7 Introduction to exile
Other similarly distasteful things father performed when he thought they should be done to justify man’s existence and set him on a plain above the beast. Trivial gestures, no doubt, born of a vagrant idealistic moment, yet as irrepressible and impellent as the adventurous streak that nothing ever quite destroyed. The new, the strange, the unknown, these never lost their fascination for my father, however cramping his circumstances might be.
It was adventure more than anything that sent him, as a young man, to the north of Iceland to serve as a coast-guard. Patrolling those wild, hazardous waters was always an unpredictable venture. The rockbound coast with its whipping gales and gloomy fogs and churning sea wore a perpetual air of evil doom, as though some god of the deep, resenting the greedy persistence of the warring fishing fleets, had vowed everlasting destruction. Of all the famous northern preserves none was more feared than this, and never a season passed without its bitter toll of human lives, and sturdy schooners ground to matchwood. It was the duty of the coast patrol to salvage such wreckage, and whatever else tragic or treasurable the sea might yield.
It was here after a storm of unusual fury that father had a curious experience which, since he was neither superstitious nor religious in the narrow, conventional sense, may bear retelling. The storm had lasted for days, beating up from intermittent squalls to a raging tempest. A Brittany fishing schooner had fought the waters within sight of shore, and, despite every effort of the patrol to come to her assistance, was crushed like an eggshell by the savage waters. The first lull in the storm came at dawn and all that day the exhausted patrol searched for the dead among the numerous skerries and jagged rocks that characterized the treacherous coastline. By the time the early dusk terminated the dreary task, many poor, broken bodies had been brought to the little chapel, which, chained to the rocks, sounded a note of sublime challenge to the angry sea. Their immediate duty done, father and his two companions, almost dropping in their tracks, stumbled on to their quarters in the barren house of an old woman, long since widowed by these same waters.
They wanted nothing but sleep, uninterrupted, healing sleep. Yet, in less than three hours, father was rudely jolted back to consciousness. His first reaction was sheer rage. Who the devil had dared wake him? Raising himself on an elbow, he peered through the gloom, and thought he saw a figure in the doorway. But, though he called out in vitriolic tones, no one answered, and, as his heavy eyes cleared, he perceived that, except for his sleeping companions, the room was empty and still. He must have been dreaming, he thought, and, grumbling at his own foolishness, he drove back into the pillows and was instantly fast asleep. Not for long, however. This time it was not a sound that broke his rest, but the weird sensation of being shaken. Nor was there any mistaking what he saw. Three figures, clearly distinguished, yet oddly wavering, as though he were seeing them through swirls of fog, stood at his bedside. They stood there in the grey gloom, transfixing him with sombre eyes, their lips moving soundlessly. ‘By heaven, now I am dreaming!’ father exclaimed, and jumped to hear his own voice ringing through the quiet room.
‘Kver fjandin!’ His bedfellow started up crossly. ‘Why the shouting—have you gone crazy?’
‘Perhaps I have, Nonni,’ father answered sheepishly. ‘Something like it. Thought I was seeing things.’
‘Hell!’ Nonni yanked the blankets over his head. ‘See away, but for the Lord’s sake shut up!’
That ended the queer disturbance, and the young men slept until late in the morning, when their kind old housekeeper brought a tray with steaming coffee and flat bread.
‘Praise God you’ve had your rest, I see,’ she greeted them mournfully. ‘Not but what you needed it, poor lads.’
‘Now, don’t tell us you had the toothache again,’ Nonni sympathized, but father seemed to know what she wanted to say, and frowned at the thought.
‘No, not the toothache—a body could stand that better. Nightmare, that’s what it was. Me that’s used to the sea all my life dreaming three foreigners dripping brine and looking sad as the last judgement. Queer, I call it, and no good omen.’
‘Poor old girl,’ Nonni muttered, when she had shuffled out. ‘Those beastly sights are getting too much for her.’
‘Suppose it wasn’t a nightmare!’ father said. ‘Suppose I should tell you I saw the three myself?’
‘Bosh! Imagination. That’s your ailment, Lars.’
Perhaps. But father decided to comb the beach once more. Dream or a dead man’s desire to communicate by some power of the mind not yet understood—whichever it was, there might be some reason for it. And reason there seemed to be, for that morning father found the three bodies almost buried in a sandbar a mile or so up the shore. The outgoing tide would have swept them down to an unmarked grave. That, mayhap, was what they feared. There was nothing by way of identification on the bodies, but all three wore scapularies eloquent of their religious faith. There was no Catholic priest in the vicinity, but father had them buried in the tiny churchyard, a white cross marking the lonely resting-place.
It was after a sojourn in the north that father once again broke a long, wearisome ride at the Deanery. He had no memory of the little girl who, seven years before, announced his first visit and listened to his gay narratives in shy fascination. But I think she did, and that flattering hint of memory must have added to her charm. She was a dainty little person, barely five feet tall, with marvellous hair, a flawless complexion, and humorous eyes. And she had the fascinating manner of a very young girl playing at decorum while her thoughts danced in a saraband of secret fun.
They seem to have been fated to meet at a most impressionable moment. To the man who had followed a dozen whims in the effort to forget a disagreeable interlude, she was a delightful, irresistible discovery. To her, he was the reincarnation of a dream—the poor young man with whom she had sympathized so deeply on that former visit. Persecution had crowned him with peculiar charm. And here he was, whimsical as ever, and with the added attraction of a reputation that set people bickering for and against him. He was charming, yes, but irresponsible. His beguiling manner was apt to make one forget that he had abjured the staid conventions and even repudiated sacred dogma! He was a pleasant companion, but not the sort of man an innocent girl should marry!
Sensible argument, however, as usual, was quite unavailing. That fateful streak of stubbornness, characteristic of the breed, sharpened under pressure into an unshakable devotion. Every one was against him, so, of course, she loved him. In less than a year, they were married—if you could call it marriage when a man had another wife living, and only the law to sanction his behaviour!
Her people were never reconciled to the match. They could foresee only misery and unhappiness in the mating of individuals so utterly different in taste and training. Nevertheless, being what they were, she received a generous dowry. Father had rented a small farm, but the stock, sheep, household linen, and even mother’s riding horse, were the gifts of the dean.
They should have prospered. But ten years of haphazard living dedicated to the quest of some rare adventure had unfitted father for a sudden plunge into fleckless domesticity. Moreover, it was soon apparent that those two, who had chosen each other for better or worse, despite bitter opposition, were emotionally unsuited, and apt to clash on any number of inconsequential, yet provocative opinions. Temperamentally, they were poles apart. He was impetuous, warm-hearted, and, like every romanticist, superficial in his emotions: quick to forget both pleasure and pain. On the other hand, she was deeply reserved, somewhat cold in deportment, and, although far too sensible for neurotic brooding, seldom forgot either an injury or a kindness. Father, whose feelings were coloured by the passing moment, found it easy to express himself; whereas mother, whose sentiments were fixed, was always helplessly inarticulate where her innermost sensibilities were concerned. She had the keenest wit, in latter years often devastatingly caustic, but in those early years of growing disillusionment I think she must have suffered mental agonies for which she found no words, and pride drove deeper and deeper into her heart.
From the very beginning everything went amiss. It seems that father either could not, or would not, shake off his former companions. They descended in droves upon the little household, and, however ably they may have settled the seething political questions of the hour, they contributed nothing towards the stability of the farm. The hay might be blowing away in a windstorm, and a dozen sheep need shearing, but a girl-wife could hardly interpolate such commonplaces into floods of glowing eloquence, both patriotic and transcendental! Nor was there any use attempting to stay the crusading company when the spirit moved them to spread their liberal gospel far and wide. Like grandfather before him, father evidently expected the farm to prosper without much help from himself.
That he should have expected an inexperienced girl of eighteen to shoulder all responsibility is scarcely flattering to his judgement, and yet it seems that she might have managed rather well if she had not faced more trying obstacles. To begin with, those trips about the country were costly in more ways than one—and, of course, debts incurred by gentlemen were ‘debts of honour,’ which must be paid, whatever the state of the family budget. Many a fat ewe was laid on the altar of this delicate honour. And, finally, in addition to financial problems and the hundred and one mishaps incidental to farming, the young wife had her own predestined handicap to contend with. Before her nineteenth year she had nearly lost her life in one of those brutal struggles which even yet are calmly accepted as the divinely ordained lot of women. After three days of unspeakable agonies the blessed reward was twins—still-born—and a fuller realization of the handicap of her sex.
Few sentimentalists measure up to their fine phrases in a distressing crisis. Father seems to have evaded the disagreeable by protracted jaunts over the country. I have a suspicion that he received sympathy with fine grace on these occasions, and responded with charming delicacy. None of which was much comfort for his wife, left alone to face disillusionment and increasing financial worries.
The next few years were anything but enheartening. If father had any talent for farming, he failed to show it. Any bargain he drove was sure to prove disastrous, and one time, in a fit of jollity, he gambled away the better part of the flock of sheep which was their mainstay. Well, one had to lose sometime, he reasoned cheerfully. To-morrow would be different. But to-morrow was never different. For some reason he simply could not settle down to the sober monotony of serious existence. That so many people had hungrily fixed on every caprice from the beginning, and predicted inevitable failure, may have had much to do with it. And I sometimes think that a weaker woman might have managed better than my mother. Like many another strong character, she made the mistake of assuming with embittered patience more and more responsibility. A little guileful flattery and coy appeal to the ever-susceptible gallant in father might have brought astonishing results. If she only could have understood that the poetic temperament requires the camouflage of romanticism to render even the most obvious duties palatable, life might have been less barren for both of them. But that was too much to expect of a young woman, forthright rather than analytical by nature, who, nurtured as she was in the sterner principles, now found herself plunged into an existence that taxed all her strength and ability. Theories and speculations were all very fine—she had listened to them spellbound those first few months of married life—but they did not pay land dues, or add one krona to the budget.
With determination and tireless energy she kept the little establishment off the rocks, working from dawn till dark, whatever the state of her health, her only vacations those enforced rest periods when another blessed event called a halt to the never-ending work at hand. Father, meanwhile, continued flirting with fate.
It was on one of those wasteful trips through the country that he met an immigration agent who was enthusiastically selling Canada to the Icelanders. Marvellous reports were detailed of the immigrants in that matchless country. Already most of them were on the high road to fortune.
‘Think of it!’ said the gentleman. ‘Over there, any able-bodied man can instantly find lucrative employment in the city, or, better still, take advantage of the generous homesteading grant, which makes him the owner of a tract of land of such fertility as is undreamed of in barren Iceland. As to the other avenues of wealth—well!’ Here the agent laughed significantly. He really didn’t dare enlarge upon the possibilities open to trappers, hunters, fishermen, and freighters, for no one would believe him.
Unfortunately for many, they did believe him. They believed him with eagerness born of long suffering. The country was entering upon a slow period of arduous adjustment, which, to be thoroughly understood, requires more explanation that seems pertinent to introduce here. However, passing mention must be made of the iniquitous trade monopolies, which, operating as they did over a period of three hundred and eighty years, had almost reduced the country to economic slavery. It began with the Hanseatic League, to which company of German merchant princes the Danish crown sold the Icelandic fishing trade for two hundred and forty years. Their policy of absolute control and unabating greed rapidly reduced the native fisherman to abject poverty. He could neither buy nor sell through any other agency, and the slightest deflection brought swift and instant punishment. Once in the bad books of a tyrannical factor, and a man never knew what the day had in store. He might be blacklisted in the fishing fleet, or his catch discounted as unfit for foreign shipment. Yet he dared not dispose of it on home soil, nor steal a bite for himself or his children.
The Hanseatic League, aided and abetted by miserable agents, left a bitter memory behind it, yet its policies were angelic as compared with those of the Harkraemer Syndicate, which followed and bled the country for one hundred and forty years.
This infamous house added secret settlement and intimidation of the vilest sort to the sufficiently unsavoury practices of its predecessor. As before, the prices were fixed for the Icelanders, but, whereas the Hanseatics had at least maintained a pirate’s rough justice, the Harkraemer agents were adept in dishonesty. Not content to estimate every catch at the lowest possible value, they resorted to crooked balances, and each succeeding season they raised the costs of outfitting the fleets and the prices of commodities required by the people. For instance, in 1702 a barrel of flour sold at two rigsdaler—by 1800 it had risen to ten. Yet a skipspund of fish (160 kilograms), for which the Icelander might have received from thirty to forty dollars in other markets, had to be sold to the Danish syndicate for seven dollars. But even this did not satisfy the greed of these ‘princes.’ They began importing rotten food and wormy flour!
It is a moot question whether the Icelanders, who, first of northern races, instituted a republic and a democratic parliament, could have been reduced to such servile straits if nature had not aligned herself with their aggressors.
Ravages from volcanic disturbances defy adequate description. To begin with, there are 107 volcanoes in a country which is only one-fifth larger than Ireland. Since historic times twenty-five vents have caused almost inestimable damage, while countless others, still extant, have been fitfully active. Lava streams from these various sources cover an area of 4,650 square miles.
Odadahraun (Lava of Evil Deeds) on the tableland of Skapta Jökull, two to four thousand feet above sea-level, covers thirteen hundred square miles, and represents the accretion of countless eruptions from twenty vents whose activity antedates historic record. As an indication of the fearful effect of such eruptions over a period of centuries I shall mention three recorded instances.
On the 5th of April 1766 the southern countryside was plunged into terror. From the summit of Mount Hekla a huge pillar of black sand was seen slowly ascending the heavens, to the hideous accompaniment of subterranean thunders. Then a coronet of flame encircled the crater, giving the mountain an unholy air of satanic grandeur. The next instant, masses of red rock, pumice, and magnetic stones were hurled up from the inferno in such continuous showers as to resemble a swarm of bees clustering over the crater. The stones were flung to incredible distances; one boulder, six feet in circumference, was pitched twenty miles, another, of magnetic stone, for fifteen miles. The air was so darkened that one hundred and fifty miles away it was impossible to distinguish white from black at a little distance. On the 9th of April the lava began to flow, and ran for five miles in a southwesterly direction, bringing death and destruction to all before it.
Yet this was as nothing compared with what the country had suffered from former eruptions of the historic mountain, or to that which was in store for the people from an unsuspected quarter. From the confines of Skapta Jökull, solitary monarch of an impenetrable desert comprising four hundred square miles, cradled among icefields, descended the most spectacular visitation ever known to that ill-fated land. Toward the end of May 1783, following a winter and spring of exceptionally fine weather, a light bluish fog began to float along the wastes of Skapta, and was followed early in June by great tremors of the earth. On the eighth of the month immense pillars of smoke gathered over the hill country to the north, and, coming down against the wind in a southerly direction, enveloped the whole district of Sida in darkness.
A whirlwind of ashes swept over the country, and on the tenth innumerable fire-spouts were seen leaping and flaring amid the icy hollows of the mountain, while the River Skapta, one of the largest of the island, having rolled down to the plain in a vast volume of fetid waters mixed with sand, suddenly disappeared. Two days later a stream of lava, issuing from sources no one has been able to penetrate, came sliding down the bed of the dried-up river, and, though the channel was six hundred feet deep and two hundred feet wide, the glowing deluge quickly overflowed its banks, crossed the fertile low country of Medalland, ripping the turf up before it like a tablecloth, and poured into a great lake, whose waters rose, hissing and steaming, into the air. Within a few days the basin of the lake itself was filled, and the unexhausted torrent again commenced its march, in one direction overflowing some ancient lava beds, and in the other re-entering the channel of Skapta, and leaping down the lofty, cataracts of Stapafosse. Nor was this all. Another lava flood was working similar havoc on the plains of Hvervis Fljot, rushing through the country with even greater velocity. The historian to whom I am indebted for the above colourful, yet authentic, record, goes on to estimate the losses in livestock in this one eruption. They are as follows: 11,500 cattle, 2,800 horses, 190,000 sheep, which in itself represents almost an lnquisitorian death sentence to a people whose economic resources were so wickedly exploited. In actual figures, the ensuing famine carried off 9,500 human lives, and left thousands more with permanently impaired health.
In this day and age we are accustomed to relief agencies that rush in with help of every kind to any people similarly afflicted. It is, therefore, difficult to visualize a state of conscience which left the so-called protectors of the Icelanders not only indifferent to their frightful misery, but which actually spurred them to further aggrandizement. Yet such is the truth. With all the unction of medieval Christianitiy, the Harkraemer Company increased its trade demands under the cloak of beneficent helpfulness. The destitute had only to sell themselves, body and soul, for the privilege of keeping alive!
Another vital factor enters into the sinister picture. Such violent eruptions are not only destructive on land, but, through furious subterranean action, affect the tides, thereby killing the spawn and driving off the shoals of fish. Consequently, the one remaining livelihood of the helpless people was seriously disrupted, and their unscrupulous masters given a plausible excuse for further extortion.
There were other sources of misery. Church and State, scarcely less avaricious than the traders, had long since cunningly usurped most of the productive lands. To be exact, the elected saviours of the poor now claimed over two thousand tax-free estates, while the total of private holdings was no more than that number, many of which were little more than strips of herbage in the midst of lava wastes. But let no one imagine that mercy was shown the deluded mortal who presumed to set the needs of his stomach above the royal tax, or the tithes to the diocese! Such worldly consideration died with the poor laws of the ancient heathen republic.
The seventeenth century was by all accounts the darkest in Iceland’s tragic history. It is neither strange nor remarkable, therefore, that the Harkraemer Syndicate should have looked upon this fresh catastrophe as a divine act predicated to their favour—that now, at last, the rebellious Norse spirit must subside for ever. They were mistaken. They had forgotten, or perhaps had never known, that long before a paradoxical code of ethics had been forced upon the Icelanders they had been effectively converted to an imperishable belief in the dignity of the human spirit. As Norsemen, they had so loved liberty that rather than accede to the demands of a king whose policy of beneficent dictatorship offended their ancient rights, they chose exile on a barren island at the world’s end. Centuries of mishap and the corrosive sentimentality of a negative faith had starved the ancient fires, but now, out of the ashes of deepest despair, a thousand tongues leaped to life once more. Wherever two or three gathered together, the gospel of liberty sounded. Desperate young men, defying all sorts of degrading punishments—public whippings, imprisonment, exile—flashed up and down the country, stirring the hearts of the people.
Yet these political firebrands might have failed in their monumental task if their message had not been caught up and impregnated by the immortal ideology of the national poets. Without the magic of impassioned poetry to fix and hold the public mind to the vision of a liberated Iceland, the inertia of woeful poverty would certainly have defeated those rebel hopes.
But, thanks to those inspired singers, the quickened spirit of liberty was never again to be quelled, howsoever the heroic agitators might suffer. Penalties and punishments were so much added fuel to the fire. Individuals might be silenced and destroyed, a dozen others leaped into the breach. The fierce old Viking soul had found a tongue once more to raise such a storm that, at long last, even the Royal Ear was disturbed, the August Conscience troubled. As a result, the Crown abolished the Harkraemer charter in 1850, thereby ending all trade monopoly. That memorable date marks the beginning of an amazing struggle for rehabilitation by the Icelandic people—a struggle fraught with every imaginable handicap, to the complete vindication of the tenacious Viking spirit. In 1904 Home Rule was established, and in 1918, Iceland became an independent nation.
This sketchy reference to the historic past is not so extraneous to my story as it appears. Economic pressure, and nothing else, was responsible for the only group emigration of Icelanders to Canada. In 1875 occurred the last of those major eruptions which I have chosen out of many to illustrate the unpredictable disasters that hounded the little nation. On this occasion it was Askja, a relatively insignificant volcano, that erupted, and yet such was its violence that a rain of ashes fell for eleven hours and forty minutes on the west coast of Norway. Fifteen hours later the city of Stockholm, Sweden, was plunged into semidarkness by the onrushing clouds.
It was this fresh catastrophe that, in aftermath, so weakened the resources of the people that word of their suffering reached Lord Dufferin, one-time Governor-General of Canada. It was he, who, with the best of intentions, first drew attention to the Icelanders as possible settlers for Canada. Lord Dufferin had visited Iceland, and, as his Letters From High Latitudes tend to show, had found the people interesting and admirable. It was his hope that in Canada the qualities he had marked and admired might take root and contribute to the cultural life of the dominion.
