With these hints, then, at our initial ignorance of what lay beyond, let me pass on to Vardö, which was the real starting-point of both our plans and our journey. The _Windward_ made an easy voyage of it on the whole up to there, and although she carried away her main-topsail yard, and smashed the reefing spar below it in two places, that was looked upon as rather a slice of luck, as it might well have been disastrous if such an accident had happened later, when every ounce of steam and every inch of canvas might be wanted in the fierce wrestle with the Polar ice. In Vardö it might be repaired.
Inside Vardö harbour walls, then, to a mooring we came, and the smells of the place closed round us and took possession. Bobbling about on the harbour swell around us were some two hundred vessels of strange Northern rig, and almost all connected with the trade in fish. There is no agriculture in this town perched on the northern outskirts of the continent; there are no trees to make a timber business; there are no metals or fuels to dig from the earth; there are no inducements to weave or carry on any of the manufactures of a more gentle clime. The sea is the only field which yields the Vardö man a harvest, and from the sea he reaps it with unremitting industry. Finns, Russians, Norwegians, Samoyedes, Lapps, all join in the work and bring their catch, in clumsy yots, and square-sailed viking boats, and the other weird unhandy craft of the North, in past the concrete wall of Vardö harbour, and run alongside the smelling warehouses which are built on piles at the water-side, and send it ashore all slimy and glistening, and then go off to dangle bait in the chill inhospitable seas for more.
The men of the town, and the women, gut the fish, and leave the entrails to rot in the streets, or under the wharfs, or in the harbour water; and then the carcasses are carried to the outskirts of the town, and hung on endless racks of wood to shrivel, and dry, and scent the air as thoroughly as the rains of the climate will permit. At the corner posts hang posies of cods' heads to serve as fodder for the cows and goats during the winter, and these too help to amplify the stink. And from the mainland, beyond the fort, when the breezes blow Vardö-wards, there drift across more forceful stinks from the factory where they flense the Finner whales, and try down the blubber into oil, and cut up the pink beef for canned meats and fodder for the Arctic cow.