We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [107]
Herman inherited the Two Sisters and Jepsen's house in Skippergade. He wasn't old enough to be the legal owner of either the ship or the house, so Jepsen's brother, Hans, was appointed his guardian. Hans Jepsen found a new captain and a crew for the ship, but when Herman demanded to be signed on to it as an ordinary seaman, he refused.
"You haven't been at sea long enough," he said.
"I sailed a whole damn ship on my own," Herman shouted. Red in the face, he took a menacing step toward Hans—who reacted by taking an equally menacing step toward the kid.
"You're only a boy and you'll sail as a boy."
"It's my ship!" Herman roared.
Hans Jepsen had been a first mate for many years so he was unimpressed by rebellious cabin boys, no matter how tall they were or how loudly they shouted.
"I don't give a damn who owns the ship," he growled in a low, savage voice that was more terrifying than any yell. "You'll be an ordinary seaman when you're old enough and no sooner, you upstart pup!" He jutted his unshaven chin. He'd sailed on an American ship as a young man and used threatening expressions like "You're dead meat, buddy" and "You're history." We were never quite sure what they meant, but we got the gist when he ground his teeth and spat out more American cuss words as if they were gristle. Now he stared at Herman, his jaw working. "I don't know what you did to my brother, but if you so much as look at me wrong, you can kiss your fat ass goodbye."
Herman had his pride. If he wasn't allowed to sail as an ordinary seaman on a ship he regarded as his own, he didn't want to sail on her at all. He did the rounds of the harbor, but no one wanted to take him on as an ordinary seaman, or as anything else. So he went off to's Copenhagen and signed on there.
For some years we heard nothing from him. Then he returned, and everything changed.
THERE ARE MANY WAYS to tell a man's story. When Albert Madsen first began writing his diary, it contained very little personal information but concentrated instead on our town and its progress. He wrote about the school in Vestergade, which was now the biggest building in town; about the new post office in Havnegade; about improvements to street lighting and the removal of the open sewers; about the network of roads that extended in all directions; and about the new streets that appeared in the southwest outskirts of the town and were named after Danish naval heroes: Tordenskjoldsgade, Niels Juelsgade, Willemoesgade, Hvidtfeldtsgade.
A sailor's often asked why he goes ashore. Whenever anyone put that question to Albert, he'd always reply that he hadn't gone ashore, he'd just swapped a small deck for a big one. The whole world was moving forward just like a ship at sea. And our island was just a ship on the endless ocean of time, heading for the future.
He always reminded us that the island's first inhabitants hadn't been islanders. Ærø had once been one of many hills in a rolling landscape. Then the huge northern glaciers had started melting. Rivers had plowed their way through the country, and the vast freshwater lakes to the south had expanded. Then the sea had poured in, and what was once a range of hills became an archipelago. Which came first? Albert would ask. The wheel or the canoe? Which would we rather do, master the weight of burdens too heavy for us to carry or conquer the distant horizons of the ocean?
The harbor rang with the cries of seagulls, the banging of shipyard hammers, and the rattle of ropes in the wind. The roar of the sea rose above it all, a noise so familiar it seemed to have been born in our ears. Those were the years when everyone was talking about America. And many left. We left too, but not for good. In earlier days, we'd had to cram our houses right on the shoreline because there'd been no room anywhere else: the gentry and the peasants owned the fields. With no other choices open to us, we'd turned our gaze seaward. The oceans were our America: they reached farther than any prairie, untamed as on the first