We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [111]
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 corner 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,