To Bergen at last
Julian Mustoe finally cruises to the Norwegian medieval city following his disastrous earlier trip
When approached from seaward, the coast of the central part of Norway, known as Fjordland, appears to be a continuous line of small, irregular mountains. It was August and I had just motor-sailed my Hunter Horizon 26, Zephyrus 200 miles across the North Sea in calm weather, and arrived five miles off the Norwegian coast at dusk. All seemed to be in order, but in a spirit of caution I stood off at sea all night. At dawn I could see that my GPS position was correct and that Korsfjord stood before me. I motored in and picked up a mooring in a tiny cove, Limavåg, on the southeast side of the island of Sotra. After a sound sleep I awoke in the beautiful land of Norway, to sunlight pouring in through the cabin windows.
The passage from Lerwick in the Shetland Islands had been a very different affair from my attempt two years before. Then I had
encountered an unexpected gale, steering failure, rescue by the Norwegian Coastguard and a catastrophic towing accident, which saw the loss of my 25ft Petersen-designed Harrier of Down. I have previously written about this incident for Yachting Monthly’s Learning Curve series and now don’t sail without a back-up steering arrangement (‘How self steering could have saved my yacht’. YM, Summer 2015).
I was now 20 miles south of Bergen, and in the intricate waters that lie inside the chain of islands, skerries and rocks, known as the skaergård, that shelters most of the west Norwegian coast. It is said that in ancient times the gods and the giants were, as usual, in dispute and that their fight took the form of hurling island-sized rocks at one another. The skaergård is the aftermath of their battle.
The city of Bergen was the third destination, after King’s Lynn in Norfolk, and Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, of my Hanseatic voyage. The Hanseatic League, or Hanse, was in the late Middle Ages, a maritime coalition of Baltic and Low Country cities, which banded together for the purposes of fostering trade, combating piracy and coping with troublesome princes and kings ashore. The memory and inheritance of the Hanse are to be found around the shores of the Baltic Sea and in many parts of northern Europe to this day.
BEWARE THE KRAKEN
The mariner who nowadays approaches the west coast of Norway should realise that he is sailing into the home waters of the legendary sea monster, the Kraken. Erik Pontoppidan, Lutheran bishop of Bergen in the mid-18th Century, wrote of the Kraken:
‘The largest Sea-monster in the world; it is called Kraken ….. That word being applied by way of eminence of this creature ….. Which is round, flat and full of arms, or branches, which they [other writers] say of its towers of
floating islands as they appeared then to be... Its back or upper part, which takes in appearance about an English mile and a half in circumference and looks like a number of small islands. At least several bright points or horns appear, which given the height they rise above the surface of the water, and sometimes they stand up as high and large as the mast of a middle-sized vessel. It seems that these are the creature’s arms, and, if they were to lay hold of the largest man of war, they would pull it to the bottom.’
Some say that the breathing of the Kraken causes the rise and fall of the ocean tides.
I resolved to take advantage of the Kraken’s respiration. On a fine summer morning I drifted out of Limavåg and turned to port. With the flood tide under me, I sailed north through Raunafjord and Byfjord before arriving at Bergen in the afternoon. I had made a swift passage, thanks to the Kraken. The historic city of Bergen is situated around Vågen on the mainland of Norway and sheltered from the North Sea by the island of Askøy. I sailed Zephyrus into Vågen and moored alongside in the very centre of the city. A short distance across the harbour was a group of medieval timber buildings constructed on the waterside by the merchants of the Hanseatic League.
The Bergen kontor was a trading colony, comparable to the European treaty ports on the coast of China in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The Hanseatic merchants, who lived in the kontor, enjoyed monopoly rights. They imported grain, textiles, wine and manufactured goods to Bergen from the south. With the profits they bought and exported dried and salted fish to Europe. In those days preserved fish was a major article of trade because the Catholic church insisted quite strictly that only fish, and not meat, be eaten on a Friday or a feast day. At the height of its trading prosperity, the kontor occupied some five hectares of central land in medieval Bergen, a city which at that time had fewer than 7,000 inhabitants. Today the Hanseatic buildings are devoted to tourism rather than trade.
After three days in Bergen I departed south through the islands on my way to Denmark and the Baltic Sea. There are many hundreds of miles of sheltered water with countless snug anchorages and scenic towns behind and between the islands of the Norwegian skaergård. These waters were the nursery of the Vikings, the highway of the Hanseatic merchants and are arteries of the modern Norwegian economy. They are also a hospitable and inexhaustible resource for the cruising yachtsman.