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Beauty and the beast

Mad Captain Ebsen was hard on Svanen as she sailed from Cadiz to Rio in 1859. In 2010, the adventures will start all over again. Svanen - the most beautiful ship ever built on Bornholm – will once again ply the seven seas.

The long swells of the Atlantic were whipped to a frothy inferno. The deck was drenched and the backstays were whistling in the wind so shrilly they occasionally drowned out the thunderous storm ravaging the seas north of the Cape Verde Islands.

Svanen, a beautiful three-masted barque, was heavily loaded with salt on its way south from Cadiz to Rio, and Captain Christian William Ebsen, also known as ‘Mad Ebsen’, was dead drunk as usual.

Although the leeward gunwale was continually under water and the crew had already reefed her sails, Svanen was piercing the waves like an arrow. The entire 14-man crew had been roused - partly to steer this runaway ship and partly to pump water out of the hold to keep the cargo dry and safe.

Boatswain Sinius Koefoed and seaman Niels Olsen are keeping watch astern when ‘Mad Ebsen’ appears on deck tottering drunk and commands the men to shake out the reefs of the topsails - and if that was not enough - orders Koefoed and Olsen to hoist the jib.

Apparently the ship is not getting to Rio fast enough or the mad captain is in such a stupor he has no idea the ship is already in imminent danger of capsizing. The crew grumble but obey the captain’s orders. But no sooner have they raised the jib before it splits down the middle with a deafening peal.

»You wretches, you bloody fools, you miserable landlubbers!« screams the demented captain, ordering Svanen’s two mates to the bow to take in the wildly flapping shreds of jib and calling the boatswain to come over to him, as he prepares to thrash the culprit with the downhaul. This is more than Sinius can bear, so he shouts right in Ebsen’s face:

»You idiot! You’re doing a great job of sinking the boat and drowning the crew! You’d ‘ave been wiser to lower the sails instead of increasing the canvas, you drunken bastard«.

This dressing down makes Mad Ebsen madder than ever, but just as he is about to hit Sinius, a huge breaker washes over the ship, carrying him, Koefoed and Olsen across the deck and underneath the winch.

The captain cries out for help, but no one can hear him as the two seamen punch and kick the deranged skipper before carrying him, unconscious, down to his cabin. In the meantime the sails are reefed even more and the storm has abated when the next day dawns.

Ebsen, fairly sober by now, appears on deck and, although bruised and in pain, he never mentions the episode again. This blow-by-blow account of a mariner’s life on the Atlantic in 1859 is taken from the diary of boatswain Sinius Martheus Lauritsen Koefoed and is rounded out with Sinius’s other stories of inhumanly hard work and practically starving ra - tions.

The romantic life of a sailor is apparently reserved for literature. The harsh daily life on board a barque was not an enviable one. The first oak has been felled Even so, dreams of adventures under billowing white sails have encouraged an enthusiastic group on Bornholm to reconstruct the proud barque that al - most met its end that night near Cape Verde.

Because Svanen no longer exists. It was sold to a shipping company in Argentina in December 1886 and disappeared from Denmark’s ship’s register. Although its subsequent fate is unknown, efforts to rebuild the most beautiful ship ever built on Bornholm will commence on 2 March 2007 – the 150th anniversary of its original launch in Svaneke.

This time, Svanen will be built in Nexø’s dry dock, the oldest in Denmark, where the barque will slowly rise to ply the seven seas once more. This time it will carry cruise passengers instead of salt and coffee and serve as a floating embassy branding Bornholm. The preparations are already in full swing.

The first oak and beech trees have been felled and are firmly clamped and drying at Østerlars Sawmill. The preparatory efforts involving dock and shipyard will start later on. Nexø Museum will feature an exhibit on the project and the fine, severely