Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No.308

TRACINGS OF THE NORTH OF EUROPE

At six o'clock of the morning of the 4th July, Quist duly appeared with the carriage at the door of the Gotha Kellare. It was a dull, cool, drizzling morning, and I mentally rejoiced in having, against many advices, resolved upon a vehicle which could afford me protection from the elements. My baggage being arranged beside me in the carriage, so that I could readily command anything I wanted – one of the greatest of all comforts in solitary travelling – I hastily swallowed the cup of coffee presented to me in my bedroom – the common custom of the country – and was soon on the road to Christiania. I observed that two hardy little horses were yoked to the carriage with rope-traces. Beside Quist, who drove them, sat a man who was to bring back the cattle, the first of a long series of such persons whom I was to see in that situation during my journey, of all varieties of age, from twelve years to threescore, in all kinds of clothes, from stout wadmaal down to bare decency. The robust, bulky frame of honest Quist generally made these people appear like dwarfs by his side. As we drove rapidly along the swampy plain surrounding Gottenburg, we met an immense number of small market-carts, driven by peasant men or women, or both, generally very lightly laden, and going at a trot, the people being usually seated on a sort of chair, perched on elastic beams passing back at an angle from the beams of the vehicle, so as to give somewhat the effect of springs. I felt affected at seeing such a multitude of people engaged in a labour so uneconomical, and which must consequently remunerate them so ill; for of course where a man or woman give a day of their own time, along with a horse's labour, to the business of selling a single pig or lamb, a few chickens and eggs, or some such trifling merchandise, the remuneration must be of the most miserable kind. The poor too often struggle on in this manner, always busy, as they allege, often working very hard, and wondering that, with all their exertions, they make so little, when the plain truth is, that their labour is so ill-directed, or is so uneconomically conducted, and in the result of their labours they consequently do so little for their fellow-creatures, that their little gains are exactly what is to be expected, and what is strictly their due. The very best lesson that we could teach a poor man, with a view to improving his fortunes, would be that which led him, as far as possible, to extend his usefulness, to substitute economical for uneconomical labour, and to concentrate and divide employments. I beheld, with interest, in this exhibition of the Swedish peasantry, the first aspect of an economy out of which it has been the business of the last hundred years to reform the farming population of my own country.

At the first station, which we reached in little more than an hour, the horses which had been ordered were in waiting, along with a new loon of some kind to take care of them. The man in charge of the used horses was then paid at a rate which appeared nearly equivalent to threepence-halfpenny per English mile. But something more was needed —dricka-pinge, or drinks-money, as Quist called it. In England, something like half-a-crown would have been expected. In Sweden, a few skillings – about twopence of our money – was given, and most thankfully received. We then set out with our new horses. The station, it may be remarked, is a place like a carrier's inn. Travellers of a humble class may stop and refresh at it; but it expects no gentlemen customers, and is unprepared for their reception. One or two out of a long series are tolerable places, and it is necessary to calculate so as to have any needful meals there, instead of the meaner houses; but even with these better-sort of houses it is necessary to order meals by the forebud, for a guest is so rare, that they have no standing arrangements for his reception. My breakfast had been ordered at the third station. It proved a decent, plain house, with clean-boarded floors, and a few rude prints along the walls; and, had there been wheaten bread, the eggs and coffee would have enabled me to make a tolerable meal.

The country passed over to-day consisted of low rocky hills of soft outline, with alluvial plains between. It is impossible for any person of common powers of observation to fail to be struck with the appearance of the rocky surface presented around Gottenburg and along the road upon which I was now travelling. All the abruptnesses and asperities usually seen upon rocks are here ground off: all is smooth and rounded. Here you see great ridges, resembling the hull of a ship turned keel uppermost, both in the general form and the smoothness of surface. There you see great slopes, as straight and smooth as an ashlar wall. Sometimes a kind of trough or channel is seen between rising ridges, and of this the sides are usually quite smooth. In general, there has been a certain weathering of the exterior, though leaving the general plane – if I may use such an expression – in its original state. Where the surface has been from any cause protected from the elements, the smoothing is clearly seen to be a true mechanical polish; that is to say, not a result of some causes connected with the formation of the rock, but an effect proceeding from some external agent which has operated on the rocks after they had been thrown into their present arrangement as a surface for this part of the earth. On these preserved surfaces we find striæ or scratches, evidently a portion of the general operation, whatever it was; and these striæ, as well as the channellings and ridges, lie in one direction – namely, compass N. E. and S. W. In numberless instances in travelling to-day I took out my compass to test this point, where much struck by the appearances, and the result was invariable. The valley of the Gotha Elv lies from north to south; but this seems merely to have exposed it to being impressed with these singular appearances. There are several hill-faces which may be considered as an exception, being rough and cliffy, sometimes with a talus of débris descending from below the cliffy front, as in Salisbury Crags near Edinburgh. In all such instances the face of the cliff is to the south-west; and where this occurs in a valley, the opposite hill-face is invariably smooth, with rounded surfaces, showing as if the smoothing agent had moved from the north-east, failing to press against faces turned away from that point of the compass, but bearing hard upon such as were presented towards it. It was most impressive and interesting to read in these facts so strange a tale of grand preterite operations of nature. I had seen some of the few and scattered markings of the same kind which exist on the surface of my own country, but was nevertheless unprepared for the all but universal grinding to which Sweden has been subjected. In Scotland one has to seek for the appearances in nooks of the country; but here they are met at every step. Very often farm establishments, and the inns at which the traveller stops, are placed on smoothed plateaux of rock, the place thus acquiring from nature all the benefit of a paved courtyard, as well as of a perfectly firm and dry foundation. Often you can trace in these natural pavements the primitive channellings and striæ, though hob-nails and wagon-wheels have clattered over them for centuries.

The matter massed up against the smoothed valley-sides has all the appearance of that of moraines amongst the Alps. A moraine, as must be known by many persons, is the accumulation of loose matter which a glacier brings down in its course, and deposits at its base. The matter seen here, as at the skirts of the Alpine glaciers, is a coarse, pale, sandy clay, mixed with rough stones of all sizes up to many tons – mixed confusedly – with here and there little nests of matter, where the clay and sand have been separated and laid down by water. Over this matter in some places are stratified sand and gravel, coming to flat, terraced forms, like sea-beaches. These, however, are rare objects. The tendency of the whole appearances, in an unprejudiced mind, is to convey the idea that ice has been the cause of the main phenomena. That water in any form could have produced them is utterly inadmissible, though this was the supposition formed by the first scientific observer, M. Sefstrom. Persons who have only read descriptions of the appearances may think them explainable upon an aqueous theory; but if they visit Sweden, and look at the surface with their own eyes, they must, if open to conviction at all, see that no such agent could have produced such effects. Only some agent applying forcibly, pressingly, and with an equable, continuous motion – like a plane going over a deal, or a plough in a furrow – could have so dressed the original surface. Such an agent is ICE. The identity of the loose matter with the moraines of existing glaciers points to the same conclusion. I therefore believe, with M. Agassiz and others, that ice has been the means of smoothing the surface of Sweden – ice on a scale of grandeur beyond what we are accustomed to see; though how such a glacial sheet was originated, and how it could move across the whole irregular face of a large country, up hill and down hill, maintaining over wide provinces one direction, I think it would be difficult to explain. We perceive clearly the nature of the agent, and we see this agent still at work upon the earth, though in a limited manner: the only difficulty is as to the different physical circumstances on which depended the magnitude of the phenomenon and the manner of its application. The superficial arrangements of the loose matter speak of a subsequent dip under water, a fact of which I shall have occasion to show other evidences.

The country passed over in this day's journey is not interesting to any but the geologist. It presents only a series of humble-looking farmsteads, and one or two small and unimportant towns. The farmhouses bear a general resemblance to those of Switzerland, but want the overhanging eaves, and are less picturesque, though some are painted of a red or ochrey colour, which gives a cleanly effect. Unlike Switzerland, too, barns, byres, and all sorts of store-offices occupy detached buildings, an arrangement by which the risk of fire is materially reduced. The scenery, though sufficiently rude, is not romantic; for the hills are in general only a few hundred feet above the level of the sea, and their outline has been rendered tame by the glacial polishing above described. The ice, as I sometimes surprised my Scandinavian friends by remarking, has been a great enemy to the picturesque in this region of the earth. Though there is no want of population, the country is dull. One misses even the little taverns and huckstry-shops which everywhere give a sort of life to the roadsides in England and Scotland. In the afternoon we came to a fiord, and found at its upper extremity the town of Uddevalla, containing from 3000 to 4000 inhabitants. Uddevalla is a name of no small interest in science, because of a great bed of ancient shells found near it. This, too, is a kind of object very rare, and only seen on a most limited scale in the superficial formations of Britain. The effect was novel and startling when, on the hill-face overlooking the fiord, and at the height of two hundred feet above its waters, I found something like a group of gravel-pits, but containing, instead of gravel, nothing but shells! It is a nook among the hills, with a surface which has originally been flat in the line of the fiord, though sloping forward towards it. We can see that the whole space is filled to a great depth with the exuviæ of marine mollusks, cockles, mussels, whelks, &c. all of them species existing at this time in the Baltic, with only a thin covering of vegetable mould on the surface. That surface has been broken in several places by the peasantry, who dig and carry away these spoils of ancient seas to spread them over their lands. I feel sure that some of their excavations are twenty feet deep; yet that is not the whole thickness of the shell-bed. Of course it is a proof of the sea and land having formerly been at a different relative level; and one more convincing could not be desired. I was familiar with this as a geological fact; but the shell-bed of Uddevalla presented it with a freshness and liveliness of evidence beyond what I would have expected. Seeing these shells so entire, so like in all respects to any bed of shells on the present shore, one looks upon the period antecedent to the assumption of the present relative level as a thing of yesterday; the whole series of intermediate events, including, what is probably but a small part of it, the course of the written history of the human race, seems concentrated into that brief space which, relatively to the entire history of the universe, it actually occupies.

My halting-place for the first night was at Quistrom, ten and a-half Swedish, or about seventy English miles from Gottenburg. This reminds me to remark that the mile in Sweden, in consequence of an arrangement adopted during the last century, is fixed at the tenth part of a geographical degree, which, it will be remembered, is about 69½ English miles. For such spaces as we require the term mile to designate, the Swedes speak of quarter and half-quarter miles. The roads exhibit formidable 'milestones' for each quarter, usually adorned with the initials of the king under whose reign they were erected. In the whole of this day's journey I had passed only one gentleman's house – a pretty place with a park, near Quistrom; and I was afterwards informed that it belonged to an Englishman. Country-houses, of a character approaching that of an English gentleman's mansion, are objects scarcely existing in either Sweden or Norway, except in the immediate neighbourhood of the larger towns.

At Quistrom I was shown into a large room in an upper floor, uncarpeted, but strewed thickly with small pieces of pine spray and juniper bush, the scent of which is abundantly pungent. This is a description applicable to most public rooms in the country inns of Scandinavia, the vegetable sprinkling being designed for exactly the same effect as a sprinkling of yellow sand in British houses of a humble class. In obedience to the forebud order, a meal was ready to be laid down for me, consisting of two small dishes of animal food, with milk, cheese, and hard cakes of rye. Everything was clean, though homely. A married pair with a child had arrived in a light vehicle about the same time with me; and as soon as I was done with eating, I retired to my bedroom, that they might sup in privacy at the same table. They had a bedroom at one side; I one at the other, a plain small room, also uncarpeted, and possessing little furniture besides a small couch of plain deals. I mention these things as characteristic of the roadside inns all over the country. Here, as everywhere else, there was snowy bed-linen. I feared the entomology of the house, but was agreeably disappointed. The stories told of Sweden and Norway in this respect are surely exaggerations. At least I can say, with a safe conscience, that of the cimicidæ I never saw one example, and of the species pulex irritans only two, during the whole time I was in the country. It is a point not unworthy of notice, for, under different impressions, I had for many nights much less steady sleep than is desirable for a traveller.

An early walk next morning showed me the situation of the inn in a pleasant valley, where a river terminates in a fiord. The river, I was told, contains abundance of fine fish, and I bethought me that for an angler such an opportunity of sport, with so cleanly an inn to live in, might be very attractive. Quist having contrived the night before to get several forebud notices sent on by a private hand free of expense, I started at eight o'clock, with some uncertainty as to the conclusion of my day's journey. The country passed over to-day consisted of low rocky hills, all smoothed, with spaces between, filled up to various heights with detrital matter. This matter usually composes flats, and the ground therefore joins the rocky hills almost as mountain lakes join the sides of the basins containing them – a feature speaking significantly of the operations of the sea upon the stuff left at the conclusion of the glacial action. Contrary to my expectation, very few boulders appeared upon the hills. Sometimes a rill cuts down the alluvial flat, and then we see a series of cultivated fields on the bisected level spaces, frontiered by steep pastoral banks, all in a flush of wild-flowers. The rounded gray rocky hills; the alluvial flats, sometimes cultivated, sometimes in moorland; low, gray, stone enclosures; red wooden houses scattered at wide intervals; now and then a whitened church, with a red wooden spire, topping a low height – such were the predominant features of the landscape during this morning's drive. The people are remarkably civil and inoffensive: not a man or boy do I pass or meet who does not take off his hat. I feel this as courtesy, not as servility, and am careful to return each greeting duly, in order that so amiable a custom may not suffer by me. There is one singular impediment in travelling: almost every few hundred yards – though often at very much wider intervals – a gate crosses the road, being part of the system of farm enclosures, and having a regard to the exclusion of cattle from the corn-fields. Generally some cottage child or group of children is ready to run and open the gate for the approaching vehicle; and for this service a minute coin, such as the third or sixth of a skilling, is regarded as a rich reward. Where no such aid is at hand, the charge-taker of the horses has to descend and throw up the bar. Another novel feature of the roads is the frequent appearance by the wayside of little posts bearing small boards, which contain an inscription – as 'Hede, 200 alnar,' 'Hogdal, 134 alnar,' &c. The explanation is, that the roads in Sweden and Norway are kept up by the bonder or peasants, each taking charge of some small section near his farm. The boards show for what piece each is answerable, the space being indicated in ells. A public officer makes periodical rounds, to see that each person executes his portion in a satisfactory manner, and to impose fines where the duty is neglected. This system partakes of the character of the compulsory furnishing of horses, and imparts a curious idea of the state of public opinion in these countries as to personal liberty. It appears that, let there be never such liberal or democratic forms established on the continent, the state of individual liberty remains the same: the central government is still permitted to bandy about the simple subject at its pleasure. And the oddest consideration is, that, amidst all the democratic struggles and revolutionary writhings which occasionally take place, no one thinks of complaining of these trammelments, or getting them corrected.

In the evening I approached a fiord called Swinesund, which forms the northern limit of Sweden in this direction. At the last station on the Swedish side an elderly officer-like man came up with great politeness, and addressed me, first in Swedish, and afterwards in German. It was his duty to search the baggage of travellers before they should pass into Norway, though I cannot imagine for what reason, unless the exaction of a rigs dollar, or some such trifle, which I paid to save myself from detention, furnish one. At a house on the Norwegian margin of the fiord something more was paid, my passport inspected, and my name entered in a book. The tendency on the continent to petty impositions of this kind is so great, that here, even between two countries under one sovereign rule, they are kept up. At this point a bag of Swedish money, with which I had been furnished at Gottenburg, and with which I was just beginning to become familiar, ceased to be useful, and a new kind became necessary. Laying down rigs-gelt dollars and skillings, I had to take up with specie dollars and marks. A rigs-gelt dollar, I may remark, is equivalent to 13½d. of English money, and the skilling is its forty-eighth part. Calculations are, however, made in an all but imaginary denomination called dollars and skillings banco, which are as 3 to 2 of the actual rigs-gelt. The prevalent monies are, in reality, notes of 1, 3, 5 rigs-gelt dollars, and for 8, 12, 16 skillings banco, the smallest of this paper-money being for 3½d. English. As may readily be imagined, the threepence-halfpenny note is generally found in no very neat or cleanly state; yet though it may be a mere clot of dirty paper, not much different in appearance from a huddled-up spider's web, it will be preferred by the natives to coin, provided it only retain the signature of the government banker. In Norway, they have notes for 1 specie dollar (about 4s. 6d. English), 2, 5, and 10 dollars, with silver marks and half-marks (9d. and 4¼.), and copper skillings. I need scarcely remark that the plunge into a new money in the course of continental travel is always a painful thing, and that it is a vexation which occurs the more frequently the more rapidly you travel. On this occasion I had had to make acquaintance with three kinds of money in about a week.

I spent the night at Westgaard, the first station within Norway, and one somewhat superior to the last. I here observed the first examples of a piece of substantial furniture very common in the north – namely, large chests or arks, usually bearing the name of a person, and an old date in quaint lettering, such as 'Agnes Olsen, 1733.' During the two previous days the weather had been dull and ungenial. The third morning proved bright and clear, and I started at an early hour for Frederickshald with elevated spirits. This place was a few miles out of the way; but I was anxious to see the scene of the death of that extraordinary prince who, as Johnson says —

It was yet scarcely past seven o'clock when we drove into the inn-yard at this little town. The landlord soon came, and being able to speak well in French, and a little in English, he proved a most serviceable ally. I was quickly on my way, under proper conduct, to the scene of the assassination of poor Carl Tolv. Frederickshald is a neat, cleanly town, at the head of one of the smaller fiords, and the fort lies close by, perched upon a rocky eminence of considerable extent, at the foot of which runs a river, noted for several fine waterfalls. A painful ascent of two or three hundred feet, along zig-zagging causeways and fortified walls, brings us to the fortress, which seems to be now chiefly a mere post for soldiers, like Edinburgh and Stirling castles. Behind the main buildings is a space of irregular rocky ground, enclosed within the exterior defences. Here an enclosure of trees and shrubs, and a little tumulus of stones, one of them bearing a half-obliterated inscription, marks the spot where Charles XII. was slain. He had invaded Norway in his usual madcap style; one of his armies, consisting of 7000 men, had there been literally buried in a snow-storm; he was now directing in person the siege of this fortress, when an unknown hand despatched him by a shot which penetrated his temple (December 11, 1718). He was found dead, but with his sword half-drawn, as if to defend himself from some enemy, or to punish an assassin, and it is accordingly believed that the wound was inflicted by one of his own people. A survey of the ground supports this view of the matter, as at such a place one does not readily see how the fatal shot could have come from the fortress. I had afterwards an opportunity of examining the dress worn at this time by the king, in the Riddarsholm Church at Stockholm. The plain cocked-hat shows the hole by which the bullet entered, and the right glove is stained with blood, as if the unfortunate monarch, under the first impulse of the moment, had clapped his hand upon the wound.