Baltic Port to Spithamn

September 7th. Barometer 30.25. Wind at dawn S.W., slight. We sailed at 7 a.m. without incident, except that in pushing our way out along the eastern quay the sharp point of our long boathook (a Dvina lumberman’s pole with a really sharp spike on the end, used for handling floating logs) stuck fast in the wooden piles and the pole remained quivering there, like the Trojan’s spear in the wooden sides of that barrack of a horse, until it was extracted by a good fellow who climbed down for it and brought it round to the narrow harbour mouth and gave it back to us as we rounded the pierhead. We then had a fair wind out of the bight into which we had so laboriously tacked the night before last. It was a fair wind, but a very light one. It shifted to the S., and at 8:20 we were at the mouth of the bay on a line between the point of East Roogö and Pakerort.

We bore up to pass as near as might be West Roogö Point, where the English charts are right in marking “a conspicuous tree.” The tree is a very little one, but it is the only one on that desolate promontory; no, not quite the only one, for, as we came nearer, we saw that its successor was already being prepared. A little tree, exactly like the first, is growing close to it, so that when the old one dies or is blown away, another shall be conspicuous in its stead. The tree is dead; long live the tree!⁠—and the charts shall need no correction. Would that similar precautions had been taken in other places!

It was a glorious morning of brilliant sunshine, but the wind grew less and less, and what there was shifting against us. At 9:45 we were off West Roogö spar-buoy, close by the wind and heading W.S.W. and ½ W. At eleven we were still between West Roogö and Grasgrand, but were now on the starboard tack and heading S.W. and ½ W., the wind having shifted northerly. The rock of Grasgrund, which had been visible on our way eastwards, was now not alone, and a considerable island had appeared above water. A fishing-boat had tied up to this amphibious place and a couple of lads were sunning themselves on ground far out at sea which is almost always a foot or two under water. Far inshore, behind Roogö Island, we sighted a cutter which had probably spent the night by the little village of Wichterpal, now slowly working westwards like ourselves. We held her all day.

At noon the wind increased a little, coming from W.N.W. We set the mizzen staysail and tried to pretend to ourselves that we were moving quite fast. We were able to keep more or less on our course, and, as the afternoon wore on, Odensholm from being a row of spots on the horizon became a visible definite island, with a lighthouse at one end and a cutter’s mast at the other, near by a shed or two.

The barometer, however, was falling. We were bound for the Worms Nukke Channel, which is not lit, and we had no longer the smallest chance of getting there by daylight. Once round the point of Spithamn we should have a long way to go for shelter. Looking S. towards the land we saw that the cutter which had sailed abeam of us from the Roogö islands was far inshore, clearly making for the hither side of Spithamn, where a schooner was already at anchor. We made up our minds to trust to “local knowledge” and do the same. We altered our course, and having the wind free, stood straight in for the two ships, encouraged by seeing the cutter round up close by the schooner and lower her sails just as we put the helm up. We sailed in close by the rocky side of Spithamn and saw the six windmills (five according to the charts, but really six) on the little hill. Boats, loaded gunwale-deep in firewood, were coming off shore to the schooner, just as I had seen last year off the northern coast of Dagö, where also is no harbour. The schooners anchor off shore. The wood is carried into the water on little carts, then packed into boats, leaving just room for a couple of boys, who on reaching the ship throw the wood up log by log to the captain, his wife, his men and his children, who stow it in the hold. If the wind blows on shore, loading is interrupted and the schooners put to sea, returning when a change of wind brings smooth water.

As we slipped along towards them, the captain of the cutter gave us the use of his local knowledge in the nick of time by waving us eastward of a shallow patch which, in the failing light, we had not observed immediately on our bows. We were using the lead, but had no warning of it until the captain’s hail and wave, instantly obeyed, saved us by a few yards. When we had cleared the shoal he waved again, and five minutes afterwards we were at anchor beside the others. We were three⁠—the firewood-loading schooner, big and quite new, the elderly cutter, about twice our own size, and the little Racundra, shielded from the W. by Spithamn Point (Spint Head on English charts), more or less shielded from the E. by the distant islands of Roogö, but open to the N. and N.W., with nothing but the little island of Odensholm between us and the coast of Sweden, near two hundred miles away. Not a very good anchorage, but, as I reasoned, the schooner, being worse than ourselves in working to windward, would clear out in plenty of time to give us warning, and the skipper of the cutter would hardly be putting the covers on his sails and be getting ready to go ashore if he had expected anything very bad during the night.

We slung the dinghy overboard with a tackle, and the Cook and I went ashore to see what we could of Spithamn before it grew too dark. An elderly man in grey homespuns saw us coming and walked from his cottage just above high-water mark down to the shingle. He helped us to pull up the dinghy, and fastened the painter to a thwart of a boat of his own that was lying well out of reach of the waves. Then, having in this manner made us his guests, he spoke to us in German, in Swedish, in Estonian and in Russian, apologizing for not knowing more than a few words of English, and those words of the sea and unlikely for the moment to be of much use. He was very pleased to know so many languages, delighted that we could answer him a word or two in each of them, inquired politely in Swedish which language we preferred to talk, and finding that Russian came easiest to us went on with our talk in that. He was a Swede and his name was Anders Ringberg. He took the Cook into his charge and sold her milk, potatoes, and little very salt fish, which he swore had been caught the previous day and were hardly salt at all. For this gross error, however, he atoned by making her a present of some cranberries and giving me copies of two Swedish newspapers, issued specially for the Swedes of the Estonian islands, these relics of the old Swedish colonization; the Reval one a typical local newspaper, with its little scrap of gossip about Odensholm, about Runö, about Worms, about each one of the Swedish settlements, so that no one of its purchasers should fail to find in it something of peculiar interest to himself. It even recorded with proper solemnity the rare visits of yachts to the outlying islets. Anders Ringberg was very disappointed that we could not play the harmonium, for he had one in his house and had made sure at once that we, as educated people from far countries, would be able to do wonderful things with it. Hemp was growing in his garden, and he told us that the men of Spithamn not only build their own boats (they had built the big schooner that was lying beside Racundra), but spun and wove the hemp, making nets, ropes, fishing-lines, and very stout clothes for their seagoing.

I went for a walk up the little hill to see the windmills, of the same form as those on Roogö Island. From the hill I could see down through a gap in the pinewoods to the shore on the other side of the promontory, where in the trees another schooner was building. Here, so I learnt, there is better anchorage, but the way into it is extremely dangerous for those who do not know the rocks. There is, of course, no detailed chart of the place.

Coming down the hill again, I walked through the village of Spithamn, a village of stout log huts, with, as on Roogö, fine pigs walking about the narrow lanes, and everywhere fishing-nets drying. Some of the houses were rudely painted with ochre, but most were the natural colour of the weather-beaten wood, the ends of the logs dovetailed across each other at the corners. One small but caught my eye from a long way off with the word “York” upon it in big white letters. I came near to it and found that I was looking at the carved name-board of a ship built into the house. There was the green painted scroll-work, and in the middle of it, carved deeply from the wood, those big white letters on which, no doubt, many waves had beat before the ship that carried them went ashore and was broken up, to the profit of the natives, on the rocks beyond the point. An English ship, or may be an American, and she must have been wrecked here a long time ago, as many others have been wrecked, for not Anders Ringberg nor anyone else could tell me anything about her.

Down on the beach the men had stopped work for the night. The last of the boats which had been carrying firewood to the schooner came in and grounded. A wire rope was shackled to a ring on the waterline under her bows, and I lent a hand at winding her up over fir rollers by means of a primitive capstan deeply bedded in the beach. Two small men of Spithamn, aged about eight, I suppose, were early beginning their inevitable career, sailing against each other two beautiful models of their fathers’ broad-bowed schooners. They were wading in the water, and one of them brought his model ashore to show me. Every detail of the rigging was there, and the hull was built like the ships themselves, decked, with a hatch amidships, a small square, half-sunk deckhouse aft, the wheel behind that, the sails broad and not high, with large topsails, two jibs and a staysail.

The skipper of the cutter had made several trips to the shore and back with things he had brought in his ship. He was now unloading his little boat for the last time. He had brought ashore sacks of coal for the winter, much other gear, and a heavy, iron-bound ancient trunk. He told me of the harbourage there is in Odensholm, and said he always left his cutter there for the winter, when ice makes sailing impossible. “There, no matter what may be, the ice can never touch her.” He himself spends the winter ashore here in Spithamn. He asked if we were not the boat that had come to Reval during the gale of a fortnight before, said he had been sheltering in Reval at the time, and paid Racundra almost as many compliments as that stout little ship deserved. With these compliments warming my heart, as compliments to Racundra always do warm it, I made my way back along the shore to the dinghy, where the Cook had already arrived with her parcels. We rowed back through smooth water, for the wind had fallen altogether, so that I was glad we were not drifting about on the other side of the point; and after we had had supper and decided that Anders Ringberg ought not to have mistaken his fish for fish caught yesterday, we smoked in the cockpit and looked towards the village. It was nine o’clock. There was not a light to be seen. Everyone in the place had gone to bed. The blinking light on Roogö showed far away, and the light on Odensholm, and we could just see another behind the trees on the point warning the “Yorks” of these days not to come to provide name-boards for the Spithamn houses. Schooner and cutter were in perfect darkness, so Racundra ran her riding light up the forestay to serve alike for herself and her big sisters, and we turned in and slept.

After midnight I went on deck and found the wind easterly, the moon high, clouds overhead moving from the S., and the sea nearly calm.