We found not the comfortable harbour I had known before, but one of, temporarily, half that size. Two big schooners were lying berthed side by side against the outer mole, and we had to tie up to the new tarred quay which walled off the anchorage, now dry land, where, with other happy little boats, Kittiwake had her moorings last year. We were glad of the new fenders from Helsingfors, and, getting ourselves pretty black, managed to keep Racundra clean. We tied up fore and aft, had a tot of hot but inferior rum, and went to bed.
OLD BALTIC PORT AND NEW
I first found Baltic Port in Kittiwake, and having found it, made it our headquarters for a happy summer of minor exploration. I had heard of it as the Russian Naval Port, and imagined it a kind of Sheerness, busy with motor-launches, steam pinnaces and other forms of naval activity. I found it a sleepy little old-time harbour, made by moles from the shore enclosing a square basin, the shore being left as it always had been, so that the fishing-boats used to beach themselves upon it at full speed, a man jumping on the thwart and swinging backward from the shrouds to save the mast at the moment of grounding, when they often ran a boat half out of the water. The day Kittiwake struggled in, there was a British steamship, a Wilson boat, the Cato, in the harbour, and though she is a small ship, she left very little room for anything else. I think the Cato called twice that summer, but all the rest of the traffic there was made up of local schooners, and the harbour-master had little else to do but to sail a smart little skiff to the bank off Pakerort for fishing, or across to Roogö, or round between the islands to see how fast she could do it. There was never any hurry in Baltic Port, and there seemed to be a lot of holidays. On one of them I watched the crew of the Cato beaten at football by a local team. Eleven played on each side, but the Cato’s crew had no spare men, whereas every man in the Port was waiting round the field to take his turn in the local team, and as one tired another took his place. On another the Cato lowered away a lifeboat, and we went off to the fishing grounds under a dipping lug. At one side of the harbour was a low stage beside which a grey Government launch was moored, end to end with a converted fishing-boat, partly tarred and partly painted blue, in which, on Sundays, stray visitors were transported to the Roogö islands and back. Once a week the three or four lads on the Government launch took her out to sea on mysterious business. But for the most part they lay half naked on the stones on the far side of the mole or had splashing matches with each other.
The little town had much the same character. Small boys played gorodki (a very exciting Russian form of skittles) on the broad streets that were nearly all grass. Cattle grazed there. I met three sheep coming out of church with the sedate manner of respectable parishioners. I watched a hare playing by the railway station, where a large part of the population used to meet in the evenings to see the train come in from Reval. There was a post office, and I think three or perhaps even four shops. There was also a fire brigade, who played various instruments and now and again stirred the whole town by giving a concert. Some young women visitors tried to organize a flag-day there, but it was a failure, though everybody in the town was very much interested and asked them how much they got. There could not be a pleasanter little place.
But with growing traffic in the Baltic, such quiet could hardly continue in a port which in all but the most exceptional winters is free from ice. There are fifteen fathoms of water between the mainland and Roogö, and the water is deep almost to the shores. Long after the way into Reval is blocked with ice, ships can come freely into Roogowik and into Baltic Port itself. Peter the Great and Catherine after him realized what could be done with such natural advantages, and relics of their work show what Baltic Port may yet become. Just north of the harbour is the old fort, carved out of the cliff itself, with deep moats which must once have been sunk to sea-level, or very near it. There are the old bastions, cunningly laid out as in Peter’s project, the old gun-positions, with sheer cliff below them on the side facing the bay, and on all other sides cliffs also, invisible from a yard or two away, made by cutting the moat down from the high land – a moat a hundred yards across, winding this way and that all round the fort, with perpendicular sides of solid rock. The work was done with convict labour and the labour of prisoners of war, and all this stuff cut out of the rock was tipped into the sea to make the mole that he had planned to stretch across the bay and to turn it into the finest enclosed harbour in the Baltic. I have seen old pictures of the work in progress, the masons busy in boats about their business. Yard by yard the mole was pushed out to sea, and from Roogö Island over on the other side, where you can still see that the natural line of the coast is broken, they began building another fort and a second mole to meet the first. On that side they did not get so far, but on this the spar-buoy north-west of the harbour marks the end not of a natural reef but of Peter’s artificial causeway and breakwater, which, unfinished as it is, serves to protect the stretch of beach always covered with fishing-boats and drying nets between the fort and the harbour. When I was there, there were wild roses growing in the fort. Columbines and Canterbury bells were growing in the moat, and, lying up there on the top of the old gun-positions, I used to spend hot afternoons looking out to sea, thinking of Peter and his passion for ships, and eating the wild strawberries.
On the shingle below the fort where the women sit with their children, fastening small flat stones as sinkers to the bottoms of the nets, I saw a German mine being put to a purpose precisely opposite to that for which it was intended. The fishermen were building a new boat. Her keel was laid and they were putting on the planking. They were busy steaming the planks, and their boiler was a German mine, emptied of its explosives and neatly fixed over a small furnace of stones from the beach. How they had managed to get the explosives out I do not know, but here was the mine with a good fire under it, boiling away like a domestic kettle, and being used for making boats instead of for their destruction.
My chief friends in Baltic Port in those days were the harbourmaster and his wife, who fed me with coffee that day when I first came in there, so tired that I fell asleep with my head on the table before ever I could put the coffee to my lips. With him I used to sail in his little skiff, which he could steer by merely shifting his own huge weight forward or aft. With her I used to remember my own North country, where also the good wives will tell you what a fool you be at the very moment when they are drying your boots and mixing you a hot grog to save you from the cold that you have earned. I met her one day going to Reval with great bundles of lilac blossom under her arm for a friend in town, and on her head, instead of the pretty green shawl she wore at home, a hat with an enormous white ostrich feather, exactly in the front of it, waving like a helmet plume. She had had this feather for nineteen years, she said, had never washed it, had never gone into Reval without it, and yet it was still as white as when it was new. It had survived many hats. Nineteen years before, her husband, a sailor then, came back from a voyage. She had forgotten where he had been, but no matter; he came back in a hard winter, when even Baltic Port was frozen in, and he left his ship stuck in the ice and came home to her to Pakerort Lighthouse on Christmas Eve, across the frozen seas, with two ostrich feathers, this and another, between his shirt and his skin, so escaping the Customs officers. “And were you pleased with him?” I asked, and was delighted by her reply. “Pleased with him?” said she. “Why, I gave him a proper talking to straight away for being such a fool as to bring two white ostrich feathers. If he’d had but a ha’porth of sense he’d have brought one white one and one black.”
What with talks with the harbourmaster and his wife, whose roughness of tongue was only a defence for the softness of her kind heart, with the lighthouse-keeper from Odensholm, who used to sail in now and again in a little half-decked sloop, and with the skippers and crews of the little sailing vessels which, but for the Cato, made all the traffic of the harbour; what with days fishing on the river six miles away, whither I took Kittiwake’s dinghy on a country cart, and days in wind and
sunshine on Peter’s fort and the cliff by Pakerort, I liked Baltic Port well at all times, but perhaps best of all in the evenings, after sundown, when we used to sit on Kittiwake’s green cabin roof, there being no other dry place after the swilling of the decks. The old watchman would carefully lay his long pipe on the bench outside his wooden but, and wander slowly round the harbour to climb the rickety non ladder and light the light at the harbour mouth. When we were there, in May and June, it was never really dark. A guitar would tune up in one of the schooners, an accordion in another. Most of the little ships carried family parties, skipper, wife and little skipperlets, and there would be dancing on the decks, while the local beauties would he back in the stern-sheets of the dinghy belonging to the Government launch and be rowed about by the sailors. And, just at this time, cutter or schooner would warp to the harbour mouth, and, with the glow of the evening sky on her sails, slip silently away to make the most of the land breeze that comes with the setting of the sun.
Now all is changed. There, where Kittiwake lay to her anchor, is now the new quay, on which they say there is to be a railway and a crane. Things may be better when the works in progress are finished, for new moles are to be built and the harbour will be twice the size. Things will be better for the big ships busy on the Russian trade, but I doubt if they will be better for us. The harbour-master is too busy to sail his little skiff. The few shops have already multiplied to a dozen or more, and whereas, in the old days, the harbourmaster’s wife was only sometimes willing to give lodging to those whom she counted her friends, there is now a regular hotel, the rooms of which are full of busy, serious people, interested in the new activity of the port. Big steamers with steel cables will soon leave no room for the schooners, and little ships like Racundra and Kittiwake will never again find Baltic Port the delightful lazy anchorage that it was a year ago.
FISHING BOATS AT BALTIC PORT.
ONE OF THE ROOGÖ BOAT-HOUSES.
THE ROOGÖ ISLANDS
WE did not call at Roogö in Racundra, for we were hurrying to get southwards to the places we had not yet visited. But the year before, in Kittiwake, we had sailed round between the two islands, and had landed at the jetty that you can see from the quay at Baltic Port and walked all over Little Roogö. The inhabitants of these islands, men, women and even pigs, are patriotic Swedes. When I first rounded up there, three aged men and a pig strolled out on the jetty to inspect us, and began at once by asking me if I spoke Swedish. I told them in Swedish that I did not, or only very little, but they were persuaded that I was only teasing them, and when at last they were convinced they lost all interest and strolled disappointed away. The pig remained on guard, and when I landed, resented my presence, worrying round me like a good housedog. I am sure if I had been a Swede he would have wagged his tail and licked my hand.
A day or two later, however, Leslie joined us from Reval, and we crossed to the island again. He had lived in Christiania and Copenhagen and was sure of being able to make himself understood. A man on the jetty who had watched us sailing over had disappeared by the time we arrived. I suppose he was one of those whom I had disappointed by not being a Swede. But Leslie went boldly up past the little windmill to the first of the wooden cottages to buy eggs. He returned discomfited with the news that this cottage was inhabited exclusively by widows who did not keep hens. I had gone farther and found another cottage, outside which some sort of Sunday parliament was in progress, half a dozen men and two or three women sitting on logs and stools, the men smoking long pipes. Spurred by competition as a linguist with Leslie, I shouted out boldly, “Har ni naugra egg?” with electrical effect. A woman with a white shawl over her head leapt up and disappeared on the run towards some outhouses. The gathering broke up. Everyone slipped away and ostentatiously busied himself or herself with something or other, and when Leslie and the Cook came up they refused to believe that I had done anything but terrify the population. Gradually the men and women, having as it were put themselves in the right by being found busy, deserted their imaginary occupations and came half-heartedly towards us. In the background I could see the fleet runner in the white shawl and green petticoat darting from outhouse to outhouse with a basket. An old humpbacked witch, certainly not over four and a half feet high, with a bright maroon shirt hanging loose outside her petticoat, hobbled from a cottage to stare at us from afar, and presently the egg-gatherer, shielded by a group of friends, drifted towards the gate where we stood.
The same questions were asked that had been put to me on my first coming by the old men on the jetty. Were we Swedish? Where had we come from? How long had we been in Baltic Port? My Swedish, having obtained eggs, faded away behind Leslie’s Scandinavian fluency. We bought butter, but had no paper to put it in. The old man who sold it us said at once that we could take their saucer and bring it back in the evening when we had done with it, a remarkable proof of the honesty of the islanders and their consequent belief in the honesty of others. In Russia such a loan would have been unthinkable. On the mainland here, the canny lender would have asked for a deposit of at least twice the value of the saucer. We settled the matter by putting the butter in the biggest of our tin mugs.
We walked out of this village of Storaby together with three mottled cows, driven by a woman with a handkerchief on her head of red, orange and white, a deep rich green skirt and a bodice of bright purple, flaming like a tulip. As we walked we were joined by other women and other cows, until at last there was a considerable herd, driven by four women with long sticks over an open space of moorland, green grass and swamp, with grey rocks showing through the turf. Fields on either hand were enclosed with stone walls built without mortar, like our walls in Lancashire and Westmoreland, but lower, because the stones are round, sea-worn boulders and harder to fit together than the flat slates at home. Presently we broke away from our companions and made for the woods to get out of the wind and find a place for dinner. The woods were even wetter than the open country, carpeted with moss that squelched under the feet. They were not the pinewoods of the mainland, but birchwoods, and under their silver stems, wherever the ground was not a morass, were lilies of the valley. Near the far edge of the woods we stopped and cooked our dinner under the shadow of a great rock on a good fire of birch, which is the best of all trees for the heat that is in it. Climbing to the top of the rock and standing upon it, I could just see the glint of water, and beyond it the dark woods of the other or Greater Roogö.
After dinner, a pipe and some flower-gathering, we went slowly out of the woods and across one stone wall after another until we came down on the western shore of the island and found a scene of astonishing strange beauty. The shore, flat, with scattered boulders, seemed to slip unwillingly into the sea. The water, dotted with rocks, so that it looked as if one could walk ankle-deep from one island to the other, was quite smooth. And in the middle of this shining water, a quarter of a mile away, was a green islet, with a little wood at its southern end, and behind this wood, her bows and tilted bowsprit showing and her tall masts heeling over above the trees, was a black, two-masted sailing-ship, aground. Beyond were the bluer waters of the bay, ruffled with wind; beyond them again the wooded shore of the mainland. It might have been the opening scene of a boy’s story of a pirate island. Nor did the scene lose any of its romantic character as we came nearer and saw the black tarred ship reflected in shallow water, through which the grass rose, disturbing her image, while at her stern a ladder was set with its foot resting on the green meadow. How she got there I could not say, nor how she proposed to depart thence. The waters of the Baltic deepen along these shores, when the wind is from the N. and W., but I did not think that they could rise so high as to float this vessel, which, undamaged, her anchor out as if in deep water, her masts and rigging intact and fretting the sky, seemed by the ladder, with a gesture of renunciation, to have given up the sea for good and made the land her resting-place for ever.
A ROOGÖ WINDMILL.
A POST WINDMILL TODAY.
The village itself is a group of little wooden cottages, painted for the most part yellow, with a few blue ones among them, each one set higgledy-piggledy in a little bit of ground with apple-trees, which just then were in full bloom. It seemed at first deserted, but as we turned up towards it from the edge of the sea we saw two old men leaning on a gate in conversation. Both of these men, and a younger man who joined them later, were dressed like sailors, in blue striped jerseys under their coats. Leslie, as Scandinavian scholar, was thrust forward as spokesman, and had a great success, fully making up for my first failure on the quay at Storaby. It seemed that news of our arrival had already crossed the island. They knew that we were English, and the elder of the two, evidently the philosopher of the place, told us that it was no wonder we could make ourselves understood, since Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, German and English were all from the same stern and were the five great languages of the world. Politely trying to make us feel at home and among friends, he asked how we were getting on with our coal strike and wanted us to tell him about Ireland, which he confounded with Courland, though when Leslie said that the Courlanders were now independent and called their country Latvia, he at once explained that he meant a country somewhere that belonged to England.
Racundra's First Cruise Page 14