Afi's Day
Post #9: Friðrik Ágúst Kristmannsson, L. and J.
Friðrik Ágúst Kristmannsson. Carpenter, Boatbuilder. During the weeks my great-grandfather emigrated from Iceland with pregnant wife Elín and daughter Anna, he kept a diary titled “1903 – A Journey to Canada.” Johanna Sesselja, still an infant, was too fragile to travel. Their brave departure from Reykjavik was one-way adventure, irrevocably rupturing a thousand-year family history nested in a few adjacent valleys.
Kindly, Haukur Hannesson has translated Friðrik’s handwriting, though the last pages are no longer legible. He writes that “the diary is a fascinating account of 19th century Iceland; the language is wonderful.”
Right away he ascertains that Friðrik knows about northern farming. The descriptions of “weather and particularly wind direction are extremely accurate and difficult to translate precisely.” Friðrik’s was not a modern Icelandic. Haukur remembers his own grandparents, born in the same region, using similar words; “a certain bitterness about the harsh conditions the country offered.”
Casting off from Reykjavik on May 19th, 1903, the packet steamer “Cerio” punches through rough weather around Iceland’s south coast, stopping briefly in Hafnarfjörður and the Westman Islands before proceeding to the eastern fjords.
The view of the east coast was unpleasant, and the hardship showed, especially as we moved further east.... Snow right down to the shore in many places. Arrival in Seyðisfjörður at 11 am. Everybody then in good health.
Of conditions below Friðrik allows only that they’re “cramped, the air foul in the hold...consequently many people were seasick.” In Fáskrúðsfjörður, an additional “ten emigrants came aboard” for the crossing to Scotland.
May 21st: We left at 4 pm. The wind then blew from the south with rain. All the women and children seasick...waves of considerable force...increasing as the wind direction turned to the south.”
May 22nd: A gale force from the south.... Land can be sighted in the Faroe Islands. Still many people are ill.... Steep mountain tops coming straight from the sea...many places covered with grass, but not clearly visible due to rain and fog.
Steaming into Klaksvík’s austere fjord they dock at that village compressed on an isthmus between two back-to-back harbours. Having unloaded “a considerable amount of dried salted fish,” they depart for Tórshavn. A wiry man, boldly moustached, Friðrik stays up on deck. Land cultivation is “on a very good foot in the Faroes,” he judges. “Fishing boats however don’t look good.”
The ship leaves at 12 pm..., storm and high waves...many sick, leakage from the deck is considerable. At 4 am, same weather. At 8:30 am land is spotted...two lighthouses set apart by a long distance. We are told this is the Orkney Islands.
May 24th: At 7 pm we see land; Scotland on the right-hand side. It looks beautiful, all you can see is cultivated fields and forests; and large buildings... at 9 pm the ship docks in Leith harbour.
May 25th: At 6:30 am our things are taken off.... Two horse-drawn carriages arrived.... We were told to follow the carriage, with our interpreter.... Our agent was supposed to be in Leith.... We waited [for him] until 11 am, then went by express train to Glasgow. A Danish fellow...guides us through the city on foot, a fairly long distance....
May 26th: At 9 am our main agent takes our tickets. At 1 pm a doctor goes through the motions of examining us.
May 27th: Good weather—very hot.
One shudders at the harsh passage. Headwinds, steep waves, water leaking in, children falling ill. Only when verdant Scotland hove into view did the gifted woodworker see a real forest for the first time. The weather improved. In Glasgow they’d board another ship destined for Montreal, rapidly assimilating to Canada’s dominant Anglo-Saxon culture.
As a founder of Osland, a fishing hamlet on the shore of remote Smith Island, south of Prince Rupert on British Columbia’s wild west coast, it seems Friðrik pursued an unvoiced project for a utopian community, one so delicate it couldn’t bear naming as such. There, pressed to the limit of the muddy shore by dense rainforest, the self-reliant Icelanders banded together with Japanese-Canadian families to form a tightly-knit community.
Disinclined to formalize local government, instead the agreeably social ‘agricultural society’ oversaw old Steini’s goats (known to menace youngsters on the wooden walkway) and a tool library. Each fall Afi joined the others to maintain that vital boardwalk connecting their twenty-five shingled homes set at respectful intervals. Its planked arc must have some definite adult measure in miles, but for children old enough for adventure it was an endless yellow-brick-road in a wondrous Narnia that they’d never forget.
Friðrik’s four sons inherited the weather instinct, their lives all to do with boats and tides. Valdimar, my grandfather known as Daniel, one day declined to fish, uneasy with a slackness in the wind. Indeed, a vicious storm churned the Hecate Strait decimating the fleet. At school, students sang Skeena River Fishermen, with Mrs. Olafsson’s lyric extolling Osland’s idyll: “around me the boats are all drifting/a miniature city.” Also, its terror: “nights of blackness/nights when the waves run high.”
Of Friðrik’s three other sons, Barney played accordion for weekend dances accompanied by Kat Sakamoto’s guitar. Art’s piledriving business flourished. Christmas Joe, as he was known, befriended the Haida. Grandchildren played at pretend fishing, spreading nets among Elín’s daffodils and rhubarb, calling her “Amma” and Friðrik “Afi.”
In May 1937, Osland’s reigning elder and master gardener Mrs. Hatsue Sakamoto led a ceremony for George VI’s coronation, planting an oak sapling sent from Buckingham Palace. As Friðrik spoke in Icelandic to the gathering beside the schoolhouse one of Steini’s goats nosed inside to sample the luncheon sandwiches.
In 1942, authorities landed a vessel at the South Float to remove octogenarian Mrs. Sakamoto and the Japanese-Canadian families. Dispossessed, consigned to wartime camps, their internment stunned and aggrieved everyone. It quashed Osland’s viability as a year-round community.
Until Friðrik passed away in 1949, he and Elín stayed on in their generous house, his handcrafted seiner Kari in her boathouse at the foot of the lawn. Osland “lifts us to the height of Lords,” so Mrs. Olafsson’s village anthem celebrated the happier times; days “with no definite beginning” that lingered in the “tang of the salt-laden air.” (June 1999, Montebello, Quebec.)
L. and J. Retired academics. Into an exile amid Scotland’s elongated shadows. Edinburgh, incipient capital, now distracted by Brexit. L. and J.’s library is rich in Scottish political and social history. Their 1807 three-storey stone rowhouse, our retreat during their absence for the winter and spring, lies steps away from the head of the Union Canal, with the Castle Mound a few minutes beyond. The deep, rising back garden is best appreciated from the generous ground-floor kitchen or from the tall shuttered bay window immediately above, spanning the main bedroom.
Famously a city of stone, Edinburgh’s architectural character lies partly in the imaginative patterning of its material variants. Capacious light-hungry windows framed by that stone “perform” the Scottish capital’s Enlightenment provenance. Lovely, too, the glimpsed interiors. (6 February 2019, Edinburgh.)
...To the Scottish National Gallery for sketching. Charcoal malleable compared to my habitual fountain pen. Set with easels in the first of the Museum’s octagonal galleries, our model will be the seated docent. With visitors snooping I concentrate to find a line into her opaque expression.
Near the high ceiling, I notice Sir Edwin Landseer’s Rent day in the wilderness (1861). Scottish scientist Sir Roderick Murchison commissioned it in 1855 as a tribute to his grandfather and he served as Landseer’s model. The imagined scene is meticulously fact-based, depicting Donald Murchison in the then-seditious act of collecting tenants’ rents on behalf of his exiled Laird.
These crofters, hidden from view on an elevated ridge, pass unnoticed by red-coats debarking from a barge below. Note the cue of height. The curator’s placement of the painting above all the others offers an entry point to a reading of Scottish sovereignty in the time of Brexit.
The Englishman Landseer had a lifelong affinity for Scotland. A prodigy who, despite personal crises in his thirties, achieved national fame before eventually being committed to an asylum. I’d thought of him as an academic painter rather fond of dogs and deer, yet here he is with a hot political subject.
Rent Day alludes cannily to the artist’s own surname. Two kilted Scots, lying on the rocky ridge training telescopes down on the English patrol, are ‘land-seers’. They play prospect/refuge to keep Highlanders safe. Scottish sovereignty rendered here is, as always, complex. Murchison risks British sanction by collecting rents illicitly, but his ‘sovereign’ action also perpetuates vassal-like loyalty to the Lord of Seaforth who’s fled following the battle at Sheriffmuir in 1715.
Judicious devotion to Highland tradition is evident in Murchison’s erect bearing. Though he amasses rents sufficient to maintain Seaforth in France, that Laird nonetheless will capriciously repudiate his faithful Agent, thereby breaking his heart. Sir Roderick wished to convey only his grandfather’s pure sense of duty, with no hint of the master’s subsequent ingratitude. A priestly figure whispers furtively in Murchison’s ear. A tenant prods a younger son forward to seek his favour. Firearms lie casually at the ready. Kilts and the woven fabrics spread over the stones bespeak Highland material traditions.
These stony heights resist most agriculture apart from sheep grazing. Lowlands are more fertile. Yet highlands, as James C. Scott argues, are places to which people ascend to in order to enjoy greater sovereignty with respect to the State. “Friction of terrain,” he argues, thwarts outside control. His is a novel way of understanding the history of political space.
No painting more clearly illustrates Scott’s ‘uplander’ thesis than Rent Day in the Wilderness. Historian T.M. Devine writes, “as Gaelic retreated from the Lowlands, the ‘Highlands’ became more culturally distinctive and linguistically separate from other parts of the kingdom. Very quickly, too, it became regarded by the state as a problem region.” Yet, as predicted, rising altitudes seem to correlate with attenuated military suppression of Highland ways.
Earlier this week, a Scottish land trust administrator just returned from the Highlands told me he encountered less fatigue with the sovereignty debate than here in Edinburgh; anti-Brexit feelings run high.
At the end of the afternoon we return to the Gallery for a concert by youthful musicians Hamish MacLeod and Robbie Greig. Accidentally or not they play directly beneath Landseer’s painting. With unamplified guitar and violin, they skein a lucid contemporaneity into Scottish traditional airs, many from the Isle of Lewis. If the subtlety, humour and humility of their musical idiom should ever discover its true political paradigm, indeed Scotland would be sovereign. (Edinburgh, 6 February 2019.)
...With L. and J. in their garden talking American politics, foiled secessions, their months on Corsica. I mention how readings in their library illuminated the cultural efflorescence preceding the 2014 referendum. They light up, recalling an infectious élan that brought diverse Scots together in a common cause. (Edinburgh, May 2019.)
Hi, Mark. Karen and I were just in Iceland for the first time--for nearly three weeks, long enough to drive around the Ring Road and explore many locations along the way--and I've been reading up a storm of Iceland books and watching Icelandic films, so your talking about your family's Icelandic roots was perfectly timed for us. Brian