Travelogue A. Feddersen

A. Feddersen was born in Denmark in 1835 and died in 1906. He was a fisheries expert and studied hatcheries, ponds and fish farms in both Denmark and Norway. He has a large body of writing behind him. Our interest in this case is that Feddersen visited a hatchery in Drammen and the salmon fishing at Hellefossen near Hokksund:

After walking over the long bridge that crosses the river, I reached the waterfall along it. The entire river's body of water forms the waterfall, but it is split in a couple of places into smaller streams by mighty blocks of rock, against which the water tumbles and breaks with violence, while the white foam dances over the waves and dissolves into a fine water vapor, in which the sunshine produces the most delicious rainbow colors.

Immediately below the falls, the river widens and becomes calmer, and here there is a beach with stones and sand, surrounded by steep clay and sand cliffs.

It is wonderfully alluring to stand down here and look up at the Fall, whose thousands of voices mingle without ceasing, and whose masses of foam and water form an infinity of images.

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But what is it, however, that appears here and there on the surface of the bent current, before it crashes down, and what is it that here and there in the strongest eddies sometimes rise up or are thrown to the wind.

It now emerges from Skummet and turns out to be Bjælker, who is on the journey to Drammen.

It must be a hard treatment for them, such a descent through a waterfall, and how many such journeys have they not already made!

To that witness their disheveled and broken Ends; some of them have not even passed this last test of their strength, but are broken in the middle, and the sad remains of these broken, proud voices lie in large numbers around on the shore between the worn stones and the fine sand: all ground on the same mill.

On the southern side of the waterfall, whole towers and buildings have been formed from the enormous masses of timber, which rise out over the river towards the waterfall, and on these buildings and dams there is a magnificent sawmill, whose machines are powered by the waterfall itself.

Many people are busily engaged in collecting the beams above the fell and bringing them in to the sawmill, where they are piled up and, after receiving a preliminary treatment with the axe, while the sides are roughly hewn and the ends cut off, they are rolled into the saws, where, when they are placed, as they should be, they are sawn by hand into boards or planks.

It looks strange how the beams, once placed under the saws, work their way towards the saw blade, which calmly moves up and down, without hearing the sawing sound due to the noise from the waterfall.

As we walked past the sawmill further and further beyond the layer of beams, which stretches across the foaming waterfall, we discovered some long beams, which protrude far beyond the fell and carry some square beam boxes or baskets, which are suspended in iron chains in such a way that their opening faces outwards towards the water below the waterfall. It is these boxes that were supposed to catch the salmon, as it tries to work its way up over the waterfall with its enormous springs, and they are precisely suspended in the only places where such a spring would be successful for the fish, when the boxes do not last.

The outermost box was so suspended above the agitated Fos that I could not even approach the beam that carried it; for where I stood, the noise already seemed so numbing and dizzying to me, when I looked down into the agitated water, that I involuntarily grabbed hold of the railing to stand against it, for it seemed to me as if I were being drawn towards the depth, which was falling beneath me, as if it were imprisoning me to itself; it was almost a similar feeling, that for some time one has looked into a great flaming Baal, but one is drawn by an inexplicable feeling and cannot stop staring into it. Is it the same effect that drives the rescued creatures into the burning building, and which has given rise to the account of the seamen and seamen, who drag themselves there?

I sat for a long time and stared at the tumbling of the water, following with my eye the beams that were swept away in the current and with a hollow drone plunged into the middle of the waterfall, soon jumping into the air, soon diving into the flowing foam, for finally after several vain attempts to reach out into the calm water and then drift down the river.

And as I now sat and stared, there was a shout from the sawmill, and a man with a long stage came hurrying over; there was a Salmon in one of the Boxes, where it made some vain Hops to get out, but as it jumped straight up, it suddenly fell into the Box.

The man now came up with his iron hook to grab the fish, but reasonably did not really get hold of it, because it fell into the stream anyway. He claimed, and I believe him, that the paany wanted to jump up after a fish jump a good distance across the water against the current, but it did not reach the basket.

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