“Any negotiations whatsoever are to be kept strictly private and confidential”

“Any negotiations whatsoever are to be kept strictly private and confidential” is both a stated rule of the shipping industry and a phrase the novel repurposes as a private joke. Introduced by Birgo Lander as the trade’s governing principle, it connects the concealment of shipping arrangements to the book’s broader concern with opaque corporate accounts—and returns, changed in tone, when Smilla uses it with Moritz.

Meaning and Business Context

Birgo explains the phrase while describing how a ship’s public contract can conceal the actual terms of its voyage. The formal document may give the destination as “the entire world” and the freight as “unspecified”; sensitive details can instead be placed in a side contract, accompanied by a bonus for the shipping company’s discretion. He presents such side agreements as a familiar feature of Danish shipping and says that they can keep unlawful cargoes out of the contract intended for maritime court.

The phrase functions less as a neutral description than as a warning about how business secrecy can be organized. Birgo says that ninety-eight percent of deals in the industry are made in private, and invokes confidentiality as the heading above negotiations. In this context, discretion is not merely personal reticence: contracts divide what can be formally disclosed from what is kept out of view.

Echoes in Corporate Accounting

The expression resonates with the account of the cryolite corporation’s governance. The company received partial state support, the government held 33.33 percent of its shares, and copies of its accounts were made for examination. Yet the structure also contained restricted sections and a smaller confidential ledger. The coexistence of public accounting procedures and inaccessible records gives the shipping phrase a wider institutional context: formal openness can sit beside carefully maintained secrecy.

Elsa Lübing’s recollection makes that tension concrete. On January 7, 1967, while balancing the accounts, she found an unitemized entry for 115,000 kroner and a missing file card. The finance director told her that he had authorized the entry and that further inquiry lay outside her expertise. Decades later, as she prepared to retire, she compared the old books with the accounts for the 1991 Gela Alta expedition and queried a 450,000-kroner entry; she learned that the money had been used to charter a ship. The phrase about confidential negotiations therefore sits beside a recurring problem in the novel: the gap between the visible record and the arrangements behind it.

A Private Reuse

When Smilla asks whether Birgo could find out about a customer seeking a particular ship and captain, he first answers with the industry’s strict rule of confidentiality. He then winks and says that, for her, he would go to great lengths. The gesture does not erase the rule; it marks a personal exception within it, making his willingness to help legible without turning it into a formal promise of disclosure.

Later, Smilla gives the phrase a lighter and more intimate use. After kissing Moritz on the cheek, she responds to his question about what Føjl would say by repeating, “Any negotiations whatsoever are to be kept strictly private and confidential.” The words that first described concealed commercial dealings become a shared joke, linking Birgo’s offer of help to Smilla’s teasing exchange with her father. Their recurrence shifts the phrase from professional caution to personal complicity without losing its underlying association with what is kept secret.