Emigrants

ANOTHER THREE SHOVELFULS OF EARTH FROM SWEDEN

- - - - - X X V - - - - ANOTHER THREE SHOVELFULS OF EARTH FROM SWEDEN -1CAPTAIN LORENTZ SAT in his cabin and mused over a piece of paper with a few lines written on it: "Wife Inga-Lena Andersdotter from Karragarde in Ljuder Parish, Konga County, born October' 4, 1809; joined in marriage with homeowner Danjel Andreasson, June 23, 1833- . _." Name, sex, and age-that was all he required, all he needed to know to conduct the funeral. This was now the eighth funeral. But there was something about the information which did not check. Nothing checked, as he thought further about it. He had seen the woman's bleeding body, he had tied her arms and legs. She had been a young woman, barely thirty, but now it seemed that the dead one was forty years old. And he had been told that she left behind four children, all on board with their parents. Yet he remembered definitely having seen only three small ones in the bunk of the dying woman. Apparently another death had occurred than the one he had expected . Once more on this voyage must he stand on deck and from the prayerbook choose suitable prayers and thought-worthy hymns, "as well as some sentence from Holy Writ," as it was prescribed in "How to Bury a Corpse on Board." "Teach us all to remember that we must die and thereby gain understanding . . . ." This potent prayer could have two meanings: either that we gain understanding and use our lives well before we die-or, the meaning which no doubt had been in the mind of the author, that we gain understanding to prepare ourselves for death. But the person who used his intelligence well would not concern himself in life with constant 348 ANOTHER THREE SHOVELFULS OF EARTH 349 preparation for death. There could be no meaning in thus wasting one's few allotted days. Man must live in comfort and good cheer as long as life lasted-soon enough death comes with joy to no one. And the thought of his own death-probable within the next few years-occupied the captain of the Charlotta for some fleeting moments . While still young, his death-day had often been in his mind; but the older he grew, the less often did he think of it. Some wisdom he had gained with the years. At sixty he was still sailing the seas in fairly good health. Nearly all the comrades of his youth had been taken by the sea, and their bodies had become part of the water that had surged about their ships. Some had sailed five years, others ten, still others thirty. He himself had already been allowed forty-six. Why? Nothing could be more foolish than to brood over this question. He might just as well ask why the wind was southerly today and northerly yesterday, and not the opposite. Once one knew there was no answer to the question , one ceased to ask. Only a simpleton would query the inexplicable. It might be difficult to die, but it was rather common. All people must die, people had done so throughout time, and he too must face up to it when his time came. Since he couldn't escape it, he might as well pretend that he would live forever. For all eternity he would sail the seas, his ship would rot down but the master remain. By thinking death nonexistent , he could best use his life. How had the wife Inga-Lena Andersdotter used her life-the forty years that had been given to her? A funeral officiant on a crowded emigrant ship could seldom know anything about those over whom he read his prayers. His passengers had been removed from their parish registers on leaving home, and had not yet been recorded elsewhere. They were registered nowhere-the emigrants on his ship were homeless, they had no plot in a churchyard. Only the sea opened its depths to them. The sea had room for all of them. These peasants often feared death at sea, because of the final resting place-they wanted to be put in consecrated ground, and the ocean was not consecrated. But they were caught in deep superstition: this water where so many good seamen had found their graves ought to be a good enough resting place for the wretched land-rats. Perhaps the wife Inga-Lena Andersdotter had died, too, in fear of the unconsecrated burial place of the ocean. Her forty...