The Sun.
London, England, 1851-04-14 00:00:00

In the following letter I will briefly detail my expe-
rience of the route. On Saturday morning the 29th of
March, the gentleman referred to left the Shoreditch
station at eight o'clock and arrived at Lowestoft shortly
after three o'clock. There a fine new vessel—the Prince,
of London—was in readiness to receive them, and at four
o'clock they steamed out of the beautiful harbour amid
the cheers of the people assembled on the quays. There
was no wind to speak of, but in a few hours most of the
passengers had feebly retired to their berths, when they
passed the night as gentlemen of England not accus-
tomed to sailing on the seas are generally wont to
spend it when upon the German Ocean. There are
many people who profess to discover a never ending di-
versity in the sea, but they would have been hard set to
have pointed out any variety in the landscape of the
drizzling sky and leady water through which we passed
for twenty-four mortal hours. It was not often that even
a solitary sail dotted the horizon to awake a languid
curiosity, while the very seagulls seemed to have re-
tired altogether to some remoter solitude. Somehow or
other the; time passed away till a quarter-past four
o'clock on Sunday afternoon, when dinner was ready,
and just at the same moment a sharp-eyed sailor
discerned "land," a dirty line, half fog, half
mud, resting on the eastern boundary of vision,
and scarcely distinguishable from clouds and water.
This was the coast of Sylt, an outlying island of Jut-
land, the famous home cf the Jutes and Cymbri, and
more famous still in later days, when the Northmen
launched their sea-horses to plunder the plains of York-
shire or Suffolk. It is now the resort of peaceful, quiet-
going traders end farmers, who have, however, been re-
garded with almost as much dread as their ancestors by
the modern British agriculturist, Thus, the passage
from Lowestoft had been well nigh completed in twenty-
four hours, and it would have been possible to land in
twenty-eight hours from the time of our departure, but
the shallow shores and the obscurity of the evening ren-
dered it desirable not to run any risk which was not ab-
solutely unavoidable. The vessel's head was put about,
and, to the great horror of those who were afflicted with
a Catholic mal du paps, we steamed off the coast till
morning, with the xceptiou of a tew hours' rest off the
safe anchorage of List. Early in the morning the anchor
was weighed, and we stood in towards shore ; but a
snowstorm came on and turned the whole atmosphere,
the very sea and air, into a sort of floating medium, like
a mass of blancmange. This delayed us for a little, and
i- was past seven o'clock before the Prince steered past
the sands of Reveer, and ran up the arm of the sea
on which is situated the port of Hjerthing. I found
there were so many to keep me company that I do not
ofh thisesitate to confess my utter ignorance of the existence
particular place up to a few days before I landed
on its shores. It has, however, been used for some
years past as an occasional harbour for steamers en-
gaged in the cattle trade, for which it is admirably
adapted by nature, when compared with other ports on
this dangerous coast. Protected by the Skellugin on the
north and west and by Finoe on the south, and thus
sheltered from the tempestuous winds that have blown
so many vessels to destruction on Jutland, Hjerthing is
almost the only point on the west of that district which
combines safety with facility of access; while, in event
of very bad weather, the harbour of Lst, in the island
of bylt, which lies a little to the south, offers the most
secure holding ground and the most prominent land-
marks from the Elbe to the Skaw. In the channel of
Hjerthing there is good bottom, with twelve feet of
water at ebb tide; and there is no point on the coast so
capable.of developing the staple. trades of Denmark in
corn and cattle as this obscure port. _ The great cattle
district, covering an area of 457 geographical miles, lies
north and south of it, and 300,000 bead of poor cattle
and 10,000 horses have been carried annually through
this district to Schleswig and Holstein to be grazed in
the marsh lands. The passage to England is at once
the shortest and cheapest. Between Hjerthing and
Lowestoft the distance is but 300 nautical miles, the
overate passage may be reckoned at 30 hours; and the
Danish Government have had under consideration a
plan for a railroad to Fredericia, which would open rapid
memmunication between England and all the capitals of
Northern Europe. As we advanced up the channel
nothing was visible but low sand hills cumulated by the
wind and worn into fantastic outlines by the western
ar,d northern gales—just resembling the coast of Bel-
gium and Holland. After a run of an hour at easy
speed, splashing past a few round-sterned fishing boats,
wherein some bluff indolent-looking men in great jack
boots and peacoats were engaged pulling up indolent-
leoking fishes, a snug-looking village of substantial
white houses, thatched with straw, and perched across
each other, so that the gables presented as many
facets as a rose diamond, came in view; from one of
these floated the British Consular flag, and the sea-
sick travellers were soon rejoiced by the assurance they
were off Hjerthing. The anchor was let go once
more, and we rode about a mile from shore. An
odd-looking praam poked her way off from the
beach, and soon came alongside with the collector of the
Customs—a portly Dane, who spoke English perfectly,
and paid the party the first felicitations on their arrival.
A big man with a bigger pipe explored their luggage,
and pronounced us fit for land, but it was some time ere
a great lumbering schuyt put off from the shore to land
the impatient company. They were not destined to
reach tetra firma so easily—some 100 yards from the
shore the schuyt took the ground, and two little prawns
rowed*,-Off to take her freight. Into these we were hud-
dled, with the happy consciousness that we could not be
drowned, or, indeed, be much wetter than we were, and
as the pratims grounded ere they arrived at the beach
there was only the unseemly expedient of getting to
shore on the back of the burly boatmen, who shot us off
into a mixture of soft sand and mud, as coal porters
deliver the contents of a sack down a grating. However
ludicrous the sight might have been to see such an inva-
sion, the solid-looking Danes who were assembled on
the beach did not laugh at it, and we were soon gathered
together in a primitive sort of tavern to wait for a
conveyance inland. Two shrewd connoisseurs in cattle
and horses set off at once to investigate the resources of
the district in that particular, and at one o'clock two
char-a basics drove up to the door of the inn, and the
rest of the party started off for Warde, on their way
across Jutland. Oar charioteers were a cross between
the extinct English coachman and a heavy dragoon ;
with their red cloaks, yellow facings, and semi-
military hats, they seemed more slayers of men than
drivers of horses ; but their jolly, round, red faces and
enlarged corporations vindicated their vocation as mas-
,ters of the whip. The day was bitterly cold, and the
English travellers, who had smiled at the figure of the
.Danish gentleman who accompanied them in the capacity
-of guide, companion, and friend, as he appeared in a pair
of great fur boots, and a coat lined with the skins of a
Scirest full of foxes, soon experienced the necessity of
euch genial clething as they swept out of the little
'town over a black moor, across which the Eastern wind
blew " sharp enough to shave a rat." A char-a-bans
offers but poor protection against such a visitation,
And railway rugs, great coats, and cloaks were all im-
portant to save the wearers from the bone-searching
blast. The country was nearly a dead level as far as
the eye could reach. A sort of stunted heather, cover-
,
,ing a black and boggy soil, stretching away in every
direction to the very horizon, was all that met the sight,
and the road soon showed signs that it had not recovered
from the effects of the Jutland winter. It seemed, in-
deed, but a mere track across the sandy waste, ploughed
up by cart wheels, and the iron back-boards of the seats '
of the carriages speedily produced an unpleasant attri-
tion of the spinal column unknown even to a third-class
passenger in England. Of course this will never an-
swer for a stage coach or for express travelling, but we
were engaged in opening up a new route, and had no
right to grumble, however great our cause of suffering.
The passage by land was, indeed, more severe than that
by water, and quite as monotonous. Endless steppes,
wrapt by the same uniform coating cf dark heath, with
darker pools of water, and now and then a white-
washed country church in the distance, or the hut of a
lonely settler, formed the entire landscape; and it was
with much the same feeling that men on a raft hail the
sight of a sail that our half-frozen party beheld, after a
drive of eight English (nearly two Danish) miles, the
spires of Warde in the distance. Here we fortified our-
selves against the cold as well as unlimited purchases of
flannel stockings, to be drawn over boots and trousers
and hands and arms, and rude mufflers could do it,
and were soon as unlike our former selves as could well
be imagined.
From Warde the road passes over a desolate waste,
which every painter who has a mind to depict the
blasted heath at Forres should at once proceed to visit.
There is a sort of melancholy grandeur, for all its mo-
notony, in such a vast dark surface stretching away in a
great circle around one till it melts into the clouds, just
as if the ocean on a calm day were instantly solidified
by the wand of an enchanter. Here and there a dingy
little cabin, perched on a small patch of lighter colour
than the rest, and nearly approaching to verdure, showed
that man had not resigned the place to sterile solitude;
and numerous churches, whitewashed to the most painful
distinctness, spotted the purple heath, as evidences that
either the population was not as pewit,. as might.be sup
posed; or that there was an abuulance of religious ao-