Nautical Heritage

Naturally now that I am breaking my rule (ok, I have broken it for a while) about using art other than my own photos I simply feel I must write on a theme so I can use this picture. Fortunately I have the heritage to be able to talk about sailing.

That is, I can talk about the stories I have bene told by my sailing uncles and my paternal grandfather. My maternal grandfather (Morfar as we call that in Danish) got seasick so he never sailed. It was interesting because he loved ships and was a gifted whittler of ships. I have a couple of his ships framed and hanging in my living room. He was a master machinist who excelled in his craft to the extent that all other machinists would refer really complex work to Morfar. He worked his whole life on the wharfs, building motors and equipment for the great ships that docked in Denmark. During the Nazi occupation of Denmark the Germans learned that Morfar was “the man” and so they wanted his help with some piece of equipment and they came down to the wharf to get him. Well, Morfar wasn’t prepared to assist the Germans. The next thing he knew he had a machine gun pressed to his back and he was marched along to their headquarters (or where it was there problem happened to be). My grandfather said that there was reason in all things and you simply did not argue with a German with a gun!

Morfar knew pretty much all of the ships that docked regularly on the wharf, both at Fredrikshavn and Aalborg. Whenever he took me down there I remember that he would stand and look across the water, shielding his eyes against the glare, then pronounce that was the “skole skibe” (school ship) and to the left of her was The Martina. I was terribly impressed.

My Farfar (my father’s father) was also a machinist but he actually worked on the ships. I suppose he would be called a merchant marine in English terms. He sailed around the world and during WWI he was actually torpedoed twice in one week! His ship was bringing coal back from England to Denmark when a torpedo went right through his cabin, splitting the ship in half. He managed to get into one of the survivor boats and they were headed to Sweden when they were shot down again. They managed to be rescued, were sent to the Danish embassy in Sweden, given a sandwich and sent home. My Farfar was quite a young man at the time but he was thoroughly disgusted with the treatment the survivors received at the hands of their government. They were bringing coal back to warm Denmark and all they got for their trouble was a sandwich! I love that story which was told to me by my own father since Farfar died in 1945 just before the second world war was over.

My own father did not sail though he did not get seasick and he loved ships and boats. When he was a lad of 7 or 8 he kept pestering his father for a little row boat. Farfar kept telling him he was too young but one day he add the proviso that when Dad could swim he could get a boat. At the time, they were on the Aalborg wharf. The next thing Farfar knew Dad had jumped into the Limfjord and begun flailing about and at the same time yelling “I can swim, I can swim.”

That was my dad!