are already near to thirty, 
in Michigan, forty-five. 
For the geologist and physiographer Norway exemplifies the full develop- 
ment of a type of landscape hinted at by nature in Northern Michigan. It. 
is a land short of dirt. The rocky skeleton of the earth is there too much 
in evidence. If our earth is a ball of rock with a mere dustlike layer of soil 
on it, here we must bore down a hundred or two hundred feet to get at the 
rock. Not so in Norway, nor in New England nor in Upper Michigan. 
In seven hundred miles of Norway I saw no landscape without its rock ex- 
panses often more than ninety per cent of all the view. There is also much 
kinship in the northern rocks. Steam by the north of Scotland south of the 
Orkney islands and the land border is a cliff falling sheer to the water or over- 
hanging. Above is a gently undulating land well clothed in green growths. 
The rocks are sandstones that lie flat in layers. The cliff is the broken edge 
of the layers. Just such, only smaller, are the cliffs of Put-in-Bay in Lake Erie, 
at Point aux Barques on the Thumb, or at Petoskey in Little Traverse Bay, 
