Let me tell you about another of my interesting discoveries in Norway.
There have been only five directors of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute since its establishment in 1866. But the statistics are somewhat overwhelmed by the tenure of Henrik Mohn, the first director, who headed the institute for nearly 50 years from 1866 to 1914. He was, it turns out, a kind of Norwegian George Du Noyer.
Du Noyer, you may recall from some otherwise long-forgotten Weather Eye, served in the Geological Survey of Ireland in the last century, mapping the various soils and rocks that form our island. By temperament he was an artist, and on his journeys around the country he produced technically brilliant watercolours of the geological features, and decorated his field-sheets with artistically perfect sketches that gave a pictorial impression of the areas being geologically mapped.
Henrik Mohn was similarly talented. On his visits to meteorological stations all over Norway, he filled dozens of sketchbooks with beguiling images of the people and the places he encountered on his travels.
For me, however, his most captivating legacy is a series of watercolours arranged along the main staircase of the institute, specially painted by Mohn to illustrate the 13 original criteria of the Beaufort Scale.
Nowadays the winds on the Beaufort Scale for maritime purposes are defined in terms of their effect on the surface of the open sea; for use on land, the Beaufort numbers refer to the effect of the wind on familiar homely objects like loose bits of paper, umbrellas, trees and chimney pots. But when originally devised by Admiral Beaufort early in the last century, the universal criterion was the effect of the wind on a typical full-rigged man-o'-war of the British navy, and in particular on the amount of sail it could carry in winds of various strengths without its getting into trouble.
This is what Mohn set out to illustrate. His ships, to be sure, are not British men-o'-war; I suppose they could be schooners, sloops, or even clippers, but their sails are depicted to show each of the Beaufort forces very clearly.
One delicate drawing shows all sails unfurled for a "light air"; a "moderate breeze", force 2, which Beaufort describes as a wind such that a "well-conditioned man-o'-war, under all sail and clean-full, would go in smooth water at from 5 to 6 knots", is depicted in another painting by a sailing ship that seems to do just that; and the "close-reefed main topsails and a reefed foresail" required to survive in a "whole gale" are vividly portrayed in watercolour No. 8.