Supplement to the Essay contained in the First Part of this new Magazine, pp. 73 ff.:
On the Establishment of a City to be founded in the Northern Lands;
by Mr. Oeder, Stiftsamtmann in Oldenburg. *)
*) I have obtained permission to name this highly deserving patriot as the author of that excellent essay. To him I am likewise indebted for the fine observation that, prior to the discovery of the banks near Terrenenve, the most considerable stockfish fishery was at Iceland, and that negotiations were conducted between King Christian IV and Queen Elizabeth concerning permission for the English to fish off Iceland. It is not credible that the sea around Iceland should now be less abundant in fish than it was at that time.
On the 25th of January 1768 there was communicated to me a memorandum which the Bailiff of Finmarken, Mr. Hammer, had in the year 1763 submitted to the Royal Rent Chamber, wherein he set forth the present wretched condition of Finmarken and its causes. From the fourteenth century until the sixteenth Finmarken was in a flourishing state; but in proportion as the privileges of the cities of Bergen and Drontheim, and especially of Bergen, took root and were further extended, so all means of subsistence in Finmarken declined. This received its final blow in the year 1715, when trade fell into the hands of a few Copenhagen merchants, and the payment made to the inhabitants for their produce was arbitrarily reduced. Mr. Hammer enumerates twelve churches and a great number of fishing stations (Fiske Vaehr), which in part had resembled small towns and are now no longer in existence. As proof that, among other things, the whale fishery must in former times have been of importance, there serve the jawbones found in great abundance around Haßwig (if I rightly recall the name), from which even a close enclosure of the churchyard is seen to have been constructed. At present, however, there are in Finmarken no more than a thousand families—Finns, Quaines, and Norwegians; and of the latter, who alone pursue the fishery, they are the fewest. From neighboring Russia, on the other hand, there arrive annually 7 to 800 persons who fish along the Norwegian coast. One can scarcely desire a more striking example from which to recognize how greatly exclusive privileges suppress all industrious pursuit of subsistence, impede population, and drive away inhabitants already settled. Even solely according to the accounts of the author cited, which agree with others, the coast around Finmarken, blessed with whales, herrings, stockfish, and the like, is just as considerable as that around Terreneuve.
Mr. Hammer puts forward well-intentioned proposals for the improvement of Finmarken, yet taken together they would accomplish nothing. Finmarken alone can give existence to no city, nor does it require one for itself alone. But a city in the Northern Lands, serving Finmarken, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and at the same time the trade with Russia and with the Swedish Lapps, would become a considerable city. Its establishment in fact costs nothing but the will to remove the obstacles and to allow people to make use of the gifts of nature according to their best judgment and knowledge. Here, as on a hundred other occasions, it is true that a government, without any expenditure, merely by clearing away moral and political impediments, can advance human industry infinitely more than by costly intervention.