We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [130]
Some months later a letter arrived from the German government, stating that the sinking of the Salvador had been unwarranted. Captain Sand received an apology from Kaiser Wilhelm himself, along with twenty-seven thousand Danish kroner, the amount for which the ship had been insured.
A few months later, another schooner went up in smoke, and Albert wrote the name Cocos under Salvador in his right-hand column.
Again the crew returned home, speaking of the war as nothing but high jinks. The U-boat had sailed them to another Marstal schooner that happened to be in the vicinity, the Karin Bak, which was allowed to pass through unharmed after its captain, Albertsen, agreed to take the shipwrecked men on board. Then the U-boat sailed away, only to return with the crew's clothes, which in their hurry they'd left behind.
"Well, I must say! The level of service isn't bad when you're dealing with German U-boats!"
"Why didn't you ask them to wash your underpants while they were at it?" Ole Mathiesen joked, and laughter erupted once more.
Telegrams stuttered with news of terrible losses on all fronts. But in Marstal we all agreed that the war was a hoot.
Albert Madsen continued to keep his accounts, and as the war progressed they became his obsession. He believed they contained a message, as yet undeciphered. Convinced that figures had the power to prove things, he made lists of the prices of life's necessities in Marstal: rye bread, butter, margarine, eggs, beef, and pork. He knew the crews' wages, their war supplement, their bonus for European or overseas voyages, and their accident insurance in case of death or disability. He kept an eye on the freight market and the price of ships, on exchange rates and quotations.
A shipowner needs to do all of these things to carry out his job properly. But does he also need to keep long lists of ships sunk by mines, of ships destroyed by torpedoes and fires, of the number of fallen men from North Schleswig, and English losses as of January 9, 1916? Of 24,122 officers dead and 525,345 killed among the junior ranks? The numbers Albert jotted down are incomprehensible. And that's precisely why they make no impression. So why, then, did he write them down? Why did he constantly mention them in his conversations with us?
Why did a ship broker and owner in a small coastal town, in a country that wasn't taking part in the world war and was thus, in a sense, not taking part in the world, keep a two-column list of lost ships, a left-hand column of ships he saw sinking in his dreams, and a right-hand column showing the same ships sunk on real seas? What was he trying to prove?
In the first year of the war, the town lost six ships, and in the second year only one. No Marstaller had been killed, though millions were dying elsewhere, beyond our field of vision. Within that field there were no dead; on the contrary, what we saw, and found so easy to understand, was that the freight market shot up so high that newly built ships earned back their startup capital in a year, and sailors' wages trebled. The price of ships started to rise as early as 1915. Even older wooden vessels, battered from their many years at sea, could be sold for almost double their prewar value. By the end of the year prices had tripled; they continued to rise throughout the whole of the following year. The Agent Petersen, the most famous ship in Marstal, which in 1887 had completed the fastest voyage ever recorded between South America and Africa, was valued at twenty-five thousand Danish kroner but sold for ninety thousand.
Marstal had started to lose its fleet, but not to the U-boats.
Albert realized that