We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [317]
I think about you every day.
Your mother
EVERY COMMUNITY HAS its own myths, including the community of ships that sailed the convoy routes to Russia. Their myths were improbable, verging on the completely unnatural. They made you listen and gawk at the same time. And yet unlike most popular legends, they were true. Take the one about Moses Huntington.
Moses Huntington was black, from Alabama: as well as a sailor, he was a tap dancer. He had a deep, melodious voice, and he tapped his feet to his music. But it wasn't these talents that gave him his mythic status and made men who met him ask for his autograph.
It was the Mary Luckenbach.
Moses was the mess boy Knud Erik had seen through his binoculars, carrying a pot of coffee across the deck of the Mary Luckenbach in the last moment of her existence. A second later the torpedo had hit, and instead of a ship there was a column of black smoke rising several kilometers into the sky, where it began to spread and rain black soot.
The Mary Luckenbach was gone. But Moses Huntington was still there.
He reappeared half a nautical mile down the convoy, where the British destroyer HMS Onslaught picked him up. No one could explain his survival, least of all Moses himself. It defied nature. Yet it had happened, and here he was to prove it, alive and tap dancing. And all the men who heard his story straightened their backs and renewed their faith that there'd be life beyond the war.
Then there was Captain Stein and his Chinese crew, on board the Empire Starlight. The Starlight was the most-bombed ship in history. From the April 4, 1942, up to and including June 16, 1942, the ship was attacked almost daily by German bombers: Messerschmitts, Focke-Wulfs, Junkers 88s, you name it, sometimes up to seven times a day. The Empire Starlight took one direct hit after another. She was anchored off the coast of Murmansk, and the crew could have gone ashore if they had wanted to. But they didn't. The Empire Starlight was their ship and there was no way they'd abandon her. Every time she was attacked, they'd fix whatever could be fixed. They took in survivors from other ships. They shot down four enemy bombers. "Come and have a go" was their attitude. They were nothing but a bunch of Chinamen with a Yankee skipper, but they never gave in.
During the ship's final days they camped on land because by then the Empire Starlight was so wrecked, it was impossible to stay on board. But they kept rowing out to carry on repairing her, so that she grew to be their ship, literally, more and more as each day passed.
They wouldn't give in.
Like the story of Moses Huntington, it sounded impossible. It defied nature. But it had happened. Which meant it could happen. And those who heard the story gritted their teeth and held their heads high.
And then there was Harald Bluetooth, the boy born in a sea filled with U-boats, torpedoes, depth charges, and drowned sailors—a sea where lives usually ended rather than began.
Everyone believed he was dead when he arrived on deck, and they gathered around him and his mother in respectful silence. But he wasn't dead, and Knud Erik cut the umbilical cord and they wrapped him in woolen blankets, though they all thought that within a few days he'd be heading back into the freezing waters he'd just emerged from. But he didn't.
The Danes on the Nimbus christened him Harald Blåtand. The ship already had a Knud, a Valdemar, and an Absalon on board, so why not a Harald Blåtand, another early Danish hero? However, the Danes were a minority on board, so of course his name got Anglicized, and he ended up as Bluetooth.
It was under this name that he became a myth. Like Moses Huntington and the Empire Starlight, he should have died, but he'd gone on living, contrary to all expectations. In his case,