The Magnet Mountain
The fairy tale of the magnet mountain runs through the whole old world — from the Arab Sindbad to German Eulenspiegel — and has taken its own form in Friesland. A ship sails too near an island of black rock, and all the iron is drawn out: nails, cannonballs, anchor, and at last the ship itself.
1 The black island
Captain Eelke Tjepkema sailed his three-master De Fryslân in 1683 for Archangel to buy furs. A storm drove the ship off course on the third night, and it found itself, in the fog, before an island of black rock. No chart marked it. When the fog lifted, Eelke saw that the island bore no living thing, no tree, no bird — only bare gleaming black rocks.
The mate suddenly pointed at the compass: the needle turned and pointed at the island. Not to the north. Eelke understood. He had heard of it from his grandfather. «Magnet mountain!» he cried. «All hands, turn the ship!» But it was too late. A silent force drew the ship to the rock. Not the sail, not the current — the iron in the ship was being drawn.
2 The captain and the nails
Eelke understood what was about to happen. He called his carpenter: «To work! Pull every iron nail from the ship! Throw them into the sea!» The carpenter trembled, but obeyed. With crowbars the sailors levered every nail from the planks. Nail after nail, rivet after rivet flew over the side into the sea, drawn by the magnet mountain.
The ship creaked. Without nails the planks loosened. The anchor shot out of its mount and flew through the air to the island. The balls of the ship’s cannon shot through their ports, as if they were dragons flying to their nest. The ship fell apart like a doll’s house. But when all the iron was gone, the ship came to rest. Wooden planks, those at least no longer bound by iron, now drifted free in the sea.
3 The return
Eelke and his men built a raft from the drifting planks. Without a single nail, only knotted with rope. On the raft they sailed away from the black island. For eight days they drifted on the White Sea. On the ninth a Russian cog found them. The men were brought to Archangel and thence home to Hindeloopen by way of Hamburg.
Eelke told the tale of the magnet mountain, but no one believed him. He died in 1701, old and poor. In his bookcase lay a piece of wood from De Fryslân, with one hole where the nail had been — the proof, he said, that the magnet mountain existed. That piece of wood hangs today in the Hindelooper Museum, in a case inscribed: «Wood from a ship that came too near a secret island.»
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