From the Mouth of the Whale (11 page)

At first light, as the ship was weighing anchor, another passenger was brought on board. Jónas woke up when a man with a canvas sack over his head was led through the sleeping quarters by two guards in the employ of Prosmund, the Danish governor of Iceland. After ordering the prisoner to sit on the deck diagonally opposite Jónas’s hammock, they removed his shackles and left. The new arrival moaned pitifully and winced as he fiddled with the knot that held the sack firmly in place on his head; his hands, blue from the irons, fumbled helplessly. Jónas rolled out of his hammock and loosed the sack from the man’s head. From beneath the canvas emerged a face with a fair beard and mournful blue eyes. It was his son, Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur Jónasson. Father and son fell weeping and wailing into each other’s arms, and wept together in the cabin for so long that a sailor eventually drove them up on deck, where they wept some more until they had almost wept away the terrifying but compelling sight of the land disappearing below the horizon.

Father and son sailed the seas and came safely to harbour.

In those first few hours after he stepped ashore in Copenhagen, Jónas the Learned saw more people than he had hitherto seen in the whole of his life: more aprons, more hats, more boots, more chickens, more pigs, more horses, more wheelbarrows, more dogs, more soldiers, more cannon, more wagons, more roofs, more buildings, more windows, more doors. And also many things he had only ever seen in pictures: windmills and water pumps, towers and market squares, churches and castles, sculptures and friezes, trees and ponds, cobblers and tailors, cheese merchants and muleteers. He tried not to let any of it impinge on his consciousness, tried to ignore all the new buildings, for he longed above all to be carried away by the illusion that he had arrived in the realm of Gormur the Old, the ancient king of the Danes. The feeling had first begun to grow in him when they sighted the Faroe Islands during the voyage. At last Jónas was seeing with his own eyes something he had drawn on those maps of the world that he had been able at times to use as payment for hospitality or provisions when he and Sigga were on the run with their children. But instead of poring over paper, looking down from heaven as if with the eye of the highest flying bird, he himself was on the map. And he was seized by the conviction that when he set foot on Danish soil all roads would be open to him. For Jónas had reached the place where the white background on maps ends – that expanse which the draughtsman feels compelled to decorate with monsters and seahorses and floating polar bears to prevent the eye from growing bored of the ocean – he had reached land in a place that was strangely familiar to him, although hitherto he had known it only as his own handiwork, realised in birch ink and paint; faint, of course, to keep the place names legible. Being accustomed to thinking of the world as a picture that can be folded up and put away in one’s pocket, or a terse geographical treatise by a medieval historian, he had the impression that from where he was now it was but a short hop to all the main sites of history: south to Constantinople and the Holy Land, east to Sweden and Tartary, to Novaya Zemlya and Asia.

But the sights that met his eyes were nothing to the assaults on his ears, for everything had its own attendant noise: rattling, cackling, shouting, banging, barking, jingling, neighing, belching, cracking, grunting, whining, clapping, and the thunderous footsteps of man and beast, running, limping, ambling, tramping. To be sure, Jónas could limit his field of vision by walking close behind Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur, eyes fixed between his shoulder blades – which he did despite his son’s constant complaints that he was treading on his heels – but he could not shut out the noise. He could not block his ears since both his hands were full. In one he was carrying a bundle of clothes belonging to their guide, a student from the south of Iceland who in return for help with his luggage was going to show them to a tolerable inn, while in the other he was holding the oblong box which reached from his fist down to his ankle. No, to have muffled the din of the city he would have had to pour wax in his ears.

Jónas Pálmason the Learned was one of those people whose life is forever turning with the wheel of fortune. He had no sooner reached a safe haven than he was sent straight back out on to the stormy sea, and always in a leakier vessel than the one in which he had arrived. Father and son took rooms at an inn called the Sommerfugl, or Butterfly, which Jónas nicknamed ‘the Summer Snipe’ after the harbinger of summer on his island; a respectable lodging for decent men and a sign that Providence was apparently prepared to handle him and Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur with silk gloves from now on. Indeed, his stay at the inn was so delightful in comparison with his exile on the island or being tossed at sea on the merchant ship that for the first week he could not be persuaded to leave the house but lay all day long in bed, haltingly reading a recent edition of
Aesop’s Fables
. Besides, he was fairly insulated there from the hubbub of the city. Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur on the other hand dashed all over town, working to resolve their case, which was the purpose of their journey after all: to obtain a royal writ dismissing the charges against them. He went hither and thither among those of their countrymen who he had reason to believe would be well disposed towards him and his father, asking their advice on how best to bring the matter to the attention of the king, for it would take no less than a handwritten, sealed writ from His Majesty King Christian IV to induce the judges of the Icelandic Althing to change their minds. And that was easier said than done. Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur discovered in addition that those responsible for their passage to Denmark were a group of scholars who had grown weary of Ole Worm’s incessant questions about this Jónas the Learned, who the Danish professor was convinced possessed a vast fund of knowledge about the ancient runic alphabet. For six years they had given him the same answer: that little was known of this Jónas beyond the fact that he was continually on the run from the authorities, a condemned man who infected all who came near him with his misfortunes. In the end, however, when Dr Wormius had contrived it so that the University Council was prepared to take up Jónas’s cause, and his son’s too if need be, his Icelandic colleagues could no longer ignore the requests of their brother in academia and personal friend of the king, so they had instigated a whip-round to pay for Jónas’s passage. And they sent Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur with him in the hope that the troublesome father and son would never return to Iceland.

By dint of telling Jónas that one of the stalls by the harbour had a monkey on display, Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur finally managed to rouse his father’s interest in seeing more of Copenhagen than the inn and its garden. Ever since Jónas had read Aesop’s fable about the monkey and the fox, he had been puzzling over the paradox that the animal which most resembled man should be bested by a four-footed beast with apparently human wits. He now longed to see a monkey with his own eyes, having seen more than enough of foxes. But before Jónas the Learned could abandon his straw mattress for the monkey, the machinery of Fate creaked into action once more; news came to the ears of father and son that their enemies from Iceland had reached Copenhagen before them and already launched a campaign of slander. The fiends had compiled a scroll containing all the vilest and most vicious things that had ever been said or written about Jónas the Learned, largely derived from the polemic by Reverend Gudmundur Einarsson of Stadarstadur, commonly known as the Treatise but described by himself as ‘
In versutias serpentis recti et tortuosi
, that is, a little treatise against the deceits and machinations of the Devil who works sometimes by straight, sometimes by crooked ways, to ruin the redemption of mankind.’ The juiciest morsels of this stew were highly seasoned with warnings to the Danes not to take pity on a scoundrel like Jonas, let alone permit him entry to the country, or, perish the thought, risk sheltering scum like him in Copenhagen, where Mayor Juren had long been troubled by an obscure but agonising internal complaint for which he had undergone extortionately expensive and painful cures that had achieved little but to keep him hanging on at death’s door. But since it was commonly rumoured that witchcraft lay at the root of his disease, no cost should be spared in tracking down the culprit. In such an atmosphere it proved easy for Jónas’s enemies to sow the seeds of mistrust and ill will towards him. In consequence, one noontide in mid-October a group of constables stormed the inn and arrested Jónas in the name of the king.

He was dragged before a magistrate at the City Hall where the slanderous scroll against him was read aloud and given credence, despite its mediocre composition – it lacked both tail and hind legs – and Jónas was sentenced to be transported back to Iceland. However, as there would be no ships now until spring, he was to remain in custody until that time. The magistrate paid no heed to Jónas, or rather to Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur on his behalf – since Jónas could not speak a word for the lump in his throat – who explained that he had come to Copenhagen to pursue his rights over a miscarriage of justice that had been perpetrated at the Althing, and, quite apart from that, he was a special envoy with a gift for none other than Olaus Wormius and his errand had not yet been fulfilled. The learned professor would unquestionably confirm that Jónas was not the dangerous criminal described in the letter. Was the magistrate unaware that he was known as ‘the Learned’? The magistrate did not listen, any more than he had listened to the other defences that Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur pleaded on behalf of his father. In the end, however, it was the gift for the esteemed Rector Ole Worm that decided the matter by lending support to the idea of Jónas’s dubious character, for it was a live Great Auk.

The creature had already caused alarm among the other guests at the Sommerfugl Inn, being unlike any bird they had ever seen, not only larger and more imposing but with a hoarse voice and a croak like the death rattle of a choking man. For the first few days Jónas had taken the Great Auk down to the dining room with him, placing the oblong box at his side, removing the lid and feeding the bird herring, which was plentiful in this country. The creature liked the food as much as the Danes did, though Jónas himself retched at every mouthful of this fatty inedible muck. After dinner he had permission to air the bird in the back garden. There was no danger of its escaping when he let it out of its cage, since it could not fly and was easy to corner. It was the Great Auk’s evening perambulations that had filled the onlookers with such misgivings; the manner in which the bird, if it was a bird, waddled about among the hens, upright like a mannikin, conjured up ghastly tales from the dark recesses of the mind: tales of people who had been lucky to escape alive from the clutches of witches on Walpurgisnacht, being left dumb, disfigured and a burden to themselves and their families for the rest of their lives, or rather the descriptions of the witches’ corporeal familiars. These were often a mixture of man and beast, not unlike the oddity that stood alone in the hen coop, bathed in moonlight, like a miniature version of a long-nosed witch swathed in a black cloak. For the bird was alone; the hens were all in their house, huddled together trembling, showing an uncanny fear of the malignant-looking visitant. At least the innkeeper’s testimony before the court went something along these lines when he was cross-examined about the conduct of the accused, Jónas Pálmason the Learned, during the fortnight he had stayed at the Sommerfugl Inn. No other witnesses were called; the Icelander was clapped in irons forthwith and transferred to a new and worse place, Gaoler Rasmussen’s House of Correction. There he discovered for himself that Copenhagen is like Lady Luck: capricious to many, but especially to Jónas.

It is time to introduce a contemporary of Jónas Pálmason the Learned, a man who not only authored the natural history treatise, ‘The account of an animal which falls from the clouds in Norway and rapidly devours the inhabitants’ grass and corn to their great detriment …’, but also devoted more time to studying antiquities than any other scholar in the first half of the seventeenth century, earning himself the title of Father of Nordic Antiquarianism. He is perhaps the finest example of a seventeenth-century man of science: a polymath with an insatiable thirst for knowledge who studied most branches of human knowledge; indeed there was no area of learning in which he did not take an interest. Moreover, his work was of such importance for Icelandic literature, and he had such close dealings with Icelanders, that his name deserves to be celebrated. This man was the doctor and natural philosopher, Ole Worm.

After the University Council had announced its verdict in the case of Jónas Pálmason the Learned on Wednesday 15 April 1637, the newly acquitted troublemaker was fetched from his cell beneath the chamber in the Consistorium building and taken with all haste to the laboratory of Preceptor Worm, who had personally directed his trial. Jónas was thus given his freedom within the university’s area of jurisdiction and spared the dungeon where he should by rights have languished until Christian IV had confirmed his acquittal. Upon arrival they took the Icelander directly to the laundry. There his shackles were removed, he was forcibly deloused and de-fleaed, and finally dumped in the large cauldron which was in the normal course of things used to boil the slime and feathers off the myriad exotic animal skeletons and bird skins that Dr Worm acquired for his collection from every corner of the world. After the bath, they found the servant in the rector’s employment who most resembled Jónas in build, and this small pot-bellied person was ordered to lend the newcomer a complete suit of clean clothes. On returning home to his laboratories, the master of the house found his guest in the kitchen sitting alone over his food, though with a large audience as his stay in prison had done nothing to improve his manners. As a puerile prank they had continued to bring him dishes long after he had eaten his fill – amused at the sight of him stuffing his cheeks – for Jónas, who knew no moderation after months of incarceration, fell ravenously upon everything that was laid before him. It was evident to Worm that he would burst if things carried on this way. And so the first encounter between the self-taught Jónas Pálmason and the academic Ole Worm was rather more intimate than the latter had intended. He ordered the suffering man to be taken to the very clinic in which he examined and cured the leading members of Copenhagen society, and when it became apparent that the patient’s banquet would not budge, the doctor administered both emetic and enema. As a result of these vigorous purges, the rotund servant was required to lend Jónas a second suit of clothes, and with the renewed onset of Jónas’s hunger pangs he was brought more food, though this time the meal was conducted under the watchful eye of the physician.