There is material for conjecture, however, perhaps more persuasive than any based on such traditions and inferences as the foregoing. The pursuit of it leads us to the far north, to the sea on the shores of which the amber was first gathered, and to the great island city once grand in marble and brass, but of which now even the ruins are forgotten.

In the Baltic, about equidistant from Sweden, Russia, and Germany, lies the island of Gottland, by some identified as the Kungla of the national epic1 of the Esthonians, where it is always described as a fairy land of adventure and untold wealth. Hither came the maritime commerce of the Wendic people after their capital city, Veneta, had been destroyed in 1043. Originally occupied by Goths, and later jointly by Goths and Germans, these tribes maintained incessant contests, which ultimately led to the downfall of the place. During the period of its supremacy, the island became a rendezvous for the vessels of all trading nations, and its principal settlement, Wisby or Wisbuy, despite the constant internal strife, grew into a city of large extent, the ruins of which have revealed many works of art and luxury. Olaus Magnus,' the great historian of the North, writing in 1555, speaks of it as a noble town, possessing a strongly-defended citadel. He says that it was the emporium of many regions, and that nowhere else in Europe was there such trade: that flocking thither came the Goths, the Gauls, the Swedes, the Russians, the Danes, the Angles, the Scots, the Flemings, the Vandals, the Saxons, the Spaniards and the Finns; these different people freely mingling with one another and filling the streets, the town hospitably welcoming all; that, in his time, there still remained.

'The Kalevipoeg. See Kirby: The Hero of Esthonia. London, 1895. 2 Olaus Magnus: Hist. de Gent. Septen. Rome, 1555, lib. 2, cxxiv.

2

marble ruins, vaulted halls and iron gates, windows decorated with copper and brass, afterwards gilded—all showing the grandeur of a bygone age. By 1288 the city seems. to have become dilapidated through the continual feuds; but, in that year, Magnus, King of Sweden, allowed the citizens to rebuild their walls and fortifications—a circumstance which has led some historians into the erroneous belief that the place was then, for the first time, established.

It naturally followed that amid such a vast concourse of foreigners, all seafaring men, disputes constantly arose, based on controversies peculiar to the mariner's calling -the relative rights of masters and seamen, of owners and shippers, the adjustment of marine losses, contracts governing the chartering and maintenance of ships and crews, and so on through the great body of that branch of jurisprudence now known as admiralty.

There is probably no one more stubbornly conservative of his rights than the sailor, or more ready to assert them; and as this has always been found true of his species since time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, there is no reason to believe that the mariners who took their liberty in the streets of Wisbuy differed materially in modes of thought and action from those who congregate to-day in the great maritime ports of the world. Jack came ashore, and probably spent his hard-earned wages and fought the "beach combers" and the "rock scorpions" and became the prey of the crimps of Wisbuy and the terror of its police, just as he does now at Gibraltar, or Liverpool, or Hong Kong; while the owners and the masters and the average adjusters and the sea-lawyers wrangled over questions of jettison and demurrage and collision with the same fervor that brings them nowadays into the Admiralty Courts. The consequence was that two sets of locally-devised laws came into existence, administered by the consulate courts or authorities of the city—the one known as the Ordinances of Wisbuy, con

trolling all matters pertaining to the harbor, docks and to vessels in port; and the other, known as the Laws of Wisbuy, governing rights on the high seas. To these statutes merchants and sailors submitted by general custom and consent,' and they submit to them still, for they are imbedded in modern codes of marine law. Whether the famous laws of Oleron, supposed to have been framed by Queen Elinor, who died in 1202, or Richard I., who died in 1199, preceded or followed the Wisbuy laws, which they closely resemble, is a mooted point; but apparently the latter are the older.2

It is certain that, early in the 13th century, the Wisbuy laws were commonly observed in the eastern ports of the Baltic, which, of course, could not have been the case had these statutes not come into existence, as some suppose, until after the rebuilding of the walls of the city in 1288. Furthermore, recent research has made it plain that the Wisbuy code was a composite structure built up gradually over a long period, during which not only additions but omissions were made; many features, at one time in full force and regarded as wise and proper, becoming obsolete or out of harmony with changed customs or more moderate notions of wrongs and remedies. The code as it appears to-day is extremely brief, and thus bears on its face the evidence that it is probably merely a residuum, and by no means inclusive of all the precepts which at various times formed parts of it.

3

1 Olaus Magnus, cit. sup., says: "The laws for sea affairs and the decisions of all controversies severally, far and wide, as far as the pillars of Hercules and the utmost Scythian Sea, are fetched from thence, and are observed; being given, that all things may be done in a due tranquillity that may be fit and agreeing to peaceable commerce."

2 Beckmann: Hist. of Inventions, London, 1817, i., 387. Parsons: Treatise on Maritime Law, Boston, 1859, 10, inclines to the opposite view.

3 The Black Book of the Admiralty, London, 1876. (Monumenta Juridica.) Introduction.

Ibid. Also Appendix to Peter's Admiralty Reports.

THE FINNS AND LAPPS.

137

Here then was a great central mart or exchange, whither came the ships and mariners of all nations, save only the Saracens; for the infidel vessels would have. found scant welcome at the hands of the newly-converted Northmen. Here was a source of sea law observed by all Christian sea-faring peoples. And here, if anywhere, was the focal point from which it may be presumed would be radiated any new item of knowledge, of interest and importance to the maritime world.

Among the ships which came to Wisbuy were those of the Finns and Lapps; and among the northern tribes, the Finns and Lapps differed from all the others in character and customs. Unlike their neighbors, they belong to that great Ugric nomad race which includes the Mongolians, Etrurians and Magyars. Their early history is exceedingly obscure. While the Lapps are commonly regarded as members of the Finnic branch of the Turanian family, some ethnologists consider them to be the original inhabitants of the country now known as Finland, and to have occupied it before the irruption into Europe of the Asiatic hordes which destroyed the Roman Empire. The Finns, on this theory, starting from the foot of the Ural Mountains, came to Bulgaria and Hungary, and being driven thence in the 7th century, made their way to the Baltic provinces, whence they drove the Lapps to the extreme north. Other hypotheses deny the close connection thus predicated between the Finns and Magyars, and place the migration of the former northward at a far earlier date, while extending the area of their settlement over a large part of Sweden and Norway, whence they were expelled by the Scandinavian Teutons and forced into the confines of present Finland.

In the 12th century, at the instigation of the Pope, Eric IX., King of Sweden, undertook to introduce Christianity among them; a series of crusades followed during the next two hundred years, with the result of subduing the Finns, though not of conquering them, and with the

further consequence of making their peculiar customs and national life far better known to their northern neighbors.'

During the Middle Ages the territory about the Baltic occupied by the Finns, the Esthonians and the Lapps, was regarded as the peculiar home and nursery of sorcerers, whither people from every land, even from distant Greece and Spain, resorted for instruction or for special aid. The Esthonians looked upon the Finns as greater sorcerers than themselves, and the Finns in turn considered the Lapps their superiors in magic skill. But the old writers always single out the Finns by name, as the typical wizards. The medieval Finns were a gloomy, earnest people, showing on their faces the marks of their Tartar relationship, and retaining in their families the same distinctive appellations as the far-distant Chinese. In their wanderings from the cradle of the human race in Asia, perhaps, they brought with them the Runic characters in which are written the ancient inscriptions found both in the north of Europe and on the Tartar steppes; but in common with the other northern nations, their traditions came down by word of mouth and in the songs of the Skalds and minstrels. They were the earliest iron workers in Northern Europe, and the Finnish swords anciently had a reputation equal to that which the famous blades of Toledo long afterwards acquired. Their great epic, the Kalevala, à composite structure of no definite date, shows them also to have been skilled as ship-builders, and in its descriptions of battles and forays it is not unlike the Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, or the Norse Eddas and Sagas; but its chief characteristic is its wild and gloomy legends of sorcery and magic.

In all forms of witchcraft the Finns were regarded as masters. They devised the magic runes and spells which overcame the enemy while protecting the wearer, the impenetrable garments, the charmed weapons, and raised

1 Vincent: Norsk, Lapp and Finn. N. Y., 1881. Peschel: The Races of Man. N. Y., 1876. Simcox: Primitive Civilization, cit. sup.