Riga to Runö

By nine in the morning of the 21st, the wind had shifted to the west. There was sunshine and, in the river, the coasting schooners were getting under way. So we hoisted sails, learnt that our windlass was useless, got our anchor by hand, and made off out of the harbour for the mouth of the river. A heavy swell was coming in; there was still plenty of wind, and we were much annoyed to be held up by a hail from a man on the Customs House Quay at Dünamünde. We had thought that yesterday’s ceremony at Mühlgraben had left us definitely cleared, but it seemed that we had to hand over here the certificate I had got from the Riga Customs. The swell was so big that I was more than half afraid of smashing Racundra against the pier. The man explained by shouts what he wanted, and we sailed as near as I thought we safely could, wrapped the certificate in a rag, with a bit of chain as a makeweight, and threw it on the pier as we cavorted past. The man grabbed it, opened it, and waved his hand down the river. We were free.

Racundra switchbacked over the swell, taking only a drop or two of water over her nose as she dipped and then lifting easily enough, but taking fountains of water through her centreboard case, the top of which had been left uncaulked. That, however, we put right in a minute or two. And then, just as we cleared the moles, the wind suddenly fell away almost to nothing, while the swell remained and we rolled about so uncomfortably that only iron-fastened wills prevented the seasickness of the entire ship’s company. It was half-past eleven before we passed the first bell-buoy. Half an hour later the wind died altogether, and we wallowed in a dead calm, while the booms banged impatiently from side to side, and the two mechanical logs (a German and an American, both secondhand and quite useless) which we were testing one against the other, hung perpendicularly like plummets in the sea. We had a rather hesitating luncheon, and then, at 2 p.m., the wind, which had taken no notice of my efforts on the accordion, gave us another little puff, in response, I believe, to my rendering of “Spanish Ladies” on the whistle. For two hours Racundra pointed north, and when we threw matches overboard she left them undeniably astern. At four we were in another desperate calm. At 5:30 I bathed and swam about the ship, with Riga Lighthouse still in sight bearing south, and the second buoy, the “howling buoy,” ten miles out, bearing a little west of north. We had a few more slight puffs and then calm, then a few more puffs, and then, as the sun went down, a little land wind came out of the S.E. and carried us at 8:40 past the second buoy. We were now fairly at sea, and the wind holding, at 9:20 we boomed out a spare staysail as a spinnaker.

At ten o’clock the others turned in. For the first time not on paper and in dreams, I had the little ship alone in my hands in a night of velvet dark below and stars above, pushing steadily along into unknown waters. I was extremely happy. At midnight the wind swung round to the N.W., and for a moment I thought of calling up the Ancient to take the tiller while I shifted sails. Then I thought I might as well have a try by myself and call the others only if I could not help it. I lashed the tiller and handed the boomed staysail. Then with all the sheets in we were back again on our course, close-hauled now, and I was at the tiller listening anxiously to know if the others had heard my hurried running to and fro on deck. But if Racundra had been a sentient thing doing her best to help me, she could not have done more than she did. The whole operation had gone like clockwork, and the others had heard nothing, and did not know of the change in the wind or even of the wind’s increase, until 4:30 a.m., when the Ancient came on deck and wondered what I had done with Riga light, which had seemed close aboard when he had gone down to his bunk.

During the night the binnacle light blew out again and again and finally refused to be relit. I steered by the North Star, which I kept bobbing about between the maintop and the peak. Our compass had not been adjusted, and a number of bearings I had taken on our way out had made it pretty clear that we had a lot of easterly deviation. Theoretically our course should have carried us eight or ten miles east of Runö. Practically I was sure that we should pass it much nearer, but, as the Ancient had small belief in deviation and said the compass was “right enough,” I was prepared to try it out. After the Ancient came up and took the tiller I hung about the deck to see the dawn, which came up with fiery red splashes over a nickel sea. With the dawn the wind backed to the S.W., when we eased off the sheets, after which I went below and was instantly asleep.

At 7:30 I was waked by a feeling of excitement on board, and was told that Runö Island was in sight. I ran up on deck to see a low line of trees with a pale red lighthouse above them exactly over our bows. The easterliness of our compass was proved beyond a doubt, for even the Ancient could not suggest that we had been making leeway against the wind. But interest in this technical point was sunk in our delight at seeing this, the most romantic island in Northern Europe, at which we had so often looked on the chart that all summer had hung on the wall of my room. The spot on the chart, which long ago, sailing further north in Slug and in Kittiwake, we had so often promised ourselves to visit as soon as we should have a seaworthy ship, was becoming a reality before our eyes. I suppose most readers of this book have already lost the ecstatic joy of sighting land at sea. Yet, no. I do not believe that even for the oldest mariner that joy can ever fade. It is always new, always a miracle, never in the common ruck of absolutely predictable events. Islands especially stir the blood, and Runö, that lonely place, over fifty miles out from Riga and nearly as far from the Estonian coast, with its Swedish seal-hunters using words that in Sweden have become archaic, living in the twentieth century a life of medieval communism, a place at which a steamer calls but once a year, coming up out of the sea before me, sought and found (however incorrectly) by my own little ship, gave me moments of unforgettable delight. The sunlight strengthened. The dark line seen through the binoculars became visible forest. The pale red tower began faintly to resemble the very inaccurate drawing of it which, as a guide to mariners, is tucked away into the drab mainland of the English charts of the Baltic. Under the forest appeared white lines and splashes, which the Ancient said were breakers but the glass showed to be sand. Then, as we came nearer, we could see the deserted beach and the broken-down wooden pier not to be visited by any steamer until July next year. There is anchorage off that pier in westerly winds, but it is unsafe if the wind blows on shore. Just now the anchorage was protected by the southern end of the island, and we steered directly for the pierhead. I took the tiller while the Ancient worked the lead, and we sent silent thanks to the Baltabor for lending it. “Three fathom,” called the Ancient. “Two⁠ ⁠… Two and a half⁠ ⁠… Two⁠ ⁠… Two⁠ ⁠… Two and a half⁠ ⁠… One and a half⁠ ⁠…” Then down with the staysail, in with the sheets, round into the wind, and, as she began to go astern, “Let go.” The chain rattled slowly out and Racundra, pulling up to it, had found her first anchorage in foreign waters.

The wooden pier, which was in two pieces, the middle part of it having been washed away, was fifty or sixty yards from us. On the pierhead was a huge rusty anchor, a trophy from a wreck, or a keepsake from some vessel that had had to slip her cable because of some sudden change of wind and had not been able to come back and claim it before the islanders had fished it from the sea. Behind the pier lay sand-dunes, behind them enormous pines bigger than any I have seen even in the forests of Russia, and behind the trees the upper works of the lighthouse, an ugly structure of red iron tubes. The anchor and the lighthouse and the wrecked pier were the only things that spoke of man. The shore was deserted. There was not a human being to be seen. We sounded our foghorn, thinking that maybe they would send out a boat. Nothing happened, and, half doubting if after all we had found the proper anchorage, we unlashed the dinghy, turned it over, and with the spare staysail halyards lowered it into the sea. The Cook and I tumbled in and pulled ashore. The wind showed signs of changing, and we knew that if it veered farther to the south we should have to be off again without delay.

Our landing on Runö was like a page from Robinson Crusoe or a child’s dream of desert islands. We rowed in past the broken end of pier and, in shallow water, tied up to the rotting timbers of the part of it that ran out from the land. We climbed up and, stepping carefully over the crazy planking, came to the sandy shore. Hummocks of sand rose before us, but north and south of the strip of sand we could see rocks out in the water. And there, almost on the edge of this tideless sea, were those gigantic pine-trees, growing out of a thick mossy carpet rich with brown and scarlet mushrooms. On a pair of rough wheels made of solid wood without spokes rested one end of a felled tree roughly trimmed. But as we went in under those tremendous arches of the forest there was an uncanny absence of any human sound. The sand dunes hid the pier. The towering trees hid the non lighthouse. There was nothing but the green-carpeted forest, cloisters for giants, and that great trank on wheels exactly like those that must have been made by the first wheelwright in the history of our race. Man, should he appear, might be of any kind. Almost, we looked up in the treetops for pygmies with their poisoned arrows, and watched the trunks of the trees for the feathers of one of Fenimore Cooper’s Indian braves.

And then, slowly wandering towards us, knocking off the heads of the mushrooms with his stick, came man indeed, the Governor-General of the Island, a short, lame, elderly man in blue canvas clothes and a seaman’s cap, the keeper of the lighthouse, to whom the men of Runö come for a casting vote in all debates. He has no official authority; no laws confer power on him or limit it; but⁠ ⁠… he is the Keeper of the Light, the guardian of the one piece of civilization imposed on Runö by the mainland, the representative of those who do not live on islands, and, I suppose, tradition invests him with a sort of dignity. In old days he was sent by a Tsar of Russia to keep the light of this little island in a sea surrounded on all sides by Russian territory. The men of Runö are Swedes, and a Tsar of Russia had driven their race from the mainland. But nowadays the sea of which Runö is as it were the central pole is no longer Russian. Its coasts are Latvian and Estonian. The Tsar is no more, and the Swedes of Runö can hardly think with any great humility of the two little nations which argue, fairly bitterly, as to which of them should really own the island on which, indifferent to such politics, the Swedes live on, preserving their own life and their own customs in an odd kind of private Middle Ages, centuries removed from the modern competitive struggle of the continent.

The lighthouse-keeper greeted us. He had heard our foghorn, and since the people were busy with their harvesting on the other side of the island had himself come down to meet us, and to warn us that the wind was changing and that we must soon look to our ship. He knew a few words of English, but more willingly spoke Russian, which he knew well, besides, of course, Estonian and Swedish. He was surprised to see us so late in the year, and, on learning my nationality, asked with the embarrassing curiosity of foreigners to whom this bit of our mingled foreign and domestic affairs is always hard to explain, “Well, Mister, and how is it with Ireland?” This was the first of several such disappointments, for I had hoped in voyaging among these remote islands to be quit of politics for once. But I hid my feelings and told him that the Irish were settling their affairs in the Irish way, and then got him to talk of his own country.

I knew already that on Runö competition is almost unknown. Instead there is a sort of ancient communism. The men of Runö are seal-hunters, and at a later stage of our cruise we met some of them actually at their work. Each seal killed belongs not to the lucky hunter but to the community as a whole. The land has been divided into workable farms, and if a family increases it cannot acquire fresh land. It merely adds the necessary room space to the farmhouse, and often does not even do that. If a son marries, he builds himself a bed, which is set up in the room of his parents, and twenty years later, if his son marries and the grandparents are still alive, another bed is built. You can number the families in a Runö house by counting the double beds in the main room. There are two hundred and seventy persons on the island. The women wear on holidays the national costume of old Sweden. Coming out of church on Sundays (they are devout Lutherans) they are as uniform as a procession of nuns. The men wear homespun clothes and sealskin shoes. Their morals are said to be strict. I have heard that some years ago a woman offended against their code, whereupon they tried her by general assembly and condemned her to death. It was found, however, that not one of them was willing to kill her. So they fastened her in the bottom of a little old boat and set her adrift in a storm. The boat did not sink, but was thrown upon the Courland coast, and the woman, still alive, was found by fishermen, recovered, and, one is left to suppose, continued her wicked career on the mainland, where people are less critical.

The lighthouse-keeper told us that people were beginning to take an interest in Runö; that this year the steamer had brought them Mr. Piip, the Estonian Foreign Minister, and a very great Englishman (our own Minister from Riga), but that these events did not much affect the islanders, who had never considered themselves Russians, nor indeed anything else than men of Runö, and were content to remain so, and to be counted Estonian, seeing that their business, when they had any, was with Arensburg; that they caught their seals on the Estonian rocks, and that, after all, the lighthouse-keeper had always been sent from Reval. He took us with him to see his lighthouse, where he posed for his photograph very nobly with the lighthouse behind him. It had been higher, he said, but the Germans had blown off the top of it, besides making a horrible mess of his house. Civilization had visited Runö after all. At the lighthouse we had a drink of fresh water, and then, as the wind shifted definitely to the south, had to give up all thoughts of staying longer on the island, and hurried away over the thick moss under the gigantic trees, picking mushrooms as we went, and so to the broken-down pier.

We were none too soon. Racundra was bobbing up and down in a manner undignified for her, and the Ancient had lowered the peak. Where the water had been smooth it was already broken. We pulled out in the dinghy, getting well splashed on the way, hauled it on board, got our anchor, hoisted the staysail, filled on the starboard tack, and were off for Paternoster and the entrance to the Moon Sound.