We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  "But what about issues of morality?" Abildgaard objected. "Where I will the child learn about those if not in the church?"

  "On board his ship," Albert replied tersely.

  "And in foreign ports, perhaps?" the pastor retorted.

  Albert said nothing.

  Where life at sea was concerned, Albert had no illusions. He'd lived the unprotected life of a cabin boy, working like a dog and being treated worse, as he put it. However, times had changed. Living conditions on board ship had improved and become more humane. The children were better taught, and in time they became better skippers. Albert believed in progress. He also believed in a sailor's sense of honor. Fellowship stemmed from that. On a ship, one man's negligence could have fatal consequences for everyone. A sailor was quick to see that. The minister called it morality. Albert called it honor. In the church you were accountable to God. On a ship you were accountable to everyone. That made a ship a better place to learn.

  In his experience, ultimately everything came down to the captain. The captain knew the function of everything on board, down to the last sail and rope, and so did the crew. By the same token, each man also had his function, and if the captain failed to make the role of each and every one clear from the start, the crew would settle it among themselves by fighting. And then the weakest—though not necessarily the least able—would find himself at the bottom of the heap. He'd seen that happen on the Emma C. Leithfield, when Captain Eagleton let his brutal first mate, O'Connor, take over the authority of the ship. The strongest isn't always the best suited to lead. A captain has to know the human mind as well as he knows the layout of his ship.

  When Albert became a captain himself, he'd had crew members jump ship from time to time. But he'd never seen this as disobedience or evidence of the sailor's bad character, so much as a failure of his own insight into human nature. He hadn't paid enough attention to set the man on the right track. He believed there was good to be found in everyone. He knew that there was evil as well. But his basic view was that evil too could be disciplined and kept in check.

  Once, in Laguna, Mexico, sometime in the 1880s, an able seaman pulled a knife on him. Albert, who was unarmed, held out his hand for the weapon. He never thought for a moment that he was doing something unusual or courageous: he just did what he had to do in order to remain in charge. The seaman froze, frowning at Albert's outstretched hand, struggling to understand. Seizing the moment, Albert punched him in the jaw with all his strength and floored him. Then Albert put his boot on the man's wrist, twisted the knife out of his grappling fingers, pulled the dazed man to his feet, and calmly proceeded to beat the living daylights out of him—while taking care not to cause permanent injury. He was both inflicting punishment and enforcing his authority.

  In the midst of this, he was aware that he didn't represent good any more than the seaman with the knife embodied evil. The two of them were simply opposing forces. Nobody sailed into a raging gale with all sails set. You didn't confront a storm head-on. You adjusted the sails and found a balance. All genuine order depends on that kind of balance, not on one man's suppression of another. No rule deserving of the name is writ in stone.

  When James Cook faced a band of furious natives at Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii, in the moment before a club struck the back of his head and a knife slashed his throat, he waved to his crew to come and help. But the boat that might have rescued him turned back to sea. And the men on shore who could have rushed to defend him threw down their muskets and fled into the surf. On his last voyage on board the Resolution, Captain Cook had had eleven out of seventeen of his able seamen flogged, giving them a total of lashes. So when he needed their help, they simply turned their scarred backs on him. He'd pulled the wrong ropes.

  Every sailing ship has miles of rope, scores of blocks, hundreds of square yards of canvas. Unless the ropes are constantly pulled and the sails endlessly adjusted, the ship becomes a helpless victim of the wind. Managing a crew is the same thing. The captain holds hundreds of invisible ropes in his hands. Allowing the crew to take charge is like letting the wind take the helm: the ship will be wrecked. But if the captain takes complete control, the ship will be becalmed and go nowhere: he strips his men of all initiative; they'll no longer do their best and go about their work with reluctance. It's all a question of experience and knowledge. But first and foremost it's about authority.

  When Albert had finished beating up the mutinous seaman and the man lay battered on the deck, he helped him to his feet, then called the galley boy to fetch a basin of water so the man could wash the blood off his face. And that was the end of the matter. The man was again part of the crew.

  Albert had once been beaten himself, with the thrashing rope. But he never became anything like Isager, who neither punished nor rewarded his pupils, but just hammered them repeatedly instead. Nor was he like O'Connor, the first mate who'd used his rank to indulge his murderous impulses. As for the captain who'd resorted to flogging to enforce his shaky authority, well, Albert was no James Cook either. Instead he was something Captain Eagleton on the Emma C. Leithfield had never managed to be, and it wasn't about obeying or disobeying rules. Life had taught him about something far more complicated than justice. Its name was balance.

  IN 1913 ALBERT decided to construct a monument to his personal doctrine in the form of a memorial stone to be erected close to the new Dampskibsbroen. He'd already picked out the stone and knew its provenance. It was about four meters long, three meters wide, and two meters tall. It lay in the Baltic Sea out by the Tail, and in an offshore storm you could sometimes see it from land. In the summer boys would swim out to it and stand on it, their small blond heads just reaching above the surface of the glittering water.

  The light would play on the waves and flicker across its massive flank and sometimes Albert would sit in his boat, resting his oars, and simply contemplate it. It lay so solidly down there in the pale green, shifting waters. But even this boulder had come here on a voyage, millions of years ago, moving down from the north with the ice. Now it must be moved again, this time to a permanent location, to remind Marstal of the construction of the breakwater and man's power over nature.

  He even came up with the inscription it would bear: STRENGTH IN FELLOWSHIP.

  Then one sunny day in June, as he sat leaning over the rail, gazing into the lapping water, a severe bout of dizziness overcame him, and he got the sudden feeling that the world was losing its cohesion and that everything he believed in was doomed. He felt the shadow of a menace that went beyond the fury of the wind and the pounding of the waves: a foreboding of looming disasters from which even the unyielding boulders of the breakwater couldn't protect Marstal. The sensation was so vague and dreamlike that he thought he must have briefly nodded off in the afternoon sunshine. Then, fixing his eyes on the boulder in the water, he made out his own shadow on its scarred flank, and his sense of reality returned.

  It was then he got the idea. It came over him with a kind of urgent haste, in a flurry of inspiration. It was time to take stock, he decided: to make a big, strong, permanent mark to counterbalance his own sudden premonition of doom. The stone.

  Only a few days after this epiphany, Albert called a meeting in the rooms of the Marine Insurance Company in Havnegade to present his idea to a circle of invited guests. His proposal for the memorial met with general support, and a committee was set up to carry out the preliminary work. The stone was to be put in place that very year, before autumn set in.

  A week later Albert joined the chairmen of the harbor commission the Marine Insurance Company to inspect it. A strong breeze was blowing from the west, baring its top as the waves broke against it.

  On a mid-July morning, two crane barges were towed out to the boulder. On board were Albert Madsen, the chairman of the harbor commission, the harbormaster, a fisherman, and a rigger from one of the shipyards in town. A circle of the town's ladies brought sandwiches and refreshments to the white sandy beach, and these were ferried out to the
sweating men on the two rocking decks. By two o'clock the stone had been lifted and secured between the barges. When the returning convoy passed Dampskibsbroen and sailed into the harbor with the stone tethered between them, the flag went up and the large crowd waiting on the wharf cheered.

  We were celebrating ourselves: ourselves and our flourishing town.

  Two days later the boulder was hoisted ashore. Albert had telephoned Svendborg and asked them to send a flatbed trailer to transport it, and this arrived on the ferry the following day. A huge crowd turned up and everyone volunteered to pull. Shipyard owner and rigger, able seaman and shipowner, merchant and clerk: even the manager of the savings bank turned himself into a human mule and got hold of the rope, while schoolchildren ran around making a racket until they too found a place in the line. Even old, long-retired skippers interrupted their chatting on the benches by the harbor to offer a helping hand, their pipes still stuck firmly in their mouths. But Josef Isager, now known as the Congo Pilot, stuffed his hands in his pockets pointedly and scowled: he was way above this kind of work. Lorentz Jørgensen too kept to the sidelines, claiming age and bulk as his excuse. The marine artist's widow, Anna Egidia Rasmussen, drawn to the harbor by the noise, which could be heard as far away as Teglgade, also looked on, clasping the hand of a grandchild. Anders Nørre, the village idiot, was jumping up and down in great excitement at the edge of the crowd. Spotting him, Albert nudged him into the flock. Once Anders had slung a rope over his shoulder, he grew strangely serene, and seemed to become calm and concentrated like the rest of the crowd.

  Then Albert himself grabbed hold of a rope, raised his hand in the air, and turned to the gathering.

  "Right, let's pull!" he called out, thumping the air with his fist.

  That was the starting signal. Albert put his whole weight into it. He was sixty-eight years old, but he didn't feel his age. It was as if his powerful body had been saving itself for this moment his whole life, as if anything he'd done up to now had just been preparation. His face reddened in the sun, and he felt a surge of happiness that seemed to come straight from his pulsing blood and tensed muscles.

  Slowly the flatbed trailer shuddered to a start. They hauled it one meter at a time—until it stopped. The ground was too soft, and the weight of the stone had sunk the trailer's wheels into the gravel, so it was impossible to move it. The legs of two hundred men strained in vain. They leaned forward into the ropes as though testing their combined weight against the stone. But it resisted them.

  Albert straightened up and turned to the gathering.

  "Come on, folks," he called out, and punched the air a second time. "One, two, three—pull!"

  But the trailer wouldn't budge.

  Somewhere in the sea of people, a sailor started up a chantey. The others joined in, and soon they were all singing, swaying rhythmically to the old working song that had rung across the sea for centuries. But it did no good.

  Albert called out to a boy and asked him to run to the Navigation College in Tordenskjoldsgade and bring back some students. The boy raced off, and it wasn't long before thirty young seamen came marching together down Havnegade. They rolled up their sleeves to reveal their tattoos and shouldered the ropes. That's our youth and our future, Albert thought. That boulder doesn't stand a chance now.

  And sure enough, the flatbed trailer started rolling again, its wheels groaning in protest, as if the whole vehicle was being torn apart by the enormous pressure. There was a tense moment when they rolled over a curb; the stone wobbled, but it stayed put, and the chantey resumed. It wasn't until now that Albert had properly listened to its words.

  I will drink whiskey hot and strong.

  Whiskey, Johnny!

  I will drink whiskey all day long.

  Whiskey for me, Johnny!

  Young boys sang along cheerfully at the top of their voice. The words held the promise of manhood. The trainee navigators led the singing. They'd sailed for long enough to feel like fully qualified seamen, and this song belonged to them: their years before the mast confirmed their right to it. For the old seamen, it was just a memory. It struck Albert that there were few men here who'd never hoisted a sail or heaved against a windlass to the tune of the whiskey song—the national anthem of all sailors. It made no difference what language it was sung in; the message was in the rhythm, not the words. It didn't preach; it traveled to men's hearts via their muscles, reminding them what they were capable of, so that forgetting their exhaustion, they'd toil in unison.

  STRENGTH IN FELLOWSHIP would be the message on Albert's stone—but in the sweaty exhilaration of heaving it onto the trailer, he realized it could just as easily, though more crudely, be WHISKEY, JOHNNY! That too spoke of fellowship.

  He raised his sweating face to the sun and smiled.

  The stone had reached its destination.

  Albert had held several public meetings at Hotel Ærø about the memorial stone, or the Fellowship Stone, as he'd privately named it. It would be financed in the way that anything major and important in Marstal was always financed: through the collection of small contributions. Through fellowship. When he stood on the podium, warming to his theme, he happily forgot that there was something important he'd never explained. What was the occasion for erecting the memorial stone? The seventy-fifth anniversary of the construction of the breakwater had been 1900, the year the century changed, but no one had organized anything back then. Its centenary was twelve years away. He couldn't count on being alive then; he'd be eighty-one years old, and he wasn't one of those arrogant men who assume they'll live forever. But why now? Why in the year 1913?

  Fortunately, no one ever put that question to him. "Of course," everyone had said, the first time he suggested it. Of course the town should have a memorial stone—and what better event to commemorate than the construction of the breakwater? So he was never called on to explain that one day in June, he'd grown dizzy on the water south of the Tail and had premonitions whose meaning was unclear to him. He could hardly stand on a podium and talk about that. Indeed, he couldn't even have confided to a friend that this was his reason for having 230 men drag a fourteen-ton boulder around on a flatbed.

  Why now, why in the year 1913?

  Before it is too late, before we forget who we are, and why we do what we do.

  Too late? What do you mean?

  No. He could barely answer these questions himself. All he knew was that he'd been overwhelmed by a sense of doom, and to counter it, he'd thrown himself into organizing the raising of the boulder.

  Again and again, from the podium in the ballroom at Hotel Ærø, Albert recounted the history of Marstal's breakwater. He explained how the harbor had once been at the mercy of winds from the north and the east, and yes, from the south too, where the sea often broke through the point that we call the Tail. How even ships in winter dock could get tossed ashore. And how, when we all faced ruin, because our harbor was so vulnerable, one man had stepped forward. You could consider him the actual founder of our town as we know it today, Albert would say, even though he didn't build on land, but in the water. He was the creator of our fellowship, the force we're now erecting a stone to commemorate. Skipper Rasmus Jepsen was his name. He encouraged our town's residents to commit themselves in writing to the construction of a breakwater. Three hundred and fifty-nine people signed that document. Some provided their labor, some the stones to build it with, and some money. But everyone gave something—all except one, who declined for the shameful reason that you should put your own needs first and not gamble on posterity.

  "I will refrain from mentioning his name, for the sake of his living relatives," Albert said from the podium.

  At which point everyone turned and stared at Skipper Hans Peter Levinsen, who was to become one of the keenest and most generous of the contributors to the memorial stone because it finally gave him the chance to erase his family's eighty-eight-year-old shame.

  Continuing his speech, Albert recalled how, on January 28, 1825, which hap
pened to be the birthday of King Frederik VI, one hundred men had gathered on the ice under the banner of fellowship to lay the first boulder of the massive building project. Even nature had been on their side, because if that year and the next few hadn't been ice winters, they'd never have been able to lay down the boulders. But they'd succeeded, and now here was Marstal's breakwater, an eternal symbol of what men can achieve through fellowship and hard work.

  "When you look at the breakwater," he addressed the gathering, "you see a line of boulders. But never forget the real building materials. Strong arms and unbreakable will."

  He concluded by reminding them that the pioneering Rasmus Jepsen had been awarded the Order of Dannebrog for his achievement. All sailors, regardless of how unruly and wayward they may appear, are monarchists, and any reference to the Dannebrog flag makes an impression on them. So sure enough, it was always at this point that the spontaneous applause erupted. Occasionally, Albert allowed himself to accept a little praise as the originator of the memorial stone, but in his heart he felt he hadn't earned it, since what he'd undertaken in these hectic, triumphant days had emerged from unstable mental territory, and from visions as ephemeral as clouds.

  On the morning of July 19, the sculptor Johannes Simonsen arrived on the postal service steamer from Svendborg to inspect the boulder. He declared it fit for the purpose, made a series of drafts, and before he returned to Svendborg left instructions for cleaning off the moss and algae. The stone was dusted with chloride of lime and then washed with hydrochloric acid diluted in water. We dug a hole two meters deep for the base and filled it with concrete. At the beginning of August the plinth and iron fencing were cast. The stone was set in place in the middle of that same month. Albert Madsen himself joined in the work, together with several other committee members.