Part 28 (1/2)

Here and there where we travelled, the forests were on fire--fires luckily not caused by those chance conflagrations, which do so much harm in Finland, but duly organised to clear a certain district. Matters are arranged in this wise: when a man wants to plough more land, he selects a nice stretch of wood, saws down all the big trees, which he sledges away, the next set (in point of size) he also hews down, but leaves where they fall, with all their boughs and leaves on, till the sun dries them. Then he makes a fire in their midst, the dried leaves soon catch, and in a few hours the whole acreage is bare except for the tree trunks, which are only charred and serve later for firewood. All the farm hands, often augmented by neighbours, a.s.sist at these fires, for although a man may wish to clear two or three acres, if the flames were not watched, they would soon lay twenty or thirty bare, and perhaps destroy an entire forest. The ashes lie on the ground and become manure, so that when, during the following summer, he begins to plough, the sandy soil is fairly well-fed, and ultimately mildly prolific. He is very ingenious this peasant, and takes the greatest care not to let the flames spread beyond his appointed boundary, beating them with huge sticks, as required, and keeping the flames well in hand. The disastrous forest fires, caused by accidental circ.u.mstances, spoil the finest timber, and can only be stayed in their wild career, as we remarked elsewhere, by digging trenches, over which the roaring flames cannot pa.s.s. Such fires are one of the curses of Finland, and do almost as much harm as a flight of locusts in Morocco.

”How old are those trees we see, twenty or thirty years?”

Our friend the _Kommerserdet_ smiled.

”Far, far more,” he replied; ”speaking roughly, every tree eight inches in diameter twenty feet from the ground is eighty years old, nine inches ninety years, ten inches a hundred years old, and so on.”

We were amazed to think that these vast forests should be so old, for if it took so long for a tree to grow, and so many millions were felled every year, it seemed to us that the land would soon be barren.

”Not at all,” our friend replied; ”a forest is never cleared. Only trees which have reached a proper girth are felled. In every forest but a certain number of trees are cut each year, so that fresh ones are in a continuous stream taking their places.”

Rich merchants possess their own forests, their own saw-mills, their own store houses, and even their own s.h.i.+ps; but the bulk of exporters pay for cut timber. In hiring a forest the tenant takes it on lease for so many years with the right to fell all trees so soon as they reach certain dimensions. The doomed trees are marked, and now we must follow their after course.

In the autumn and winter they are felled and left for the first fall of snow, when they are dragged, sometimes two or three logs one behind the other fixed together with iron chains, to the nearest open road for further conveyance by sledge when the snow permits.

No single horse could move such a weight in summer, but by the aid of sledges and snow all is changed, and away gallop the little steeds down the mountain side, pushed forward at times by the weight behind. By this means the trees are conveyed to the nearest waterway.

Then the logs are stamped with the owner's registered mark and rolled upon the ice of lake or river, to await the natural transport of spring.

Once the ice thaws the forests begin to move, for as ”Birnam Wood marched to Dunsinane,” the Finnish forests float to other lands.

Imagine the helter-skelter of those thousands of trees over the roaring, rus.h.i.+ng waterfalls, or along the rapidly flowing cataracts and flooded rivers. To prevent these wooden horses getting caught-up on the banks along their watery course, men with long poles ”personally conduct” huge batches to the coast, or, where they are likely to get fixed, a sort of wooden fencing is built in the river to direct their course. On, on they voyage, those soldiers of the forest, for hundreds of miles to the coast, till, finally arriving at such an enormous wood export town as _Kotka_, they meet their doom.

Wherever the chain of waterways is composed of large lakes, the logs are conveyed to the coast by means of enormous rafts. It is really most ingenious; head and tail into a ring half-a-mile or more in circ.u.mference float the pine trees, coupled together by iron clamps.

Inside these the newly-cut logs, which look like a rope of sausages, are thrust end on end, until they make a perfectly solid floor floating on the surface of the water. Now, as a raft of this kind contains many thousand logs, which means a considerable amount of money value, it is conveyed to the coast with the greatest care. At one end a small house is built on the raft itself, on which live the two or three men who have to escort this floating island across the lakes, attend to the logs that get out of place, or secure the fastenings of the outside wood which binds the whole together.

Naturally it takes some weeks for such a vast island to reach the coast, and as it is sometimes necessary for various reasons to stop on the journey, a horse goes on the raft so as to let down or pull up the anchor when necessary. It is truly wonderful to think that on a floating ma.s.s of tree trunks, merely bound together by a primitive barrier or outside ring, men should live for weeks, and a horse should have its stabling. Yet such is the case, and many times during our three months'

summer sojourn in Finland we pa.s.sed these floating islands wending their way to the coast.

Of course, it is understood rafts can only travel over the vast lakes, and that on rivers the wood must go separately in the manner before described. But in such a river as the _Ule_, where the salmon fis.h.i.+ng is of as great importance, if not greater than wood, the latter are only allowed to pa.s.s down until the day when salmon fis.h.i.+ng commences. On the completion of the floating season the stock logs at _Kotka_ often amount to a million pieces. That alone gives some idea of this wonderful industry. About a mile above _Kotka_ the logs are received by the floating inspector and his trained sorters, who separate and distribute, according to the marks thereon, the logs to their respective owners.

Large floating houses await their arrival, and as the back part of these sheds are divided by half a dozen or so openings leading into the water pens, the men at work quickly turn the timber over, see the owners'

names, and by means of a pole steer it into the s.p.a.ce belonging to that owner, so that in time each water pen becomes filled with the trees belonging to its proprietor.

All this time the steam saw-mills are waiting for their prey, and, like the pigs at Chicago who come out smoked and cooked hams, according to tradition, the trees that go in have half a dozen saws run into them at once, and out come boards and planks of various thicknesses and widths.

The middle bit--the plum of the cake--is the worst in this instance, for it contains the heart, which is bad wood for working as it splits and twists on drying; the rest is converted into deals, battens, and boards.

The outside slab pieces are made into staves for barrels, while the general odds and ends that remain behind are used as fuel for engines, steamboats, or private house consumption in Finland, where coal being practically unknown, wood takes its place.

The sawn wood is stacked up for miles and miles along the waterside to season ready for export, and, as a rule, the Finnish owners sell their timber with the clause that it should be ready to be s.h.i.+pped at ”first open water,” when away go the pines, cargo after cargo, the best being sent to England, and other qualities to France, Germany, etc. Thus from Finland comes much of the wood that makes our floors, our window frames, our railings, and our doors, and lights our daily fires--it enters the peasant hut, and it finds a place in the royal palace.

Another big trade is birch--a cla.s.s of wood cut up into reels and bobbins for England; and yet another is aspen, which wood is supplied to Sweden in large quant.i.ties to make matches. Not only are matches pure and simple made enormously in Sweden; but when leaving Gothenburg on our homeward journey we saw hundreds of large cases being put on board our steamer. Although very big, one man carried a case with ease, much to our surprise, for anything so enormous in the way of cargo was generally hoisted on board with a crane. What a revelation! These cases contained match boxes, which are sent by thousands every week to England.

There is an enormous export of wood spirit made from sawdust; yet even then, until lately, it was difficult to get rid of the superfluous sawdust, a great deal of which was burned away in large furnaces.

Sawdust now plays an important role in the trade of Finland, and silk factories have been started, for pulp; for our French friends have found that beautiful fabrics can be made from wood, which takes dye almost better than silk woven by a painstaking little worm, only costs a fraction of the money, and sells almost equally well.

So that wood for building purposes, for matches or fuel, pulp for paper, sawdust for spirit and silk, are the outcome of the life of a Finnish tree. People can be clothed in wood, get drunk on wood, read print on wood, and get warmed and their food cooked by wood.