There was a time when all we ever carried was grain. We bought it in one place and sold it in another. Now we were circumnavigating the globe with a hold full of commodities whose names we had to learn to pronounce and whose use had to be explained to us. Our ships had become our schools. They were still powered by the wind in their sails, as they had been for thousands of years. But stacked in their holds lay the future.
Albert Madsen came ashore when he was about fifty, as most of us did. If you'd saved up thirty thousand kroner by then, you could put it in the savings bank, where they offered you 4 percent interest per annum, and you'd get a monthly payment of one hundred kroner: enough to live on. But Albert had earned much more than that, and he didn't put his money in the bank. Instead, he invested it in ships and became a shipowner and broker. Many of those who bought shares in ships in those days, including farmers from the interior of the island, knew nothing about shipping and needed advice from someone who himself had once sailed and understood the sea. This called for someone known as a corresponding shipowner, and Albert became a corresponding shipowner like no other. During his many travels he'd become acquainted with a Jewish tailor in Rotterdam who went on board ships docked there to make clothes for the sailors, and they'd become friends. Luis Presser was an astute businessman. After Rotterdam he'd settled in Le Havre and set up his own shipping company, with a fleet of seven large barks. He had them registered in Marstal and made Albert, who'd just come ashore, their corresponding owner.
In Le Havre Albert had fallen in love with Presser's wife, a beautiful Chinese lady called Cheng Sumei. And she'd fallen in love with him. They'd looked at each other, realized that they'd met too late in life, and decided on friendship instead. When Luis Presser died suddenly of pneumonia, his widow took over the business and continued it with even greater success than her late husband. Perhaps she'd always been the woman behind the man. At any rate, she now became the woman behind Albert. It was she who advised him as he went from being captain on the brig Princess to managing ten ships.
Their two businesses eventually became so closely intertwined that Cheng Sumei's company in Le Havre was hard to distinguish from Albert's in Marstal. Albert too had a talent for making money. Once, when he was a young man, he'd stood on the deck of a ship in the Pacific with a bag of pearls in his hand that could have made all his dreams come true, and he'd flung it into the sea because he felt that the wealth they could buy him would bring a curse. Now a woman from China had placed a new bag of pearls in his outstretched hand. And this time he'd opened it.
We don't know whether Albert Madsen and Cheng Sumei were entwined as closely on a personal level as they were on a business one. Life had demanded so many changes from both of them: first they'd had to snuff their growing love and replace it with friendship. Now the possibility of love was open to them once again. Did they grab the chance?
Cheng Sumei never had children of her own, but she always referred to the company's huge, elegant barks, such as the Claudia, the Suzanne, and the Germaine, as her "daughters." She was now too old to bear a child, though you wouldn't know it from her strangely ageless features. The two held hands in public. They probably slept together too, the slim Chinese lady with the smooth, polished skin stretched beautifully across her high cheekbones and the big, coarsely built Dane who could easily fill a double bed. But they never married.
She'd been born in Shanghai. She'd never known her parents and had survived on the street by selling flowers. Many of us had met her in Rotterdam when Presser was still alive and coming on board our ships to measure us up for clothes. But she'd also been seen in Sydney and in Bangkok, in Bahia and in Buenos Aires. Some claimed to have met her in a brothel; others had known her as the manager of a boardinghouse. We all believed we knew something about her, but none of us knew anything for certain. She'd have needed nine lives, like a cat, to have appeared in all the places we thought we'd seen her. She was as well traveled as any long-haul sailor.
But she never came to Marstal; it was always Albert who went to Le Havre. Until one day he stopped. At first we thought they'd fallen out. But then we learned she'd died—quite unexpectedly. Albert didn't tell us any of this; we pieced it together ourselves. Why had they never married? Why hadn't they lived together? Had Albert not loved her enough? Had she not been enough in love with him?
If any of us got up the nerve to ask why he'd never married her or anyone else, he'd reply, "I was in so much of a hurry that I clean forgot." That made us laugh. He'd had plenty of opportunities.
When Albert first came ashore, he bought the old merchant's house on the right-hand side of Prinsegade as you come up from the harbor. Later, he moved across the street, into a brand-new house he'd had built for himself, with high ceilings and a first floor. From its large east-facing balcony he could see the breakwater and the archipelago. A bay window gave onto the street. On the small pane of glass above his front door he had his name painted in gilt letters: ALBERT MADSEN.
Diagonally across from his was the house of Lorentz Jørgensen, who'd set up shop as a shipowner and broker many years before Albert. As a boy, Lorentz had been fat and wheezing, with a permanent pleading look in his eyes. Then the sea had hardened him until we forgot that we'd once thought of him as nothing but a flabby sissy with no balls. He hadn't stayed long at sea, and had come ashore after sitting his navigation exam. Though he'd not been able to save up much from's his modest wages, it turned out he had a talent for making money. He bought shares in ships and knew how to talk business with Marstal Savings Bank. He entered into a kind of partnership with the biggest shipowner in town, Sofus Boye, who was nicknamed Farmer Sofus because he came from Ommel, a village three kilometers inland from Marstal.
Lorentz Jørgensen hadn't yet turned thirty when he convinced us to have a telegraph cable laid from Langeland. He spoke of the world market and the telegraph. The words meant little to us, but he managed to convey that the world market was to the sailor what the soil was to the farmer, and that without a telegraph we'd never make contact with it.
The government turned us down when we applied for financial assistance for the telegraph. So Lorentz went to see Sofus Boye. Farmer Sofus was a modest man who despite owning the biggest shipping company in town could still sometimes be found waiting by the ferry dock, hustling a few coins as a porter. He had no office as such: he'd just tap his forehead with his index finger and say he kept everything in there. But Farmer Sofus listened when Lorentz described the speaking cable that could shrink distances to nothing.
"It doesn't matter whether you live in a big town or a small one. Even if you live on the tiniest island in the middle of the ocean, as long as you have a telegraph, you're at the center of the world."
This kind of talk sounded fanciful to most people, but not to Farmer Sofus, whose ears quite readily went deaf on other matters. He came along with Lorentz to Marstal Savings Bank and told him to repeat what he'd said about the telegraph to Rudolf Østermann, the manager.
"The center of the world," Lorentz insisted.
The bank manager, who considered himself something of a wit, was on the verge of asking if there was any chance of using this telegraph thing to contact the good Lord God—but one sharp look from Farmer Sofus wiped the grin right off his face. As it turned out, Rudolf Østermann soon became the most zealous of the invention's converts, frequently declaring, "The telegraph office is the heart of a town, a pure blessing. They should have it in the church." He'd completely forgotten the joke he'd been ready to crack the first time Lorentz told him about it.
Once Marstal Savings Bank and the biggest shipowner in town had backed the telegraph, other Marstal investors emerged. If the government wouldn't help us, we'd just have to help ourselves.
It was also Lorentz who came up with a plan for the town's own mutual marine insurance. At first we insured only small ships, and then as Marstal's prosperity increased, we took on big vessels too. In 1904 the Marine Insurance Company acquired its own building on the co
rner of Skolegade and Havnegade, a splendid red-brick house with a relief on its façade depicting a schooner in full sail. The building served the same function as the breakwater: it protected us.
Nothing escaped the attention of the meticulous and imaginative Lorentz. When he was appointed harbormaster he ordered the construction of the four-hundred-foot-long steamer wharf, the Dampskibsbroen. He was also one of the cofounders of the whitewashed Marstal Dairy, with its tall chimney, in Vestergade. He bought a horse, and he cut an impressive figure as he rode through town with the beast's iron-shod hooves ringing on the cobbles. He was the real master builder of the town—though the wall he built around Marstal was an invisible one, designed to shield us from all the unforeseen accidents of life at sea.
Lorentz married a woman two years his senior, Katrine Hermansen. It was a late marriage, but the couple managed to have three children. The eldest immigrated to America, the middle one he sent to England to learn the shipping trade, and the youngest, a girl, stayed at home and married a sail maker, Møller from Nygade. They had four children, who turned up at their grandfather's office in Prinsegade every day to sing to him in their gentle, clear voices. On Lorentz's desk lay telegrams from Algiers, Antwerp, Tangier, Bridgewater, Liverpool, Dunkirk, Riga, Kristiania, Stettin, and Lisbon. In his later years he ran to fat and began to resemble his old self in the days before he went to sea. But no one teased him about his big body anymore. As he sat in the swivel chair of his office, listening to his grandchildren singing, he reminded us of one of those chubby, contented Buddhas you see in Chinese temples.
The cemetery where Lorentz would one day be laid to rest was new, like so many other things in Marstal in those days. Previously we'd all been buried in the churchyard between Kirkestræde and Vestergade, in the shadow of the beech trees. But now we were put to rest in a completely new cemetery outside the town, which sloped toward the beach from Ommelsvejen and provided a view of the archipelago. In it we planted a long avenue of rowan trees that would last at least a hundred years. There was room there for many dead.
Certainly we were hoping to be just as numerous in the future as we were then. Perhaps we even thought there'd be more of us. We must also have hoped we'd no longer die in foreign ports or at sea, but instead draw our final breaths in familiar surroundings.
A cemetery that fills up slowly sends out a comforting message: You'll die in the place where you were born, the place you love, the place where you belong. You'll see your children grow up. You'll sit, bent with age, while your grandchildren sing to you and your life stretches out behind you like a slope that begins on the narrow, white edge of the beach and ends on a hill with a view of the archipelago.
When one of us was once asked why, when his ship was floundering in a storm, he'd refused to give up even though death seemed like a certainty, he'd given an answer that would seem strange to anyone but a Marstaller. It was Morten Seier, the first mate of the Flora, which was skippered by Anders Kroman. It was December 1901, and the ship was bound for Kiel with a load of English coal. A west wind rose and grew, and for six days the Flora was adrift in a hard gale, covered in frost, with only the reefed mainsail and the staysail set. Then the storm turned into a hurricane and swept off the longboat, the galley, and the wheelhouse. The men could venture on deck only if secured to a line, while waves as big as houses crashed down on them from all directions. On the tenth day a huge wave took away the rigging, and the cargo shifted. When the Flora rose out of the raging water again, she'd taken a severe list. Masts, rigging, and all the superstructure had gone, and the wreckage floated on the waves, covered with white foam from the pressure of the hurricane.
They gathered in the cabin and Captain Kroman, who was a plain-speaking man, informed them that they shouldn't expect to see Christmas.
Then another huge wave crashed over the ship and flung them against the bulkhead. Now they were convinced that the Flora had been dealt her final blow. Knowing she would soon sink, they braced themselves for a watery grave.
But the badly damaged hull stayed afloat.
And that's when Morten Seier had the idea that saved them: sling the entire cargo overboard so that the stern could lift above the waterline. They couldn't open the hatches for fear of flooding the ship with seawater, so instead they used their axes to chop through the bulkhead and into the hold. And from there they began heaving out the coal. None of them had got a wink of sleep since the rigging was swept overboard three nights before. Nevertheless, freezing in the howling snowstorm that swept the bare deck, and soaked by the icy water that washed over them incessantly, the six-man crew of the Flora used buckets and sacks to shift forty tons of coal and tip them into the sea. In one night: nearly seven tons, or seven thousand kilos, per man.
Afterward, according to Morten Seier, they were all dead on their feet. They soon fell into a deep sleep—the men in the now empty hold, Captain Kroman and Seier in the cabin.
When they woke it was early in the morning of December 24, and the storm had died down. They calculated that they were approximately sixteen sea miles from the Orkney Islands, but as the storm had taken their lifeboat, the sight of land made doom just as likely as salvation. So they shackled the two anchor chains together to avoid drifting into the murderously rocky coast.
Finally help came. A Dutch fishing boat appeared on the horizon, and soon the crew of the Flora was on board.
"What made you keep going?" we asked Seier.
It was a stupid question, but we asked it anyway, though anyone could work out the answer. Morten Seier wanted to see his house in Buegade again. He didn't want to be parted from his wife, Gertrud, or his children, Jens and Ingrid, who needed him just as much as he needed them. He wanted to be back for Christmas. And like any other sailor, he wanted to end up captain of his own ship before he came ashore for good. To sum it up: it was too early for him to die.
But Morten Seier didn't offer any of those explanations. Instead he gave us something completely different: an intelligent answer to a stupid question.
"I kept going because I wanted to be buried in the new cemetery," he said.
You might think this was a strange reply. Perhaps only a sailor could understand it. But our new cemetery represented hope.
It was something to come home to.
What would we have done if a stranger had told us that the burial ground would remain half empty, and that only a few gravestones would testify to the lives that were once lived here, or that the avenue of rowan trees we'd planted along the high road would one day be half-buried by tall grass, so that only a trained eye could discern the landscape we'd planned in that wilderness?
What would we have done if a stranger had told us that the ancestral chains binding us to Marstal would soon be broken, and forces stronger than the sea would carry us away?
We'd have laughed at him, the fool.
ALBERT MADSEN DIDN'T believe in God and he didn't believe in the devil either. He believed, a little, in mankind's capacity for good; as for evil, he'd seen it for himself on board the ships he'd sailed. He also believed in common sense, but even that wasn't his strongest belief. Above all else, Albert Madsen believed in fellowship. As far as he knew, those who believed in God had no proof that He existed. But Albert had proof of his own belief in fellowship—and it was a solid reality. He saw it every morning when he looked out of his gable window, past the broker's office in Prinsegade, and he could see it from the bay window of his office below too: in fact, it was the reason he'd added the window to the house. And when he descended the three stone steps at his front door and turned right down Prinsegade toward the harbor, there it was again, laid out before him.
The mighty breakwater had taken the town forty years to build. It lay in the middle of the bay, more than a thousand meters long and four meters high, built from boulders each weighing several tons. Like the Egyptians with their pyramids, we'd built a vast monument of stone. Ours, though, was not meant to preserve the memory of the dead, but to protect the l
iving. Which made us wiser than them. The breakwater was the work of a pharaoh, Albert told us: a pharaoh with many faces. Together they represented what he called fellowship.
This was Albert's morning worship: his sailor's eyes would roam the sky and its cloud formations, full of messages for those who could read them, and then settle on the breakwater. It brought him a feeling of serenity. There it lay, a dormant power stronger than the sea, capable of calming the tides beyond it and providing shelter for the ships: living proof of human fellowship. We don't sail because the sea is there. We sail because there's a harbor. We don't start by heading for distant shores. We seek protection first.
Albert rarely went to church. But he attended services on festival days and special occasions because the church too was part of man's fellowship, and he didn't want to be isolated from it. He had no particular respect for the ritual. But a church is like a ship. Certain rules apply and once you come on board, you have to adhere to them. And if you can't, you should stay away.
For years a succession of ministers had complained that the church was badly maintained. But when Pastor Abildgaard, with whom Albert was on otherwise good terms, went so far as to argue that money earmarked for the school should be spent on the church's façade, he was given short shrift. When it came to choosing between education and religion, Albert said, he'd choose education every time. The school represented young people and the future—and the church didn't. If the school in Vestergade was bigger than the church, so much the better. Any town that believed in the future should take note.
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