In 1848, a motley crew of Danish sailors sets sail from the small island town of Marstal to fight the Germans. Not all of them return—and those who do will never be the same. Among them is the daredevil Laurids Madsen, who promptly escapes again into the anonymity of the high seas.
This is also the story of the port town of Marstal, Denmark, whose inhabitants sailed the world from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War and about the women and children they left behind. The novel tells of ships wrecked and blown up in wars, of places of terror and violence that continue to lure each generation with their cannibals, shrunken heads, prophetic dreams, forbidden passions, cowards, heroes, tragedies, and miraculous survivals.
The result is a brilliant seafaring novel, a gripping saga encompassing industrial growth, the years of expansion and exploration, the crucible of the first half of the twentieth century, and most of all, the sea.
Hailed in Europe as an instant classic, We, the Drowned, spanning four generations, two world wars, and a hundred years, is an epic tale of adventure, ruthlessness, and passion destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature.
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We, the Drowned
In 1848, a motley crew of Danish sailors sets sail from the small island town of Marstal to fight the Germans. Not all of them return—and those who do will never be the same. Among them is the daredevil Laurids Madsen, who promptly escapes again into the anonymity of the high seas.
This is also the story of the port town of Marstal, Denmark, whose inhabitants sailed the world from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War and about the women and children they left behind. The novel tells of ships wrecked and blown up in wars, of places of terror and violence that continue to lure each generation with their cannibals, shrunken heads, prophetic dreams, forbidden passions, cowards, heroes, tragedies, and miraculous survivals.
The result is a brilliant seafaring novel, a gripping saga encompassing industrial growth, the years of expansion and exploration, the crucible of the first half of the twentieth century, and most of all, the sea.
Hailed in Europe as an instant classic, We, the Drowned, spanning four generations, two world wars, and a hundred years, is an epic tale of adventure, ruthlessness, and passion destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature.
In 1848, a motley crew of Danish sailors sets sail from the small island town of Marstal to fight the Germans. Not all of them return—and those who do will never be the same. Among them is the daredevil Laurids Madsen, who promptly escapes again into the anonymity of the high seas.
This is also the story of the port town of Marstal, Denmark, whose inhabitants sailed the world from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War and about the women and children they left behind. The novel tells of ships wrecked and blown up in wars, of places of terror and violence that continue to lure each generation with their cannibals, shrunken heads, prophetic dreams, forbidden passions, cowards, heroes, tragedies, and miraculous survivals.
The result is a brilliant seafaring novel, a gripping saga encompassing industrial growth, the years of expansion and exploration, the crucible of the first half of the twentieth century, and most of all, the sea.
Hailed in Europe as an instant classic, We, the Drowned, spanning four generations, two world wars, and a hundred years, is an epic tale of adventure, ruthlessness, and passion destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature.
Danish author Carsten Jensen’s international bestselling novel We, the Drowned has been published in more than twenty countries and sold more than half a million copies worldwide. He has also written several critically acclaimed travelogues, including I Have Seen the World Begin, which won the Golden Laurel, the most coveted literary prize in Denmark. Jensen has reported on war in the Balkans and Afghanistan, the atrocities committed, and the political motivation behind Danish presence in these war zones, and he was awarded the prestigious Olof Palme Prize for his “work, in word and deed, to defend the weak and vulnerable as well in his own country as around the world.”
Charlotte Barslund has translated several Norwegian and Danish writers, including Jo Nesbø and Karin Fossum. Her translation of Per Petterson’s I Curse The River of Time was shortlisted for the Independent 2011 Foreign Fiction award, and that of Carsten Jensen’s We, the Drowned was nominated for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award.
Robert Whitfield is the pseudonym for Simon Vance, an AudioFile Golden Voice with over forty Earphones Awards. He has also won more than a dozen prestigious Audie Awards and has narrated more than eight hundred audiobooks over thirty years.
Many years ago there lived a man called Laurids Madsen, who went up to Heaven and came down again, thanks to his boots. He didn’t soar as high as the tip of the mast on a full-rigged ship; in fact he got no farther than the main. Once up there, he stood outside the pearly gates and saw Saint Peter — though the guardian of the gateway to the Hereafter merely flashed his bare ass at him. Laurids Madsen should have been dead. But death didn’t want him, and he came back down a changed man. Until the fame he achieved from this heavenly visit, Laurids Madsen was best known for having single-handedly started a war. His father, Rasmus, had been lost at sea when Laurids was six years old. When he turned fourteen he shipped aboard the Anna of Marstal, his native town on the island of Ærø, but the ship was lost in the Baltic only three months later. The crew was rescued by an American brig and from then on Laurids Madsen dreamt of America. He’d passed his navigation exam in Flensburg when he was eighteen and the same year he was shipwrecked again, this time off the coast of Norway near Mandal, where he stood on a rock with the waves slapping on a cold October night, scanning the horizon for salvation. For the next five years he sailed the seven seas. He went south around Cape Horn and heard penguins scream in the pitch-black night. He saw Valparaiso, the west coast of America, and Sydney, where the kangaroos hop and the trees shed bark in winter and not their leaves. He met a girl with eyes like grapes by the name of Sally Brown, and could tell stories about Foretop Street, La Boca, Barbary Coast, and Tiger Bay. He boasted about his first equator crossing, when he’d saluted Neptune and felt the bump as the ship passed the line: his fellow sailors had marked the occasion by forcing him to drink salt water, fish oil, and vinegar; they’d baptized him in tar, lamp soot, and glue; shaved him with a rusty razor with dents in its blade; and tended to his cuts with stinging salt and lime. They made him kiss the ocher-colored cheek of the pockmarked Amphitrite and forced his nose down her bottle of smelling salts, which they’d filled with nail clippings. Laurids Madsen had seen the world. So had many others. But he was the only one to return to Marstal with the peculiar notion that everything there was too small, and to prove his point, he frequently spoke in a foreign tongue he called American, which he’d learned when he sailed with the naval frigate Neversink for a year. “Givin nem belong mi Laurids Madsen,” he said.
He had three sons and a daughter with Karoline Grube from Nygade: Rasmus, named after his grandfather, and Esben and Albert. The girl’s name was Else and she was the oldest. Rasmus, Esben, and Else took after their mother, who was short and taciturn, while Albert resembled his father: at the age of four he was already as tall as Esben, who was three years his senior. His favorite pastime was rolling around an English cast-iron cannonball, which was far too heavy for him to lift — not that it stopped him from trying. Stubborn-faced, he’d brace his knees and strain. “Heave away, my jolly boys! Heave away, my bullies!” Laurids shouted in encouragement, as he watched his youngest son struggling with it. The cannonball had come crashing through the roof of their house in Korsgade during the English siege of Marstal in 1808, and it had put Laurids’s mother in such a fright that she promptly gave birth to him right in the middle of the kitchen floor. When little Albert wasn’t busy with the cannonball it lived in the kitchen, where Karoline used it as a mortar for crushing mustard seeds. “It could have been you announcing your arrival, my boy,” Laurids’s father had once said to him, “seeing how big you were when you were born. If the stork had dropped you, you would have gone through the roof like an English cannonball.” “Finggu,” Laurids said, holding up his finger. He wanted to teach the children the American language. Fut meant foot. He pointed to his boot. Maus was mouth. He rubbed his belly when they sat down to eat. He bared his teeth. “Hanggre.” They all understood he was telling them he was hungry. Ma was misis, Pa papa tru. When Laurids was absent, they said “Mother” and “Father” like normal children, except for Albert. He had a special bond with his father. The children had many names, pickaninnies, bullies, and hearties. “Laihim tumas,” Laurids said to Karoline, and pursed his lips as if he was about to kiss her. She blushed and laughed, and then got angry. “Don’t be such a fool, Laurids,” she said.
i The Boots 3 The Thrashing Rope 56 Justice 91 The Voyage 118 The Disaster 197
ii The Breakwater 205 Visions 239 The Boy 301 North Star 376
iii The Widows 383 The Seagull Killer 436 The Sailor 469 Homecoming 548
iv The End of the World 567 Acknowledgments 677 Jensen-
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
We, The Drowned is "most memorable for the sheer gusto of its narrative. The author ennobles the old-fashioned art of storytelling by showing how the relating of a tale can itself foster a spirit of fellowship... We, The Drowned is itself a monument to the way that history can be made epic through legend." -Wall Street Journal
"As an epic of grand design, We, The Drowned is a thumping success." —San Francisco Chronicle
"Powerful reading for a long winter's night... This gorgeous, unsparing novel ends during the last days of World War II with a captain struggling to bring his crew home after their ship is torpedoed. The sea is Marstal's life and Jensen's unstrained metaphor: luring the Marstallers away from home, offering uncertain passage and providing few harbors that are safe for long." —Washington Post
"From adventures on the storm-ravaged seas and in exotic lands, to battles in town over the shipping industry and family life, dozens of stories coalesce into an odyssey taut with action and drama and suffused with enough heart to satisfy readers who want more than the breakneck thrills of ships battling the elements." —Publishers Weekly
"For all the brutality and suspense in the manner of Conrad, Melville, and Stevenson, Jensen's oceanic novel (already a bestseller overseas and gorgeously translated) is tenderly human . . . Jensen's resplendent saga, an epic voyage of the imagination, is mesmerizing in its unsparing drama, fascinating in its knowledge of the sea, wryly humorous, and profound in its embrace of compassion, reason, and justice." —Booklist
"Expertly told . . . Jensen is a sympathetic storyteller with an eye for the absurd, with the result that if this novel descends from Moby-Dick, it also looks to The Tin Drum for inspiration . . . An elegant meditation on life, death, and the ways of the sea." —Kirkus Reviews
"...vast and daring... rich, powerful and rewarding... one of the more engrossing literary vorages of recent years." —Financial Times (UK)
"Carsten Jensen is without doubt one of the most exciting authors in Nordic literature today. I always wait with great anticipation for his books. He is, in my opinion, completely unique as a story teller." —Henning Mankell
"A novel of immense authority and ambition and beauty, by a master storyteller at the height of his powers. This is a book to sail into, to explore, to get lost in, but it is also a book that brings the reader, dazzled by wonders, home to the heart from which great stories come." —Joseph O’Connor, author of Star of the Sea