* * * * *
Here we lay for two nights, waiting for a fair wind, and used the intervening day of bright sunshine for the drying of bedding and mattresses and for a visit to the town which is some little way from the jetty. Indeed, as you approach Hapsal from the sea, the jetty, with the tall white granary behind it, looks like an island, for the narrow strip of land that connects it with the town is flat and low. The town itself is grouped round a low hillock on which is a ruined castle, which has, so we learnt, its ghosts and its Hounds of Hell guarding hidden treasure, all indeed that is necessary and fitting for a ruin in a popular watering-place.
The castle was the residence of the German bishops who, during the thirteenth century, made themselves the first foreign rulers of Esthonia. The revolting Ests tried in vain to take it in 1334. Two hundred years and more after that it was taken by the Swedes. They did not hold it for long, for the Swedish officer commanding had no money to pay his troops, and so, in those good old days of private initiative, pawned the castle to his soldiers on the understanding that, if their pay did not arrive by the next Midsummer’s Day, they could sell the castle to whom they chose, on condition that the buyer should be a Christian, but should not be either the Russian Tsar or Bishop Magnus, who had married a niece of Ivan the Terrible. The soldiers did not get their pay and did actually sell the castle for forty thousand talers to Ungern, who was acting viceroy for the King of Denmark. Next year the Russians took it for nothing and without meeting any resistance, for which reason the Danish leader, Stark, was duly executed in Arensburg. Ten years later the Russians, after a fight, lost it to the Swedes, and in 1628 the Swedish King, improving on the commercial methods of the Swedish soldiers, sold it for 66,830 talers to a Field-Marshal, whose son died in the utmost poverty after his father’s purchase had been quietly re-appropriated by the Crown, who perhaps were thinking of selling it again. But the Swedes held on to the property too long, for before they tried to sell it a third time, Peter the Great in 1710 made it Russian, and Russian it remained until 1918, when it was occupied by the Germans, on whose departure the Ests came at last into their own.
We had this ruin to see and, besides that, needed bread, milk, meat and matches, and had set our hearts on a cabbage, which we had not been able to find in Baltic Port. So after bathing in the early morning, we walked in over the low slip of land, that would certainly be covered at high water if this were not a tideless sea, and came to the town – a little town with winding streets of stone and wooden houses, twisting about round the shallow inlets of water, and from one promontory to another in a manner most confusing to a stranger. We had some difficulty in finding the shops, which were, as everyone told us, in the middle of the town. The Esthonians are an admirable, tenacious people, but in all the years of my acquaintance with them I have never met one who knew how to tell me the way. They will point vaguely in the wrong direction, or, if they point in the right direction, will tell you, as a landmark, to look out for a tree with a broken branch among several hundreds all with broken branches, instead of mentioning a large, obvious barn which a blind man could not miss. Here, in Hapsal, we found the further difficulty that the cosmopolitan season was over and that therefore everybody had ceased to understand any language but Esthonian. I was there once for a few days earlier in the summer, when most people seemed to know both Russian and German. Now it was as if every linguist in the place had gone into hibernation till next spring. We did, however, at last come out in the middle of the town, where we found two hotels. We tried both. In one a man was viciously tuning a piano. In the other there was a gramophone. In neither did we see any visitors besides ourselves, and in both we were told at once that the season was over. Indeed we were told so by everyone with whom we spoke, even by the baker from whom we bought the bread, as much as to say that we had no business to be there. I got the impression that the town was quite consciously recovering itself, drawing a long breath and enjoying its nationality after the alien but profitable bustle of the summer.
In summer Hapsal is crowded with visitors, who, for the most part, do not live in the hotels, but rent the little houses, or parts of them, at so much “for the season”. It is not as in England, where whole families go to the seaside for a tumultuous fortnight or month of holiday. Here, the men plant out their wives and children at Hapsal for the summer, to get brown, take mud baths and cure imaginary diseases, while they run down from Reval by train for the week ends. There is a floating restaurant on the inland lake, and great consumption of vanilla ices, besides open-air concerts, regattas in hired boats – in fact, opportunities for all that such visitors demand.
When Racundra sailed in there, all this maelstrom of amusement was still. The idle crowds of hypochondriac rheumatics taking the baths and impatiently exchanging symptoms had disappeared. The little town was itself again, and, if I were to stay there, the back end of the year is certainly the time that I should choose. The tiny market under the castle was quietly busy in the morning, as no doubt it has been since the Middle Ages. We met there women from the country and the islands in their local costume – bright red bodices, black accordion-pleated skirts, with red stockings, short white socks over the red stockings and black shoes with strips of black leather criss-cross over the white socks. And though the visitors were gone the boats remained, and, for the crew of Racundra, these boats compete with the ruins as the things of most interest in Hapsal.
I should explain that beyond the pier and the town and those flat promontories is a huge stretch of shallow water, on which the men of Hapsal take their summer visitors sailing. This inland sea is nowhere more than a very few feet deep, and a special type of boat, unlike any others on the Esthonian coast, has been evolved for sailing on it. I have a reproduction of an old drawing showing that boats something like these were in existence in the very early nineteenth century, if not earlier. They are shaped a little like the shallow wherries of the Norfolk Broads, but are, of course, much smaller. They have a fair-sized cabin right forward, with a big well for the passengers and a small well right aft for the steersman, who from that position controls the sails. The mainsail is extremely high and they are sloop-rigged. They have neither centreboards nor lee-boards, but, drawing not more than a couple of feet of water, they sail in the most remarkable manner both off and by the wind.
Footnote
1 I am told by hydrographers that it is probably incorrect to say that the wind causes the current through these channels. They say that wind and current are alike caused by pressure, or lack of it, elsewhere. To the simple sailormen of these parts, however, the fact remains that wind from the south brings current from the south, wind from the west brings a rise of water in the otherwise tideless Sound, wind from the east lowers the waters there, and in writing about these phenomena I have written as they speak.
HAPSAL TO HELTERMAA (ISLAND OF DAGÖ)
SEPTEMBER 11th. Barometer 29.9. The wind was still against us this morning, shifting between W. and S.W., but a whole day lying at anchor had made us determined to move, if only to get through the difficult bit between the Rukeraga and Odroraga reefs, or, if we should fail to do that, at least to get to anchorage at Estholm, ready to slip through the moment the wind should change. We got our anchor at 7.30 and, slowly tacking, passed by the pierhead near enough to learn that the fishermen thereon, who had come before the dawn, had caught two little silver fish between them. Then we began with infinite labour to retrace, as far as the black-and-white buoy where the channel from Nukke and Worms joins that from the S., the course which we had run so merrily with the wind free two days before.
The sun was behind the Hapsal beacons, and in the glare over the water they were quite invisible, so we just felt our way out, tacking from spar-buoy to spar-buoy, the Ancient in the bows singing out when he saw the bottom coming up to meet us. The Cook was busy with the breakfast, two Primuses going at once, steam from the porridge coming up the companion-way together with the rich dark smell of frying bacon. At nine we reache
d the first of the main buoys and at ten minutes past ten we were at the third, round which the channel turns to the S. Here we brought Racundra to the wind and hove to while we hauled the dinghy on board. We then tacked on southwards. It was a wearisome business, but we were all keen to go on, for with the wind backing to the S.W. we had a good hope of being able to point straight through the narrow alleyway of buoys between the reefs. We went as close as we dared to the Odroraga and saw its wicked line just below the surface of the water, and at one point a little strip of it, pale red above the wavelets, with seabirds huddled together upon it. We stood away then for Estholm, where are the beginnings and the rains of a fine harbour, warehouses and quays alike broken by the war, wrecks of half-sunk pontoons lifting desperately into the air and a forlorn crane. A little cutter was at anchor close by the piers. We had watched her through the glasses, picking her way in with lowered foresail and dropped peak. Away to the E., with the wind behind her, a fine schooner was coming easily through the passage by the Rukeraga beacon. We went about and sailed close-hauled to meet her.
The beacon is fixed on the northern end of a low strip of rock, just above the level of the water. The Baltic Pilot, by the way, like the German chart, gives a most inaccurate picture of it, suggesting a low pyramid supporting a square. It may have been so once upon a time. Now it is a tall openwork obelisk, visible from a great distance, and easily recognizable from a few miles away because of the big conical stones which lie near it. Just N. of it and running E. and W. is a narrow lane of four pairs of spar-buoys. The channel between them is not a stone’s-throw across, and, as there are rocks and stone shallows just outside the line of the buoys on either side, beating through it is impossible.
We met the schooner, envying her speed and favourable wind, and reaching the first pair of buoys, found we could just point through the channel. We passed the first three pairs of buoys with no difficulty, and were just rejoicing in having got through a ticklish bit of sailing when I noticed that, though we were heading by compass as before, the wind had fallen a little, and the last pair of buoys were slipping slowly southwards. I brought Racundra’s head a fraction up. It made no difference. We were already caught in the current, which, sweeping up along the far side of the reefs, touched us here, whereas it had been imperceptible during the first three-quarters of the passage. There was nothing to be done. There was neither time nor room to beat. We were already close upon the last pan of buoys, and we were on the wrong side of the northern one. I shouted forward and the Ancient stood by with the anchor as a last resource, while we stood on, our hearts in our mouths. The buoy was abeam of us and visibly slipping away. It was on our quarter. It was astern. There came a puff of wind and Racundra answered it at once, and a moment later the Ancient looked happily over his shoulder. “Deep water,” he called, and we knew that we were out in the Moon Sound proper, where big steamers find their way and where beacons are lit at night. Now we cared for nothing. I let Racundra fall a point off the wind and she brisked up like a horse after a feed of oats. The wind backed a little more and she pointed W. by S. and even W.S.W. That, however, was the best that she could do, and we were not yet far enough from the reefs to put her about on the other tack. So we held on, watching the southern shore of Worms and recognizing far before us the low coast of Dagö Island and Pihalep church spire, that is a good guide from afar to the pleasant little harbour of Heltermaa.
Then the wind strengthened and fell away, strengthened and fell away from the S.W., the short unpleasing sea of the Moon Sound got up, and the admirable Racundra began to show us that we had been wrong in boasting that she did not roll. She rolled abominably. The main boom swung from side to side with mighty bangs, until I lashed it to the lee backstay tackle. The mizen boom swung on unheeded. Things were very unpleasant, and, as we looked back to the tall Rukeraga beacon, seeming now as if it floated in the water, it was clear enough that we were making very little southing. If that was so in this part of the Sound, if the current was so strong here, it would be very much worse in the narrows to the S., and, anxious as we were to get along, we had no sort of wish to spend the night in vainly beating to and fro against wind and current together. Just then the two little steamers from Hapsal, the Endla and the Hiumaa, rivals for the exiguous Dagö trade, passed us bound cheerfully for Heltermaa. I had been in Heltermaa before, and knew it for a picturesque place, one of the smallest good harbours in the world. There was that church on the horizon, a fine mark to steer by; and, after all, we reasoned, if the wind should change we should be able to consider the visit to Heltermaa merely as a longer tack. We could lose nothing by going there. So we made up our minds to hold on until either the wind should change or we should come to Heltermaa. The wind did not change, so we came to Heltermaa just before sunset. At 6.15 we warped in round Endla’s stern, nearly carrying away her flagstaff as we did so, owing to the energy with which we were helped by the men of Heltermaa, and found ourselves in very snug quarters for the night.
“RACUNDRA” AT HELTERMAA (DAGÖ ISLAND).
HELTERMAA HARBOUR TODAY.
There was room in Heltermaa harbour for the tiny Hiumaa, one open fishing-boat, a dinghy, Racundra, the Endla and a schooner of small size. But Endla was tied up outside the harbour proper, across the end of the pierhead, and the schooner was at anchor. The fishing-boat, Racundra and Hiumaa filled all available quay berths. A young man in uniform, who was, I think, coastguard, soldier and harbourmaster, came on board and enthusiastically pencilled the date of Racundra’s arrival on her papers. Then, as it looked like rain, we put the covers on the sails; and, while the Cook and the Ancient began to make supper, I set out with a milk-can, an egg-basket and a string bag to do some provisioning.
A hundred yards or so from the harbour is a so-called inn, that was once a Russian posting-station where you could hire horses, at so many kopecks per mile per horse, to take you across the island. It is still called an inn, and people do sleep on sacks of straw there, if they are on their way to Hapsal and the Sound is too rough for the little steamer. Its landlord, who has or had some official connection with the harbour, talks only Esthonian, nor does his wife talk any other language. My dealings with them were not easy. I tried English. I tried Russian. These failing, I took a long breath and asked them for milk in Esthonian.
“Piima,” I said, and waved my milk-can.
“Ei ole piima,” they replied in chorus.
All right. If they had no milk I would try for eggs.
“Muna,” I said, and the good woman scuttled off as if she were a hen herself and came back with a lot of very little eggs.
“Kui palio maksap?” said I.
“Kumme munat (ten eggs),” said the woman, counting on her fingers. “Nelli kument mark.”
“Forty marks.” I had only a note for a hundred, and they had no change or very little, so they gave me ten marks back and a number of new white loaves.
That was all they could do, but that was not enough. They pointed up the road towards the forest, and I went to the next house, which turned out to be the school-house. I found a young woman in a pink cotton dress sitting on the back of a desk. She was the schoolmistress and this an idle hour. I tried English, and she turned the colour of a ripe apple.
“I know English,” she said, and promptly, in her embarrassment, forgot all she knew.
I dare say she reads Shakespeare. I think it highly likely that she teaches English. She understood perfectly when I explained that I wanted milk; but when she tried to answer, it was as if someone held her tongue by the roots and muffled her brain. By now, I am sure, she has thought out the speech she should have made. At the time she was struck dumb, and, coming to the doorstep, could only point up the road into the forest, turn redder and redder, so that her pink cotton dress looked almost white, and stammer, “House, house, house, house ...” and then, with a flash of memory, “YELLOW house.” So I thanked her and she fled away back into her schoolroom, while I went on towards the trees, looking for a yellow
house.
I found the yellow house; but the woman therein, who talked Esthonian to me, exhausted herself in explaining that they had only one cow and were ten in family. She directed me to another house where she said they were few in family but had two cows. I found that house; but the woman in it said that I could have milk only when the cows should come home, and that they were not expected home before eight o’clock. However, she directed me to another house.
Here I found a little elderly woman with a face wrinkled all over, the most charming wrinkles, so that when she smiled every line in her face took part in the smile; and she, while explaining that she had no milk, would not let me go, but held me firmly by my jersey, and called for her husband to come out and look. To me she said, “We have no milk,” but to him, “Here is an Englishman,” and held me firmly till he came, a long, thin, smiling fellow who somehow reminded me of John Masefield, I accordingly felt friendly towards him, and perhaps I reminded him of someone, for he seemed to feel friendship for me, and took me by the arm and led me to a stake hedge, where he pulled out a stake to let me through, and said, “Over there is a house with a little white barn, and there lives a Russian man, and he has good cows, and will certainly give you milk.”
Racundra's First Cruise Page 17