CHAP. XIII. COUNTRY BETWEEN SLESWICK AND FLENDSBURG. COMMERCIAL TRAVELLERS THE TREES ON ONE SIDE OF THE BALTIC. ALL FIR TREES ON THE - POLITICAL THE OPERATIVE INTEREST A THIRD PARTY BETWEEN FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION.-ITS ARGUMENT, PRINCIPLE, AND POWER. FLENDSBURG, 1851.-This town is about twenty English miles from Sleswick. The road, which is good, and macadamised, passes from a fringe of green fields, hedges, and groves, which borders the long fiord called the Sley, to a similar green fringe around the sides and head of the fiord of Flendsburg. The intermediate space between the heads of these fiords is a brown and yellow moor of stunted heath and bare sand, flat, barren, almost uninhabited, and sprinkled with small lakes, pools, bogs, and peat-grounds. The view extends over a considerable space of such bare, flat, barren land, even from the small elevation of the traveller's carriage, or from one of the grave-mounds which are scattered on the moor. This bare back of the peninsula is, in some places, separated from its green coastside-fringe of arable and pasture land by an intermediate soil covered with woods, which may claim the dignity of forests, from their extent, and consist of oak, elm, beech, and lime trees, of great size and beauty. The ash seems a scarce tree; and the pine tribe, or needle-leaved trees, do not grow naturally in this country, and, where they have been planted, do not thrive. I have not seen a thriving fir, pine, or larch; but every where the most magnificent oak and beech trees flourish. It is curious that so small a distance as the breadth of the Sound at Elsinore, not more than three or four miles, should divide the land of beech-trees from the land of firs. In the island of Sealand, about latitude 56°, the most splendid forests of beech and oak, perhaps, in Europe cover the land, but the fir will not grow to be a large tree; and across the Sound, in the same latitude, the fir occupies the land in vast forests, and the beech, oak, and elm do not grow naturally, or become fine trees. It is not the difference of elevation above the sea that is the cause; for the province of Scania, and indeed all Sweden, is as low and flat as the island of Sealand, or this peninsula. It must be in the soil or subsoil. In this peninsula the subsoil, at the lowest depth to which it has been penetrated, consists of sand, gravel, and boulder stones of granite or gneis, interspersed, and upon this a stratum of clay containing boulder stones also, and above the clay a covering of vegetable earth, or of peat-moss, with marl immediately under the moss. This subsoil absorbs all the water that can penetrate to it; so that, although lakes of all sizes abound in localities where the impervious clay is the bottom, there is no stream of running water in the country, no burns or brooks, but only stripes of sluggish water-ditches connected together, and oozing slowly to an outlet as one river, the Eyder, into the North Sea. Few streams run towards the Baltic or the Cattegat. In the land of fir-trees-the great Scandinavian peninsula-the granite, or rather gneis, is the subsoil or ground-rock, and is the soil also; for the thin layer of earth covering the groundrock is a mixture of granitic sand or gravel, with decayed vegetable matter, mosses, heaths, and small plants; and in this earth the needle-leaved race of trees appears to flourish better than in the richer land of Denmark, in which marl, chalk, and substances, such as limestone, connected with animal or organic matter, enter more largely into the composition of the soil. In the Baltic there is no rise and fall of water every six hours, no ebb and flood. The eastern shores of this peninsula are strangers to the regularly recurring agency which is at work on its western shores, adding to or taking away from the land. If we may conclude, from the single fact that the stripe of land. which bounded the head of the inlet of the Baltic called the Lymfiord, and divided it from the North Sea, has been washed away within this half century, and the north end of Jutland converted into an island, separated by a strait, with nine feet of water in it, from the rest of the peninsula, the tendency of this agency at present is to take away the land, to remove the barrier which the same agency has formed, in times unknown, between the great ocean and the Baltic. Although ebb and flood do not recur in the Baltic regularly, there are, owing to prevailing winds, melting of ice in the great rivers, or other local causes, very great changes sometimes in the level of the water in various places. I have seen the shore at Kiel laid dry for several yards, where usually there is a depth of three or four feet of water; and here, at Flendsburg, there is a wall facing the quay, on which is marked the height at which the water has stood against it at various periods. The highest mark is at least ten feet above the ordinary level of the water in the fiord; for it is eight feet above the pavement of the quay but as nothing is recorded of the wind or weather, of ice or thaw, it is only the fact, not the causes, or any information leading to them, that can be deduced from the marks. The natural history of the Baltic, the changes which the adjacent lands have undergone, and are, by slow but evident process, undergoing, the nature of the bottom of this remarkable lake or sea, of its waters, its fish, its marine vegetable products, are subjects of which the world is remarkably uninformed, considering that its western and northern coasts are inhabited by the two most distinguished nations in such researches, naturalists, and a nation of antiquaries. a nation of In our popular histories of England, we are edified by the tale of Canute the Great rebuking the adulation of his courtiers by ordering his chair of state to be carried below high-water mark on the English coast, and showing them that the flowing tide would not retire at the royal command. It is probable that the origin of this traditionary anecdote may have been the curiosity of the Danes, who had never witnessed the phenomenon of flood and ebb in the Baltic, and would naturally point it out to the king, and desire him to witness it. Flendsburg, 1851.-This town is a string of redtiled houses with white sides, standing in two rows, and forming a long, roughly-paved street, round the head of a fiord, about sixteen miles from its mouth in the Baltic. This fiord is at the south end of the great and little Belt, is near to all the Danish islands, and has depth of water for large vessels at the quayside of the town. Flendsburg, owing to these advantages, is a flourishing place, of about eighteen thousand inhabitants, with many large vessels in the foreign carrying trade and in the Greenland fishery, and with fifteen sail in the West-India trade. Next to Copenhagen, it is the most important commercial town in the Danish dominions. The Danish West-India islands, St. Croix and St. Thomas, being entrepôts for smuggling goods into Mexico, and also into the South American States on the Atlantic, which impose import duties on European manufactures, are of much greater commercial importance than their own products or consumption would make them. German manufactures, as well as British, for the South American markets, find their way to the consumers from these Danish West-India islands; and Flendsburg is, or before the late war was, the most convenient port for the German manufacturer or merchant to ship his goods. from. To acquire the important West-India trade of Flendsburg, and possibly the Danish West-India islands, which are intimately connected with the commercial capital and mercantile houses in Flendsburg, was one of the great objects of Prussian policy in her intrigues for annexing Sleswick to Holstein, and bringing both under her power. There are wealthy merchants and shipowners here, in Flendsburg, who live very modestly and quietly, in houses of no more show than those of their shipmasters; but all are good, comfortable dwellings. |