The Willimantic Journal

SCENES IN NORWAY.

A PEEP AT THE MOST NORTHERN FORT IN THE WORLD.

A Visit to the Public Schools of Vardo.

Pleasant and Entertaining Exercises.

Malodorous Factories for Rendering Whale Blubber into Oil.

Vardo is the most easterly town in Norway, located on an island of the same name in the Arctic ocean, in latitude 70 degrees 20 minutes 36 seconds north. It is separated from the mainland by a channel two miles wide, and contains a population of about 2,000. It claims the most northern fort in all the world, which is garrisoned by sixteen men and has an armament of about an equal number of old fashioned cannon, making a man for each gun. The keystone of an arch over the entrance to the rampart bears the date "1737."

There being two public schools in the place, and I naturally having a curiosity to visit a seat of learning whose foundations were lashed by the Arctic wave, I entered the larger of the two by a rear door, for there was no entrance from the street nor at either end. I was kindly and politely saluted by the teacher, and on entering the main room the pupils arose in a body and bowed to me. A seat was given me and a book was placed in my hand that I might follow the boys and girls through their reading lesson, which was characterized in some measure by that doleful enunciation so often heard in rural schools. The girls wore the inevitable handkerchief about their heads. A bit of lithe cane in a corner represented the pedagogic mace. The rooms on this day, the 8th of July, were heated by coal stoves. The school contained four departments, under a male principal, and three assistant female teachers, all intelligent and wide awake.

From the principal's room I passed to an adjoining one in charge of a bright and neatly attired young lady, who required her pupils to sing for me, and strove with graceful tact to make the exercises pleasant and intelligible to one totally ignorant of the language. It was almost pitiful to see some of the girls caressing small bunches of puny dandelion blossoms that seemed as precious to them as a victoria regia would be to a southern maid. Others were nursing a few sprays of millefolium in bottles of water, and one could only wonder at so stunted and sparse a flora could beget any love for flowers at all; and yet geraniums and roses in the windows of the better houses are not uncommon. Excepting a small and unimportant one at Hammerfest, this is the most northern school in the world, and after a pleasant hour therein I departed.

The remainder of the day I concluded to spend in visiting the whale factories; that is, the establishments for rendering whale blubber into oil and transforming the krang (flensed carcasses) into artificial guano. I have had occasion already to mention several of the most northern things in the world: here I discovered the most powerful stench in all Europe, and probably in the world, and yet I felt willing to brave it to witness a dissection of leviathans. There are around Vardo four or five establishments, each having several steam whalers constantly scouring the seas off the coast in pursuit of whales. Floating in the channel before the different factories were forty flensed carcasses, some swollen to enormous proportions. Two large whales, one seventy-five feet in length, were drawn out on the shore, one with the blubber newly removed, the other fresh from the water. Several men mounted the latter by a ladder and clambered about on its smooth, slippery skin by means of sharp spikes attached to the soles of their boots; with blubber knives two feet in length in long wooden handles, they made transverse incisions as deep as the blubber about twelve inches in this case-and five or six feet long, and then running the cut longitudinally for thirty feet, a blanket of fat was ready for removal; a chain was attached to the farther end, and by the power of a windlass in the factory this prodigious slab of blubber, weighing several tons, was slowly torn from the carcass. This process was continued till the flensing was completed. In the factory the blubber is cut into small pieces for the "trying out" pots. The flesh of the flensed carcass is then cut down into large pieces that are dragged and pitched with flesh hooks to small cars; it is then taken to drying furnaces, where it is rendered friable. When the flesh and viscera have been removed, the work of chopping down the flinty forest of bones is commenced; the bones are also subjected to the drying furnace, and when parched are ground together with the flesh into a powder, which is barreled and shipped to all parts of Europe as a fertilizer.-James Ricalton in Outing