OCEAN BOUND WOMEN

I. Aye Aye, Destiny!

1. Ashes to Ashes

It all started with the city conflagration of July 1869 when the two surviving siblings Mia and Emy in frail and vulnerable toddler­hood spent the night outdoors at the House of Nobility Street in the East District. They were sheltered by a fortepiano covered by a large blanket, as all houses burned down and the coastal town Gefle was ablaze in one of the largest fires in Swedish history. The 47-year-old glazier and councillor Jacob Hallengren, a practical man who in his childhood had seen a Brownie doing good deeds, organized rescue operations for the sufferers.

Close to North Sea Customs Street in the same district, quarters of old populated by seamen and fishermen, the sisters for a while were to dwell with their ailing mother in temporary lodgings. It was a homely shack in an area walled by a decayed fence of planks, where the rats swarmed the huge rubbish-heap in the enclosure. The youngest boys, too small for fishing trips in the vast harbour, used to slink into that forbidden and forbidding area, and, sitting at the fence, angle for fat hauls with their long rods.

The garden was the playground, and one of the boys remembered how he happened to hit a patrolling policeman’s helmet with a foot­ball, and the ensuing moment of fright when the constable stopped, found the doorway to the property, and in a majestic manner stepped into the grounds with the leather ball under his arm and the imposing sabre at his belt.

When Emy’s and Mia’s mother died at 24 in 1873—whose mother had died at 27 in the cholera epidemic of 1853 leaving the daughter to be adopted at an orphanage—their father was at sea. Their longing for him, which was always hard to bear, became increasingly unendurable.

By then their father was in Jamaica with the full-rigged ship Thor and returned home the following year—and only then found that he had become a widower and the children motherless. The postal service, by mail boats, was much worse than today, and sometimes slower than the merchantmen. Deceased crewmen, not taken by the high seas or buried at sea, accidentally returned home in coffins or caskets with transport vessels to shocked mothers and widows without prior warning.

Not until 1895—the year when Emy gave birth to her oldest son, the father of this book’s author—Marconi invented the wireless telegraph. The first Atlantic cable was laid in 1858, but telegraphists were never found on the boats these ancestors carried and rarely in the ports they called at.

The technology was limited to sextant, compass, nautical charts, log, lead plummet, barometer, thermometer, marine chronometer, wind meter, ship clock, hourglass, drawing set in brass with a pair of compasses, draft pin, protractor and transversal scale, as well as field glasses. All indispensable on astronomical navigation out in the oceans with no land in sight, and especially at night, gearing up and steering with the help of the navigation stars and the nautical almanac, which indicated coordinates, declination and hourly angle for fifty-eight stars, the vessel doing well over five knots per hour on the average and a hundred nautical miles round the clock.

Emy remembered that early one morning she woke up hearing, as in a dream, an anchor chain go in a windlass at a berth in the harbour a mile away and immediately discerned that it was daddy coming home at long last. She referred to this occurrence in her early childhood as a clairvoyance of love.

At the funeral in the small wooden chapel, the girls had been sitting in their loneliness silently watching their mother, who was lying pallid on lit de parade displayed in an open boat-shaped coffin, surrounded by solitary strangers, and in particular they noticed an old, veiled mourning woman sobbing, whose identity they never learned. People kept at a distance; there was a fear for contagion and the dead in the phthisis plague that claimed so many victims.

2. Seafarers

Captain Johan Axel Söderström, known as the Skipper King, grim and determined, who used to command his men in storm as in calm, sat pale with them at the sepulchre chapel after his arrival to the homeport. His weather-beaten face, a picture of a thunderstorm that could shed light in the impenetrable darkness at sea, was like an empty slate where the text had just been erased leaving a thin film of moisture or, expres­sive but speechless, an immobile rock hit by the hurricane. He was known for finding the right course of the sailing ships by the winds that caressed his cheeks.

With his large hands hanging heavy at the sides, his gaze was rigidly turned towards a remote distance, riveted to an invisible horizon. The ringing of the church bells on Sunday waxed and waned in the wind of time, moved back and forth, was coming and going. ‘Goodbye, she had said. God bless you. Father will take care of you.’ Withering away and emaciated by consumption, on the iron bed of sooth in the waiting room of death, her soul finally had departed before their eyes.

The daughters sat silent, looking down at the floor. They held each other’s hands. They had not yet begun school and were still at kinder­garten. What would be their fate now? What dangers did not lurk on land as at sea?

Full is the earth of evil,

and full of it is also

the immeasurable sea

the ancient sermon echoed. ‘May Providence guide us on our journey!’ The ship must soon let go and set out for the world. Was there any greater honour for the family than setting a full-rigged ship to sail for new goals? What other options were there, what other way out? The crew waited, new rents had to be taken, shipping bargains to be struck. We must submit to our destiny and put up with it. What else could be in store for us? The ocean is our home as much as the cottage in the eastern quarter were. And what is a home that you cannot build and carry inwards?

The captain had made it all clear and stood resolute. ‘In the future I want to show them the world as I saw it in my absence far away during all their childhood, while the old water-wheel of the idyll turned in the Gavle river and vagrant cattle on the road frightened the infants and reluctant skippers kept announcing “Remain off-shore in rough sea­way.” Yet may God preserve the man who comes too close to them! Good they will be in the father's supervision for years onwards.’

However, only 5 and 6 years old, the daughters were left ashore in care of the orphanage of their mother, the private children’s home Salem and the girls’ school for ten years, until the time was ripe to sign on a ship, whilst their father without postponement left the port for the oceans again and stayed away for ages.

In 1876 he became master mariner of the recently built barque Atlantic, a grand three-masted vessel, which would determine the fate of his family and not least the life of his daughters, who took on in September of 1885.

From Emy and other people in the crew stem a number of stories about the people and adventures at sea, in addition to strange experi­ences at distant places abroad. Notable is the journal Mia kept on board in 1885–1887, which includes the first account of a circumnavigation written by a Scandinavian woman—the last in the Age of Sail, and one of the first ever in woman literature, preceded by Ida Pfeiffer’s travels in the 1850s, and the Frenchwoman Madame Rose de Freycinet’s pio­neering letters of her romantic seafaring adventures on board the cor­vette Uranie of 1817–1820.

The reasons why there were just a pocketful of such diaries preserved worldwide were by no means any lack of ability to write or any paucity of woman authors or female journal writers—in the nineteenth century most educated women kept diaries and wrote letters—but the scarceness of girls travelling round the earth in a circular fashion, and the fact that woman seamen had been considered an anomaly if not a paradox. Sailors in many countries thought that women on board were calamitous, and the great explorers of the past did not bring any in their crews. The covenant on the sea was that between the male crew and the ship of female gender forming a union, a steadfast pact bridling the forces of nature for better or for worse.

Over and above this rationale there are very concrete and plain explanations too. ‘World tourism’ and ‘globetrotting’ are fairly new­fangled things, which are hardly older than the very words used to de­note these modern phenomena (late nineteenth century). Further­more, there is a business-related cause to consider. In fact, for economic reasons sailing trips round the world were still uncommon in the early 1800s, and often unpremeditated. These circular tours were more of interest to explorers, adventure lovers and research expe­ditions than to commercial travellers. Indeed, the Magellan–Elcano expedition ac­complished the feat as early as 1519–1522, but the first circumnavi­ga­tion of a Swedish ship was that of the brigantine Mary Ann in 1839–1841, with Captain Nils Werngren at the helm of this two-masted vessel. In the merchant fleet, that craft was a famous predecessor of the magnificent Atlantic of 1,000 metric tons, carvel-built of Swedish oak and pine wood and coppered, which sailed on until 1911.

3. The Life Journey

Mia thought that she would vex posterity with her conundrums on the clandestine and never-ending journey. Once, at an imperial navy ball, she had found an elegant cavalier, a stylish officer of the Russian armada, forlornly stupid. He had not even heard of her homeport Gefle right across the same narrow Baltic Sea—a sister city in the waterways of the era, which in the middle of the nineteenth century had the largest merchant fleet and next to Gothenburg was the major harbour in her country of origin.

Her nieces Gunborg and Greta later recalled, that one day in their childhood they were told that twenty-three of their seafaring kinsfolks, men and women, were currently on board or at the quay somewhere, and the number of captains, skippers, mates, coxswains and other sea­men in the line of ancestors forty-five.

After all she knew that she was the first North European woman ever to write a journal of travel on a circumnavigation, spending motherless her teenage years with her sister among men on a slow deep-sea craft, a merchantman with pending destinations and unknown destiny, ocean bound year after year like her ancestry for eons, the voyage an inward journey carrying her fate, longing and fear.

She would never have dreamt of or imagined the range of adven­tures and tragedies that were to follow. That the sisters were to be acquainted with so many outlandish distant places and end up in Australia, or that her only son would become a war victim in the Gallipoli Campaign. Nor that they would, on their long journey, encounter aboriginal populations in the Pacific including one or two earnest cannibals, besides privateers and mutineers, and pass through scores of ordeals, and face strange, cruel fatalities worldwide—storms, calamities and shipwreck—and experience long dark nights in despair, lurching from one crisis to another as the boat did.

It was a time of adventurers and the moon still held mysteries. It was possible to hear how the ghosts of the past weave through our days, stir the heart and make the aloneness less lonely. The sea was near, and gulls, fulmars, huge albatrosses with wingspans of 10 feet, shearwaters, petrels and frigate birds traversed the oceans as kindred spirits, rapturous in the wind. Whereas navigation was astronomic, fate was astrological.

Haunting sailing crafts and steamers in the fog, nightmares, mirages and illusions were countered by prayers and hymns in the scream of gale-force winds, and when the hurricane struck at its worst the order was All hands on deck! which also meant Up in the lookout and into the rig to trim the sails and save the ship, Anchors out!

At times, Man overboard! was as common as Land ahoy! The captain was granted with almighty authority as chief, police, judge, punisher, doctor, priest and was often forced to combine these roles, being the only one carrying firearm en route, a Webley & Son .442 five-round black powder revolver with 11, 1-mm lead bullets, the ship equipped with old-fashioned swivel guns mounted at gunwales and the master bestowed with the right to conduct funerals at sea. Attacks and losses were common.

Still, this generation’s Holy Grail was the dream of a Camelot that would never end. The latter half of the nineteenth century was also an era of mass migration, which was not seasonal as in the animal king­dom of their wandering companions travelling the air and the waters along with them, but with no return, on occasion without hope, too, ending in cul-de-sacs.

These seafarers believed in the anima mundi, the world soul, and wondered what that might be trying to tell us about our unknown fates if we could listen. In her diary at sea, the ship tossed by the roaring ocean, the diarist noted down in despair: ‘Will I ever get married?’

On 10 April 1995, the present writer received a moving and unexpected answer to her lasting query in the physical form of a family heirloom. I was then to an old pewter maker named Hopp at 2 Banner Street in Stockholm, a lone remnant of an old Central European guild of skilled craftsmen. The large inherited tin dish in my possession he identified as a Carolina plate from 1762. According to an inscription, which he could decipher, it turned out to be a wedding gift to Maria Söderström (‘MSM’) in 1888, the writer of the diary.

I was told that the pewter dishes from the 1700s at that time had become a common gift from the Age of Freedom and its bygone days since their uses as dining services were completely driven out of competition by porcelain in the 1800s. They had become increasingly rare and precious collector’s items and primarily for show as ornaments.

The tin founder further observed that this dish had spent a large part of its life, about a hundred years, at room temperature indoors, but not in the middle of a table but standing on edge at a wall as a decoration. This he perceived from its oval shape. ‘Pure tin is soft metal,’ he explained, ‘and is slowly shifting shape in the course of times by the force of the earth’s gravitation, as is also taking place at a much slower rate with much harder materials such as glass and rocks.’ Wash the dish with detergent and soft brush under running water, he recommended, and ‘use it every day as a bowl for colourful fruits like lemons or oranges, it’s beautiful!’ In a flash of memory, I then recalled that at the barque Atlantic, one citrus fruit a day was compulsory for the crew to prevent scurvy, both under the command of Axel and his successor, his son-in-law. (Curiously enough, by the force of the long-accustomed habit, descendants have stuck to Captain Söderström’s or­dination to this day.)

So, one day she would get married, under remarkable circum­stances, as it turned out, on this long and adventurous voyage, despite her fear and misgivings of never having a home, and a family of her own. And the sisters’ descendants were to hand down her journal and all notes and stories and family archives to me for research and relation.

As will transpire from the hitherto unpublished documents in the following, all translated from the Swedish handwriting, she had married the captain of another ship in Melbourne, and in course of time her father, the sea captain, sank to another sea while her husband, who thus succeeded her father as commander of the Atlantic, met his death under mysterious circumstances in Cape Town, South Africa.

An island of the Antarctic in the Southern Ocean was to be named after one of their descendants.

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© hallengren@post.harvard.edu, <https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/q0321>