If a skipper wants news from the North Sea or Skager Rack, he generally keeps a look-out for one of these pilot-boats, and finds a living shipping list, and the newest too, on board, which costs him, at the most, supposing he has nothing of interest to impart in return, a roll of tobacco, a bottle of spirits, or a strand of rope.

But it is to the captain who, on some pitch-dark winter night, when the sea is running mountains high, has come in beneath bare poles under the Torungens, and who knows that he is doomed if he cannot get a pilot, that these Merdoe men are most familiar.

When, perhaps, he has given up all hope, he suddenly hears himself hailed from the darkness; a line is thrown; and a dripping pilot stands upon the deck.

When the sea is too rough to board a vessel in any other way, they do not think twice about taking a line round their waist and jumping overboard; and when it is a point of honour with them to bring in a ship, boat and home and life weigh but very little in the opposite scale.
The black-bearded Salve Kristiansen soon came to be the best known in Arendal of them all.

The dauntless look in his keen brown eyes, his sharp features, and his short, sudden manner and way of speaking, gave the impression of a character of uncommon energy; and it was said that not the very wildest weather would deter him from going to sea.