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An epic drama of adventure, courage, ruthlessness and passion by one of Scandinavia’s most acclaimed storytellers.

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.

As soon as he is old enough, his son Albert sets off in search of his missing father on a voyage that will take him to the furthest reaches of the globe and into the clutches of the most nefarious company. Bearing a mysterious shrunken head, and plagued by premonitions of bloodshed, he returns to a town increasingly run by women – among them a widow intent on liberating all men from the tyranny of the sea.

From the barren rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the roughest bars in Tasmania, to the frozen coasts of northern Russia, We, The Drowned spans four generations, two world wars and a hundred years. Carsten Jensen conjures a wise, humorous, thrilling story of fathers and sons, of the women they love and leave behind, and of the sea’s murderous promise. This is a novel destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature.

Carsten Jensen was born in 1952. He first made his name as a columnist and literary critic. As a journalist he has reported from many regions of conflict, including the Balkans and most recently, Afghanistan. His essays, novels and travel books have won numerous literary awards, including the coveted Golden Laurels and the Danish Bank Literary Prize. In 2010 he received the prestigious Olof Palme Prize, awarded for his contribution to the defence of human rights. We, The Drowned has sold more than 300,000 copies in Scandinavia alone and was voted best Danish novel of the past twenty-five years.

We, The Drowned

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 further than the main. Once up there, he stood outside the Pearly Gates and saw St Peter – though the guardian of the gateway to the hereafter merely flashed his bare arse 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 dreamed 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 around and the trees shed bark, not leaves, in winter. 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 baptised 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’d made him kiss the ochre-coloured cheek of the pockmarked Amphitrite and forced his nose down her bottle of smelling salts, which they’d filled with nail clippings.

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.

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 favourite pastime was rolling around an English cast-iron cannonball, which was far too heavy for him to lift – not that it stopped him 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’ 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’ father had once said to him, ‘seeing how big you were when you were born. If the stork had dropped you, you’d have gone through the roof just like an English cannonball.’

Ma was misis, pa was papa tru. When Laurids was away, they said ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ like normal children, except for Albert. He had a special bond with his father.

‘Laihim tumas,’ Laurids said to Karoline, and pursed his lips as if he was about to kiss her.

IN 1848, WAR BROKE OUT BETWEEN THE DANISH CROWN AND THE rebellious Germans across the Baltic in Schleswig-Holstein, who wanted to cut their ties with Denmark. The old customs steward, de la Porte, was the first to know because the provisional insurgent government in Kiel sent him a ‘proclamation’, accompanied by a request to hand over the customs coffers.

All of Ærø was up in arms, and we immediately formed a home guard led by a young teacher from Rise, who from then on was known as the General. On the highest points of the island we erected beacons made of barrels filled with tar and old rope, attached to poles. If the German came by sea, we’d signal his approach by setting them alight and hoisting them up.

There were beacons at Knasterbjerg and on the hills by Vejsnæs, and all around our coastguards watched the horizon closely.

But all this war business soon became too much for Laurids, who never had much respect for anything to begin with. One evening, as he was on his way home from Eckernförde Fjord, he passed Vejsnæs where he neared the shore and yelled: ‘The German is coming!’ His voice ringing out across the water.

A few minutes later the barrel at the top of the hill was set alight, then the one on Knasterbjerg, and the others followed all the way down to Synneshøj, almost fifteen miles away, until the whole of Ærø was illuminated as on Bonfire Night.

As the flames rose, Laurids lay in his boat, laughing his head off at the mayhem he’d caused. But when he reached Marstal, he saw lights everywhere and the streets teeming with people, even though it was late evening. Some were shouting incomprehensible orders; others were whimpering and praying. A belligerent crowd was marching up Markgade armed with scythes, pitchforks and the odd gun, and terrified young mothers rushed around the streets, clutching wailing babies, sure that the German would skewer them on his bayonet. By the well on the corner of Markgade and Vestergade a skipper’s wife was arguing with a servant girl. The woman had got it into her head that they should hide in the well and was ordering the girl to go first.

‘After you, Madam,’ the girl insisted.

We men were ordering each other about as well, but there are too many skippers in our town for anyone to heed anyone else, so all we could agree on was making a solemn vow to part with our lives only at the highest possible price.

The upheaval reached the vicarage in Kirkestrædet where Pastor Zachariassen was entertaining guests. One lady fainted, but the pastor’s twelve-year-old son, Ludvig, grabbed a poker ready to defend his country against the advancing enemy. At the home of Mr Isager, the schoolteacher, who also doubled up as parish clerk, the family prepared for imminent attack. All twelve sons were on hand to celebrate the birthday of their mother, the portly Mrs Isager: she equipped them with clay pots filled with ashes and commanded them to throw the contents in the face of the German, should he dare to storm their house.

Our flock moved on through Markgade towards Reberbanen led by old Jeppe, who was waving a pitchfork and yelling that the German was welcome to come and get him if he dared. Laves Petersen, the little carpenter, was forced to return home. He had bravely slung his gun over his shoulder and filled his pockets to bursting with bullets, but halfway down the street, had suddenly remembered he’d left his gunpowder behind.

At Marstal Mill the miller’s hefty wife, Madam Weber, already armed with a pitchfork, insisted on joining the fight, and because she appeared more intimidating than most of us men, we instantly welcomed her to our bloodthirsty ranks.

Laurids, who was an emotional man, was so fired up by the general fighting spirit that he too ran home to find a weapon. Karoline and the four children were hiding under the dining table in the parlour when he burst in and proclaimed cheerfully: ‘Come along, kids, time to go to war!’

There was a hollow thud. It was Karoline banging her head against the underside of the dining table. With effort, she crawled out from under the table, stood to her full height and screamed at her husband: ‘Have you completely lost your mind, Madsen? Children don’t go to war!’

Rasmus and Esben started jumping up and down.

‘We want to go! We want to go!’ they yelled in unison. ‘Please, please, let us go.’

Little Albert had already started rolling his cannonball around.

‘Have you all gone stark raving mad?’ their mother shouted, boxing the ears of whichever child came near. ‘You get back under that table right now!’

Laurids ran out into the kitchen to find a suitable weapon. ‘Where do you keep the big frying pan?’ he called into the parlour.

‘You keep your hands off it!’ Karoline shouted back.

‘Well, I’ll take the broom then,’ he announced. ‘The German will be sorry!’

They heard the front door slam behind him.

‘Did you hear that?’ whispered Rasmus, the eldest, to Albert. ‘Father wasn’t even speaking American.’

‘The man’s insane,’ their mother said, shaking her head in the darkness underneath the dining table. ‘Have you ever heard of anyone going to war with a broom?’

Laurids’ arrival in our militant crowd stirred great delight. True, he had a reputation for being cocky, but he was big and strong and good to have on your side.

‘Is that the only weapon you’ve got?’

We had spotted the broom.

‘It’s good enough for the German,’ he replied, brandishing it aloft. ‘We’ll sweep him right out of here.’

Feeling invincible, we roared with laughter at his joke.

‘Let’s leave a few pitchforks behind,’ Lars Bødker said. ‘We’ll need them for stacking the bodies.’

By now we’d reached the open fields. It was half an hour’s march to Vejsnæs, but our pace was brisk and our blood was up. At Drejbakkerne, the sight of the flaming beacons further fuelled our fighting spirit. But at the sound of horses’ hooves in the darkness we froze. The enemy was upon us!

* * *

We had hoped to surprise the German on the beach, but here on the hill the terrain still favoured us. Laurids positioned himself for battle with his broom and we followed suit.

‘Wait for me!’ a voice rang out behind us.

It was the little carpenter, who’d gone home for his gunpowder.

‘Shhhh,’ we warned. ‘The German is closing in.’

The hoof beats grew louder – and it became clear that there was only one horse. When the rider appeared out of the darkness, Laves Petersen raised his gun and took aim. But Laurids pushed down on the barrel.

‘It’s Bülow, the controller,’ he said.

The horse was dripping with sweat, its black flanks pumping in and out. Bülow raised his hand.

‘You can go home. There’s no German at Vejsnæs.’

‘But the beacons were alight,’ Laves called out.

‘I’ve spoken to the coastguard,’ Bülow said. ‘It was a false alarm.’

‘And we left our warm beds. For what? For nothing!’

Madam Weber folded her arms across her chest and fired us all a warning glance as though looking for a new enemy now that the German had failed to show.

‘At least we’ve proved that we’re ready for him,’ the controller said soothingly. ‘And surely it’s good news that he’s not coming after all.’

We mumbled in agreement. But although we saw his logic, we were sorely disappointed. We had been ready to stare the German in the face, and death, too – but neither had made it to Ærø.

‘One day that German will be sorry,’ Lars Bødker said.

Starting to tire, we decided to head home. A chilly shower had begun to fall. In silence we reached the mill, where Madam Weber parted company from us. Turning to face our miserable flock, she placed her pitchfork on the ground as though presenting a rifle.

‘I wonder,’ she said in an ominous voice, ‘which one of you jokers got decent folks out of their beds in the middle of the night to go to war.’

We all stared at Laurids, towering there with his broom on his shoulder.

But Laurids neither flinched nor averted his eyes. Instead he looked straight at us. Then he threw his head back and started laughing into the rain.