Et quacunque viam dederit fortuna sequamur

“Et quacunque viam dederit fortuna sequamur” is the Latin farewell Professor Fridriksson calls after the departing travelers as they leave Reykjavik. Rendered in the text as “And whichsoever way thou goest, may fortune follow!”, the line frames the expedition as a journey whose direction and destination remain uncertain, while its later course gives the farewell an added resonance.

A Farewell at Departure

The words come at the end of the travelers’ stay with Fridriksson. At six o’clock their preparations are complete; he shakes hands warmly with them, and Professor Hardwigg thanks him in Icelandic for his hospitality. The narrator, Henry Lawson, offers his own compliments in Latin. Once these reciprocal farewells are done, the party mounts its horses, and Fridriksson calls out the Virgilian line specifically as a parting benediction for travelers setting out toward an uncertain destination.

The quotation is followed by an English rendering that preserves its sense of movement and contingency: whichever way the journey goes, fortune is wished as a companion. It is not an instruction to take a particular route. Instead, its valedictory force lies in accepting that the route ahead cannot yet be known.

Language and Fellowship

The farewell draws together the linguistic exchange that has made Fridriksson especially accessible to Henry. Fridriksson speaks Icelandic and Latin, and Latin gives the two a language in which they can understand one another. Henry’s Latin compliments at departure answer that earlier connection in kind: the quotation is at once a classical allusion and a personal gesture between the scholar and the traveler.

Its placement also marks a transition from hospitality to motion. The travelers have received lodging and assistance in Reykjavik; now they leave on horseback, carrying the friendship expressed in the farewell into a landscape and journey beyond the town. The line’s plural sense of following a way suits the expedition’s collective departure, while its address as a blessing leaves the outcome open.

Resonance Across the Journey

The expedition’s progress makes the idea of an unknown route more than a conventional farewell. On Mount Sneffels, Professor Hardwigg identifies its two peaks and asks Hans for the local name of the one beneath them; Hans answers, “Scartaris.” Later, when the party sets out by raft across the inland sea, Hardwigg proposes naming the craft, and Henry offers a name of his own. These moments show the travelers repeatedly using names to make unfamiliar spaces and objects legible, even as the way forward remains uncertain.

The narrator’s later measurements give the journey a concrete scale. From Port Gretchen the raft has traveled two hundred and seventy leagues, more than eight hundred miles, across the inland sea; the travelers are six hundred and twenty leagues from Iceland and directly beneath England. The farewell’s appeal to fortune thus stands beside the expedition’s habit of observation and calculation: its course may be uncertain, but the travelers continue to record where it has taken them. The line’s significance lies in that conjunction of classical fellowship, departure, and a route whose turns become meaningful only as the journey unfolds.