One last time he tried to clamber up the slippery walls of the abyss, but slid down again immediately.
He had made up his mind to get it all over with quickly. The sinker was heavy, he made his last measurement and decided it weighed seven kilos. He tied the rope attached to the stone round his legs.
But first he took off all his clothes. He wanted to die naked. The cold water would deaden his senses.
Then he lifted the stone over the rail and followed it down into the depths.
Some days later the boat drifted ashore at the Häradskär lighthouse. One of the pilots identified it as Sara Fredrika’s sailing dinghy.
The sea froze over in mid-January.
The ice covered all the sea graves in the winter of 1916.
Afterword
This story takes place in a borderland between reality and my own invention.
I have redrawn many sea charts, given islands new names, added new bays and eliminated others. Anybody who tries to sail along the shipping lanes I have sketched out must reckon with coming upon lots of unexpected shallows and other hazards.
In December 2001 the Swedish Navy handed over responsibility for hydrographic surveys in Swedish waters to civilian organisations. I hope both they and all earlier generations of hydrographic engineers will forgive me for creating my own routines regarding the charting of naval channels. What is beyond dispute is that the sounding lead that was dropped into the water and allowed to sink down to the seabed was the instrument originally used to decide the safest route for ships to follow.
I had the sounding lead used in this novel made in Manchester. That could well have been a fact, but need not be.
Many of the ships that feature in the novel did exist, but were long since sent to the scrapyard or have otherwise disappeared from our consciousness. Other vessels have been constructed by me, in my role as shipbuilder. I have increased and decreased tonnages, downsized the crew or added an artillery officer when it seemed to me appropriate.
To be frank, I have been rather self-indulgent.
Some of the people I describe have also existed. But most of them have never set foot on the islands in the beautiful, barren and occasionally stormy Östergötland archipelago. Nor have they been bosuns or captains on board Swedish naval vessels.
Nevertheless, I can imagine them — in the shadowy world where history and imagination merge, on the literary shores where the flotsam and jetsam of fantasy and reality intermingle.
Some years ago, in the early 1990s, I rowed through the fog in the Gryt archipelago. Later, when the weather had cleared up and everything seemed reminiscent of a curious dream, this story was born.
H.M.
Maputo, August 2004