Bergen Maritime Museum. Nygårdsparken.

On this, my last afternoon in Bergen, Norway I visited the Bergen Maritime Museum and a park, Nygårdsparken.

This being my last entry from Bergen, I’ll put a Bergen summary at the end of the post. Stay tuned for that.

Bergen Maritime Museum

First, let me give you the Norwegian name of the Bergen Maritime Museum. It’s “Bergens Sjøfartsmuseum.” I know I’ve been inconsistent about providing Norwegian names for the sights I visit, but I like the name Sjøfartsmuseum. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea why it strikes my fancy. I honestly don’t think it’s the juvenile explanation that it contains “farts,” but because I can’t think of any other reason for me to enjoy the name, let’s go with that.

That out of the way, I’ll use the English name from here on in because typing “Bergen Maritime Museum” is easier than copying and pasting “Sjøfartsmuseum” or remembering the name,—which is not easy for me, an anglophone—and then typing it, holding down the “o” long enough for my Apple device to pop up the accent options for “o”s. And when they do pop up, those options appear so small and that my ancient eyes have trouble finding the one I need.

I’m reasonably certain that my Mac has a keyboard combination for putting a diagonal slash through a letter that can take one in some languages. But I use it so infrequently that it’s not worth searching for how to do it. And I wouldn’t remember it from one time to the next.

Besides, I usually travel alone. I use the time between courses and bites at restaurants to do some of the typing of these entries on my iPhone. My iPhone doesn’t offer me the keyboard combination option for accents, just the hold-down-the-letter option.

Jeez, you people should stop me when I start on one of these lengthy, boring, pointless tangents. I depend on you to keep me on a straight, marginally succinct path, but you regularly let me down. It’s your fault. You have no one but yourself for allowing me to publish this claptrap.

Let’s get back to the Bergen Maritime Museum and have no more of this nonsense.

The museum is small. The building doesn’t have a large footprint to start with, but it surrounds an open-air courtyard of grass and a square decorative pool. I didn’t try it, but I don’t think the door to the courtyard was usable by the visiting public.

Thus, the displays are in wide corridors around the square on the museum’s two levels. Some of the space on the lower level is taken up by the ticket desk and a small gift shop. On the second floor, there’s a not-overly small sitting area. In other words, there’s not a lot of exhibit space.

The items on display consist primarily of models of ships from various times. There are also some small real boats. And there are a few undersea archaeology relics.

The Bergen Maritime Museum’s purview covers maritime operations from the Stone Age through to much more modern times.

The museum places narrative text throughout the space. Those signs are in both Norwegian and English.

But some items have tags that say only what it is and give some statistics such as width, length, where it was made, etc. Which stats are on the tag depends on the item.

Here’s the weird thing, in most cases, the words on those tags are unilingual. In some cases it’s Norwegian, but in others it’s English.

The museum has a walk-in mock-up of three connected rooms in an old ship. I think it was supposed to be a captain’s quarters and office. But I don’t know. Unless I missed another tag, it had only a unilingual Norwegian tag on it.

I did get some interesting information out of the narrative texts, such as:

• There are no examples in existence of the oldest boats referenced in the Bergen Maritime Museum. They’re known only from art such as cave drawings.
• The name “Norway” comes from “way leading to the north,” by sea.
• Norway’s coast is more than 1,000 kilometres long.
• The earliest boats in the land that’s now Norway were probably made of animal skins and logs.
• Burying people in boats was an ancient tradition and it became common for upper-class Vikings.
• In 1628, a Norwegian royal decree gave cities trade privileges if they armed their merchant ships. In peacetime, the ships could use their guns to protect themselves against pirates, but they had to put their ships in the service of the navy in wartime.

The museum’s text also told a story that I read at another museum in Bergen, but I don’t remember where. It might have been a text panel in the Rosenkrantz Tower. I don’t recall writing the story up then, so I’ll do it here (with my modern-day prologue). If this is a repeat, I apologize.

In modern times, if governments need or want more money than is coming into them they have basically three economically sound (as opposed to just recklessly printing money) options: Raise taxes, borrow, or make spending cuts.

At one time (and maybe today in thankfully rare cases), some governments had another option: piracy.

In the early 1660s, the merged country of Denmark and Norway was heavily indebted. England also needed considerably more revenue then too. Capturing merchant ships belonging to enemies that a country was at war with and seizing the goods was considered to be a legitimate and lucrative way for a government to raise funds.

At the time of the Anglo-Dutch war, in the 17th century, some Dutch merchant ships loaded with valuable cargoes took refuge in Bergen. That probably wasn’t a good idea considering Denmark-Norway’s indebtedness.

Because England and Denmark-Norway both needed money, they agreed to let England capture the ships in Bergen, without the Bergenhus Fortress there defending the harboured ships, and the two countries would divide the spoils.

However, the Danish-Norwegian king, who resided in Copenhagen, got cold feet and waited as long as possible—too long for the English—to send the order to Bergenhus to stand down. The English lost patience and attacked Bergen before the order made it to Bergenhus. Consequently, the commander at Bergenhus followed the rules of neutrality and opened fire on the aggressor. As best as I could tell from the text, it didn’t work out well for anyone.

On the second floor of the Bergen Maritime Museum, there was a small temporary exhibit titled “Queer Lives at Sea.” It told the story of gays at sea in a male-dominated environment, where the people on the ships spent a lot of time together at sea. Much of the focus was on the acceptance, or rather lack thereof, of gays at sea and the effect of that on gay seamen.

The Bergen Maritime Museum is on the peninsula that forms one side of the Bergen harbour, the other side from Bryggen. The museum is near the far side of the peninsular from the harbour, close to the water on the other side. Strategically placed picture windows at the museum showed me where Bergen hides its cargo port, i.e., on that side of the peninsula.

Bergen Maritime Museum is another of Bergen’s little, a wee bit quirky, specialty museums. I enjoyed it.

Nygårdsparken

After leaving the Bergen Maritime Museum I walked to a park not far away, Nygårdsparken, to just walk, sit, and relax.

Nygårdsparken is a Goldilocks city park. Not too big, not too small. Just right.

There are lots of mature trees, lawns and flowers. My walking tour app told me that some of those date back to the park’s inception. The park opened in 1885.

There are also some statues and fountains, and a small serpentine lake with fountains in it.

I found a nice bench beside the lake, near one of the lake’s fountains, and sat for a while listening to the gentle gushing of the water from the fountain. (Is it possible to gush gently? My point was it’s a small fountain and the sound of it was gentle even as the water gushed out of it.)

I was glad to read that the park opened in 1885 and the name originated a few years earlier with the founding of an association to build the park. I worried that it might have been much more recent and named after Peter Nygärd, the Canadian-Finnish former fashion executive. In 2023, he was convicted in Toronto, Canada of sexual assault and he faces other charges in both Canada and the United States. If the park were named after him, they’d probably be looking for a new name for it now.

On the walk back from Nygårdsparken I passed through some neighbourhoods I hadn’t been through before, including one that had some buildings that are much more modern than are typical in Bergen. Those buildings didn’t have a brick or so much as a stick of wood showing as far as I could see.

The modern buildings were all mid-rise. I liked the architecture of some, but I neither loved nor hated any of them. Then again, architectural appreciation is such a subjective thing. I occasionally read a column written by an architectural critic back home in Toronto. Some of the buildings he loves, I hate. And vice versa. It’s not often I agree with him.

The point is, you’ll have to judge the more modern Bergen buildings for yourself. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of them. I guess you’ll have to visit Bergen.

Also on my way back, I passed a large, stately old building of stone and red brick. Checking Google Maps, I saw it was another of the Kode museums. You might remember I went to three Kode museums the other day. This one is called “Permanenten.” Google Translate tells me that translates to “The Permanent” in English.

Not so permanent. The Permanenten is currently closed in honour of my visit

Bergen Summary

I’m having a hard time thinking of what to say in this summary about Bergen because I don’t want to slip into sickeningly effusive praise, but I love this place.

The charm of Bryggen is second to none, but some of the other residential districts come close. The city has lots of little specialty museums, some of them quirky. They’re fun, interesting and, being small, not at all overwhelming. And of course, there’s the beautiful harbour and the opportunity to cruise fjords.

I wouldn’t have minded spending more time here. There are different cruises available, some shorter and some longer than the one I took, and they sound interesting. There are some all-day, water-based and land-based tours I didn’t go on that begin and end in Bergen and go to sights that look beautiful in the promotional pictures. In addition, there are a couple of larger museums of the more standard general-purpose type that I didn’t get to. And, I wouldn’t have minded just walking and sitting around soaking up the charm of the place some more.

If I were the sort of person to assign stars to places I visit, Bergen would get the maximum number, or close to it.