Norway

I saw no flies in Lappmark but as soon as I entered Norway there was an abundance of them in the houses. The huge swarms of mosquitoes, on the other hand, disappeared completely.

I was given red-fish to eat here and it tasted like salmon; it was large and had 1 dorsal fin running from the middle of the body to the tail.

I was now utterly exhausted by the journey and allowed myself a rest.

12th. There was a very strong wind the following day and I did not dare go out to sea. I walked on the shore in the morning when the tide was low. The tide comes in twice in every 24 hours and takes 6 hours between the low and the high tide. That is, 4 tides each day, 2 ebb-tides and 2 flood-tides. They increase with the moon. Various species of fucus lay on the lonely shore, growing on rocks or shells.1

The Lapps come to TÖRRFJORD to buy schnaps. First they drank as long as they could stand, then they blew up the dried reindeer bladders they had with them, filled them with schnaps, tied them up and carried them off. They also have small cups, about 1/3 the size of a spoon, and they drink one after another of these, often as much as half a pint.

When the Lapps want to dress up they put on an unlined white homespun garment which has a high collar with 10 rows of thread stitched around it; the colour is blue with brown edging. The material costs 1 copper daler for 2 feet and it takes 16 feet for a tunic, so it costs as much as a small Lapp fur coat.

The Lapps place one hand on top of the other when they wash their faces.

The womenfolk sew the clothes and shoes and cook the food made from milk, but the men cook the meat, fish and fowl etc. If the wife is absent the men ccok the milk food too – otherwise not.

It was fairly hot today and a few drops of rain fell after midday.

13th. As the weather had become calmer, we went out to sea to see what nature had to offer. We immediately took some coalfish on the hooks we cast out from the boat.

There were high mountains with snow on them all around Törrfjord and grey-black clouds were rising from the earth here and there between their tops. But both the tops and the bottoms of the hills could be seen. Eventually the clouds subsided.

The “missne” that people eat is ‘Dracunculus aquaticus’ [Bog Arum]. “Missne” for cattle is ‘Menyanthes’ [Bogbean].

They chop spruce brushwood extremely fine for their horses, mix it half and half with barley and give it to the horses in hard times. It is excellent.

No sooner had we cast out the hook and let it drift behind the boat than we caught coalfish; they took so quickly that we hardly had time to pull them in. But the following day, when the weather was clear, things were different. The hook, which was attached to a cither string, was unbaited. We took 60 or so that way.

A fair number of isolated homesteads lay scattered among the hills out in the skerries. I noticed that each of them occupied no more than a small valley and thus had only one or two arable fields and possibly a little meadow-land by the farm (and, perhaps, a little more further away). They could not subsist on it if they did not have such a good supply of fish to exploit and sell, for the sea up here contains both many species and great numbers of them. I heard much talk of whales.