After many vicissitudes this tar arrives at the end of its land journey--but if that be on the frontier of Russia, it may still have two hundred and fifty miles of river, lake, and rapid to traverse before it reaches _Uleåborg_, where it is transhipped to England, America, and Germany.
It had been arranged that we were to descend the wonderful rapids from _Kajana_ to _Uleåborg_, a day and a half's journey; but we wanted to taste something of the ascent as well,--there is no _down_ without an _up_, and we thought we should like to try both. The tar-boats that go down the _Oulunjoki_ river, heavily laden with their wares, take two or three days, and have to come up again empty; this is the heaviest and most tiring part of the whole performance to the boatmen, and cannot be accomplished under two or three weeks. They sometimes bring back five hundred or six hundred pounds of salt or flour, for although they take down twenty-five or thirty times as much as this in weight, they cannot manage more on the return journey, when, to lighten the boat as much as possible, they even take off the top planks or bulwarks and leave them behind at _Uleåborg_, putting new bulwarks a foot broad made of half-inch plank before the next downward voyage.
A tar-boat is a very peculiar craft, and, when one sees it for the first time, it seems impossible that anything so fragile can travel over two hundred miles by river, rapid, lake, and cataract. The boats are generally from thirty-five to forty-five feet long, but never more than four feet wide, or they could not be steered between the rocks of the swirling cataracts. They are pointed at both ends like a gondola, but it is not the narrowness and length that strike terror into the heart of a stranger, but rather the thinness of the wood of which they are built. The boat is made of the planks of well-grown trees, which planks, though over a foot wide, are sawn down to three-quarters of an inch thick, so that in the strongest part only three-quarters of an inch divides passengers and crew from the water, that water being full of rocks and swirling whirlpools. Four planks a foot wide and three-quarters of an inch thick, as a rule, make the sides of a tar-boat, not nailed, be it understood, but merely _tied_ together with pieces of thin birch twig! Holes are bored, the birch threaded through, securely fastened, and then, to make the whole thing water-tight, the seams are well caulked with tar. This simple tying process gives the craft great flexibility, and if she graze a rock, or be buffeted by an extra heavy wave, she bends instead of breaking.