Except the cook, who was a Fin

In the course of our conversation, he informed me that he had a snug birth aboard the Hercules, merchantman. This vessel was built in the Gulph of Finland, burthen 800 tons. She was two years on the stocks, composed entirely of fir and pine, except her knees, which were oak. The axe and long Finland knife were the only tools employed. The saw and the plane were excluded. The hands were Swedes, except the cook, who was a Fin, and it was well for him, that he did not understand the Swedish language, for the poor fellow often thought they were prasing his culinary powers, when they were cursing him.

The memoirs and adventures of Mark Moore, late an officer in the British navy. 1795

These are called beds of Loulais

The King set out for Finland in the beginning of June, for the purpose of reviewing the troops in the dutchy. There a volley from a party commanded by himself startled his horse, and he had the misfortune to break his arm by a fall. The interview with the Empress, though retarded by this accident, was effected on the 29th of June, and celebrated, during the three days which their majesties remained together, by continual fetes. The Empress had caused a very elegant wooden palace to be erected at Fredericksham, richly ornamented and furnished, in which was an elegant theatre, appropriated to the performances of a troop of French comedians provided for the occasion. The King gave the Empress very positive assurances of an exact neutrality, and returned to Stockholm on the 4th of July, entirely recovered of the fracture. The burgesses of Stockholm, in memory of the happy return and recovery of their Monarch, set apart the sum of 4,000 rix-dollars, for the perpetual support of some beds in the Royal Hospital, at hich fractures of arms and legs are to be cured gratis. These are called beds of Loulais, from the name of the camp at which the accident happened to the King.

I. F. Henry Drevon: A journey through Sweden, containing a detailed account of its population, agriculture, commerce, and finances. ~1789

Contemplativeness is another distinctive feature of the Finns

The disasters, the wars, the bad crops, the famines, from which the Finnish peasant has so often had to suffer, have created his capacity of grave and uncomplaining submission to fate ; but the relative liberty he has always enjoyed has prevented him from developing that sad spirit of resignation, that deep sorrow which too often characterizes his Russian brother. Never having been a personal serf, he is not servile; he always maintains his personal dignity and speaks with the same grave intonation and self-respect to a Russian tsar as to his neighbor. A lymphatic temperament, slowness of movement and of thought, and sullen indifference have often been imputed to him. In fact, when I have entered on a Sunday a peasant house in eastern Finland, and found several men sitting on the benches round the wall, dropping only a few words at long intervals, plunged in a mute reverie as they enjoyed their inseparable pipes, I could not help remembering this reproach addressed to the Finnish peasant. But I soon perceived that though the Finn is always very deliberate in his movement, slowness of thought and indifference are peculiar only to those, unhappily too numerous, village paupers whom long continued want and the struggle for life without hope of improvement have rendered callous. Still, a Finnish peasant family must be reduced to very great destitution before the wife loses her habits of cleanliness, which are not devoid of a certain aesthetical tint. The thrift of the Finn is striking; not only among those who have no choice, for they are compelled to live upon rye bread, baked four times a year and containing an admixture "of the bark of our black pines," as Runeberg says. Simplicity of life is the rule in all classes of society; the unhealthy luxury of the European cities is yet unknown to the Finns ; and the Russian tchinovnik cannot but wonder how the Finnish official lives, without stealing, on the scanty allowance granted him by the State.

Contemplativeness — if I am permitted to use this ugly word — is another distinctive feature of the Finns : Tawastes, Sawas, and Karelians are alike prone to it. Contemplation of nature, a meditative, mute contemplation, which finds its expression rather in a song than in words, or incites to the reflection about nature's mysteries rather than about the facts, is characteristic as well of the peasant as of the savant. It may be akin to, without being identical with, mystical reverie. It may, in certain circumstances, give rise to mysticism, as it did at the beginning of our century; it produced that tendency towards sorcery and witchcraft for which the Finns were, and are still, renowned among and feared by their Russian neighbors ; but actually it gives rise among the instructed classes to a tendency towards a philosophic and pantheistic conception of nature, instead of the childish wonder with which others are satisfied. It also colors the Finnish folk-lore with an idealism which makes it so strongly contrast with the sensualism of the folk-lore of so many other nationalities.

P. Kropotkin: Finland: a rising nationality. (Littell's Living age. v.165. 1885)

Herrings, in large quantities, were frequently found dead

It may be deserving of mention, that in some places in Sweden, where cholera raged at this time, phenomena occurred for which it is difficult to account. Dr. Willman assures me, for instance, that soon after the disease broke out in the town of Malmo, where it caused great havoc, the jackdaws, which breed in large numbers in the church steeple, simultaneously disappeared ; and that it was not until after the cessation of the disorder that they returned to their old quarters. The same was also the case with the sparrows. The fish on the coast, moreover, especially on one particular day, came up dead to the surface, in large numbers.

The Doctor also assured me, that when he was in Finland in 1848, in which country the cholera was then raging, the herrings, in large quantities, were frequently found dead in the Gulf of Finland.

Llewelyn Lloyd: Scandinavian adventures. Volume I. 1854