Hapsal to Heltermaa (Island of Dagö)

September 11th. Barometer 29.9. The wind was still against us this morning, shifting between W. and S.W., but a whole day lying at anchor had made us determined to move, if only to get through the difficult bit between the Rukeraga and Odroraga reefs, or, if we should fail to do that, at least to get to anchorage at Estholm, ready to slip through the moment the wind should change. We got our anchor at 7:30 and, slowly tacking, passed by the pierhead near enough to learn that the fishermen thereon, who had come before the dawn, had caught two little silver fish between them. Then we began with infinite labour to retrace, as far as the black-and-white buoy where the channel from Nukke and Worms joins that from the S., the course which we had run so merrily with the wind free two days before.

The sun was behind the Hapsal beacons, and in the glare over the water they were quite invisible, so we just felt our way out, tacking from spar-buoy to spar-buoy, the Ancient in the bows singing out when he saw the bottom coming up to meet us. The Cook was busy with the breakfast, two Primuses going at once, steam from the porridge coming up the companionway together with the rich dark smell of frying bacon. At nine we reached the first of the main buoys and at ten minutes past ten we were at the third, round which the channel turns to the S. Here we brought Racundra to the wind and hove to while we hauled the dinghy on board. We then tacked on southwards. It was a wearisome business, but we were all keen to go on, for with the wind backing to the S.W. we had a good hope of being able to point straight through the narrow alleyway of buoys between the reefs. We went as close as we dared to the Odroraga and saw its wicked line just below the surface of the water, and at one point a little strip of it, pale red above the wavelets, with seabirds huddled together upon it. We stood away then for Estholm, where are the beginnings and the ruins of a fine harbour, warehouses and quays alike broken by the war, wrecks of half-sunk pontoons lifting desperately into the air and a forlorn crane. A little cutter was at anchor close by the piers. We had watched her through the glasses, picking her way in with lowered foresail and dropped peak. Away to the E., with the wind behind her, a fine schooner was coming easily through the passage by the Rukeraga beacon. We went about and sailed close-hauled to meet her.

The beacon is fixed on the northern end of a low strip of rock, just above the level of the water. The Baltic Pilot, by the way, like the German chart, gives a most inaccurate picture of it, suggesting a low pyramid supporting a square. It may have been so once upon a time. Now it is a tall openwork obelisk, visible from a great distance, and easily recognizable from a few miles away because of the big conical stones which lie near it. Just N. of it and running E. and W. is a narrow lane of four pairs of spar-buoys. The channel between them is not a stone’s-throw across, and, as there are rocks and stone shallows just outside the line of the buoys on either side, beating through it is impossible.

We met the schooner, envying her speed and favourable wind, and reaching the first pair of buoys, found we could just point through the channel. We passed the first three pairs of buoys with no difficulty, and were just rejoicing in having got through a ticklish bit of sailing when I noticed that, though we were heading by compass as before, the wind had fallen a little, and the last pair of buoys were slipping slowly southwards. I brought Racundra’s head a fraction up. It made no difference. We were already caught in the current, which, sweeping up along the far side of the reefs, touched us here, whereas it had been imperceptible during the first three-quarters of the passage. There was nothing to be done. There was neither time nor room to beat. We were already close upon the last pan of buoys, and we were on the wrong side of the northern one. I shouted forward and the Ancient stood by with the anchor as a last resource, while we stood on, our hearts in our mouths. The buoy was abeam of us and visibly slipping away. It was on our quarter. It was astern. There came a puff of wind and Racundra answered it at once, and a moment later the Ancient looked happily over his shoulder. “Deep water,” he called, and we knew that we were out in the Moon Sound proper, where big steamers find their way and where beacons are lit at night. Now we cared for nothing. I let Racundra fall a point off the wind and she brisked up like a horse after a feed of oats. The wind backed a little more and she pointed W. by S. and even W.S.W. That, however, was the best that she could do, and we were not yet far enough from the reefs to put her about on the other tack. So we held on, watching the southern shore of Worms and recognizing far before us the low coast of Dagö Island and Pihalep church spire, that is a good guide from afar to the pleasant little harbour of Heltermaa.

Then the wind strengthened and fell away, strengthened and fell away from the S.W., the short unpleasing sea of the Moon Sound got up, and the admirable Racundra began to show us that we had been wrong in boasting that she did not roll. She rolled abominably. The main boom swung from side to side with mighty bangs, until I lashed it to the lee backstay tackle. The mizzen boom swung on unheeded. Things were very unpleasant, and, as we looked back to the tall Rukeraga beacon, seeming now as if it floated in the water, it was clear enough that we were making very little southing. If that was so in this part of the Sound, if the current was so strong here, it would be very much worse in the narrows to the S., and, anxious as we were to get along, we had no sort of wish to spend the night in vainly beating to and fro against wind and current together. Just then the two little steamers from Hapsal, the Endla and the Hiumaa, rivals for the exiguous Dagö trade, passed us bound cheerfully for Heltermaa. I had been in Heltermaa before, and knew it for a picturesque place, one of the smallest good harbours in the world. There was that church on the horizon, a fine mark to steer by; and, after all, we reasoned, if the wind should change we should be able to consider the visit to Heltermaa merely as a longer tack. We could lose nothing by going there. So we made up our minds to hold on until either the wind should change or we should come to Heltermaa. The wind did not change, so we came to Heltermaa just before sunset. At 6:15 we warped in round Endla’s stern, nearly carrying away her flagstaff as we did so, owing to the energy with which we were helped by the men of Heltermaa, and found ourselves in very snug quarters for the night.

There was room in Heltermaa harbour for the tiny Hiumaa, one open fishing-boat, a dinghy, Racundra, the Endla and a schooner of small size. But Endla was tied up outside the harbour proper, across the end of the pierhead, and the schooner was at anchor. The fishing-boat, Racundra and Hiumaa filled all available quay berths. A young man in uniform, who was, I think, coastguard, soldier and harbourmaster, came on board and enthusiastically pencilled the date of Racundra’s arrival on her papers. Then, as it looked like rain, we put the covers on the sails; and, while the Cook and the Ancient began to make supper, I set out with a milk-can, an egg-basket and a string bag to do some provisioning.

A hundred yards or so from the harbour is a so-called inn, that was once a Russian posting-station where you could hire horses, at so many kopecks per mile per horse, to take you across the island. It is still called an inn, and people do sleep on sacks of straw there, if they are on their way to Hapsal and the Sound is too rough for the little steamer. Its landlord, who has or had some official connection with the harbour, talks only Estonian, nor does his wife talk any other language. My dealings with them were not easy. I tried English. I tried Russian. These failing, I took a long breath and asked them for milk in Estonian.

“Piima,” I said, and waved my milk-can.

“Ei ole piima,” they replied in chorus.

All right. If they had no milk I would try for eggs.

“Muna,” I said, and the good woman scuttled off as if she were a hen herself and came back with a lot of very little eggs.

“Kui palio maksap?” said I.

“Kumme munat (ten eggs),” said the woman, counting on her fingers. “Nelli kument mark.”

“Forty marks.” I had only a note for a hundred, and they had no change or very little, so they gave me ten marks back and a number of new white loaves.

That was all they could do, but that was not enough. They pointed up the road towards the forest, and I went to the next house, which turned out to be the schoolhouse. I found a young woman in a pink cotton dress sitting on the back of a desk. She was the schoolmistress and this an idle hour. I tried English, and she turned the colour of a ripe apple.

“I know English,” she said, and promptly, in her embarrassment, forgot all she knew.

I dare say she reads Shakespeare. I think it highly likely that she teaches English. She understood perfectly when I explained that I wanted milk; but when she tried to answer, it was as if someone held her tongue by the roots and muffled her brain. By now, I am sure, she has thought out the speech she should have made. At the time she was struck dumb, and, coming to the doorstep, could only point up the road into the forest, turn redder and redder, so that her pink cotton dress looked almost white, and stammer, “House, house, house, house⁠ ⁠…” and then, with a flash of memory, “Yellow house.” So I thanked her and she fled away back into her schoolroom, while I went on towards the trees, looking for a yellow house.

I found the yellow house; but the woman therein, who talked Estonian to me, exhausted herself in explaining that they had only one cow and were ten in family. She directed me to another house where she said they were few in family but had two cows. I found that house; but the woman in it said that I could have milk only when the cows should come home, and that they were not expected home before eight o’clock. However, she directed me to another house.

Here I found a little elderly woman with a face wrinkled all over, the most charming wrinkles, so that when she smiled every line in her face took part in the smile; and she, while explaining that she had no milk, would not let me go, but held me firmly by my jersey, and called for her husband to come out and look. To me she said, “We have no milk,” but to him, “Here is an Englishman,” and held me firmly till he came, a long, thin, smiling fellow who somehow reminded me of John Masefield. I accordingly felt friendly towards him, and perhaps I reminded him of someone, for he seemed to feel friendship for me, and took me by the arm and led me to a stake hedge, where he pulled out a stake to let me through, and said, “Over there is a house with a little white barn, and there lives a Russian man, and he has good cows, and will certainly give you milk.”

So I wandered on into the forest and came to a house with a little pigsty beside it with a glass window, the only pigsty with a glass window that I can remember to have seen. And beyond that, sure enough, was a house, a log cabin, with a tiny barn, and the barn was whitewashed. And here I spoke to the woman of that house in Russian; but she did not understand me, and called to her husband, who came from the potato-bed, wearing his shirt outside his trousers in the Russian fashion.

With him, of course, I had a good talk and great difficulty in coming to business. He told me he had come here as a soldier in the Russian service thirty years ago, and had married a wife and lived here ever since. “Yet, if I were to ask some of them from our village, by Poltava, to help me till this ground, they would laugh at me, for they would say there was nothing to be got out of it, and indeed in Poltava is the black earth and here is nothing but stone; but now I am fifty years old and a little more, and I am not too well, and I do not suppose I shall see Russia again.” Then he told me he had sold all his milk for the Endla; but I let that pass, and he told me of how he had been a policeman in Hapsal⁠—“a summer policeman,” he explained, for in winter, it seems, there are no visitors, and policemen are not necessary⁠—and how a man wearing a Cossack bourka, or long cloak, and talking very good Russian had told him that he had played cards with the Emperor. “It was clear enough that he was a great man.” Then I put in another word about the milk, and he said something to his wife about milk for the Endla, and she laughed, and I guessed that the people of the Endla were going to get less perfect milk than they had hoped, for she took my milk-can and went off, while he told me there had been great rains, so that the water stood between the potato rows and the potatoes had rotted, and went on to ask if all was well with England. Then he noticed the eggs that I had bought at the inn. “Those are very little eggs,” said he, and asked me what I had had to pay for them. I asked him if he had any, as we needed more for our ship, and he sent a little girl who brought ten beauties, twice the size of those already in my basket. Then the woman came back with my milk-can full of new milk warm from the cow, and he asked how he should know my little ship, so that his wife could bring me more milk in the morning, if we had not sailed. Then, when I paid for the eggs and the milk, he asked me if there was nothing else I wanted that he could give me, and I could think of nothing; but he gave me the best of his turnips and a lot of fresh beans, and with that he walked with me to an opening in the trees, whence we could see the harbour and Racundra’s two masts. “If those masts are there in the morning,” said he, “my wife shall bring you some more milk.”

And so we parted, thanking each other, like old friends, and I hurried back by a quick way he showed me across country and came to the ship, and found that those hungry ones had finished supper and that my supper was cold, but I ate it with great pleasure, full of the warmth of this abundance of human intercourse.