chapter xxiii
., though in common use in Norway, is not Norwegian; it belongs to the ancient church, and is said to be as old as the days of Ambrose and Augustine.
The legends are collected from all manner of sources: many of them from Tom and Torkel, some from the Eddas and Sagas, some from Malet and Knightley; they are all, however, legitimate Scandinavian legends, believed implicitly by some one or other.
One word about the voyage out. It signifies little to the public when and where those incidents really happened—whether in the North Sea, or in the Bay of Biscay, or in the Mediterranean; but it signifies to them a great deal, to know that these things actually did happen once, and may happen again at any time.
The main incidents adapted to that fictitious voyage are strictly and literally true. A large steamer was upon one occasion in the precise situation ascribed to the _Walrus_,—and—in the absence of its skipper, who for the time had mysteriously disappeared—was saved by the promptness of one of the passengers, precisely as is described in the narrative. And it is also true that the same vessel, after a run of not more than five hundred miles, did find herself fifty miles out of her course. The compasses, no doubt, being in fault, as they always are on such occasions—poor things!
These are important matters for the public to be made acquainted with; for the public do very frequently go down to the sea in steamers, and therefore any individual reader may at any time find himself in the very same situation.
The author has enlarged upon this, in the faint hope of drawing attention to these matters. He would suggest that some sort of superintendence would not be altogether superfluous, and that it is not entirely right that the lives of two or three hundred men on the deep sea should be entrusted to a skipper not competent to navigate a river, nor be committed to a vessel so parsimoniously found as to be unable to encounter casualties which might happen any day in a voyage to Ramsgate.
On a subject so important as this, the author thinks it his duty to state that these incidents, extraordinary as they may appear, are in no way fictitious; that they did happen under his own eye; and that the mate, the only real sailor on board, did request of him, after the escape, a certificate that he, at least, had done his duty. If that man should be still alive, he possesses a most unique document, a certificate of seamanship, signed by a clergyman of the United Church of England and Ireland.
The skipper’s name the author does not think it necessary to record. He is not likely to be employed again; for he is one of those who have since immortalised themselves in the public prints, by losing his vessel—a circumstance which, it will readily be believed, did not excite any very great feelings of surprise in the mind of the author.
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