We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [112]
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