The Wreck of the København
Lost at Sea With All Hands, 1929
We have abandoned ship. It is snowing and a gale blows. Tonight, while everyone is sleeping, I realize our awful fate. Everything convinces me that this sea has taken us beyond the limits of the world.
—Message found in a bottle, washed up on the shore of Bouvet Island, 1,600 miles east of Cape Horn, 1934.
Her figurehead the war-helmed Absalon
(Axel), founder of the town whose name she bore—
bishop of Roskilde, warrior archbishop of Lund—
fate unguessed, the five-masted barque set sail,
whose only hope—whose help in the name of the Lord—
hung, not by a rope or a cord, but by the hair.
From the evidence, we know the Cape was never rounded,
but where she lost her bearings have no clue;
for in the lonely wastes in which she foundered,
none but the gulls could possibly have told
—her wreck was never found—who if they knew,
give witness to the whiteness only and the cold.
From the evidence, we surmise the master blundered,
in a squall had failed to haul her wind, although,
on lookout, what masthead boy in a hundred,
(there were forty-five in training on the ship),
through snow could see—or hail the deck—the ice-floe
that like a continent was moving in?
But the evidence—the only we’re possessed of,
found in a bottle a thousand miles away—
as far to the east as the Cape itself is west of
Denmark’s coast and five long years gone by
(if only they had lived to sail another day!),
is the diary of a boy about to die.
“All hands on deck! Brail up the topcourse, furl
it in the bunt. Belay, boys! Frap it fast!”
That deck, with each successive wave aswirl,
for those of the crew aloft posed death in a trice—
awash in a slosh of snow, each listing mast,
its yards encased in a treacherous glaze of ice.
“All hands!” The command was lost in the gale’s roaring.
All hands together could never save the ship,
the South Atlantic through unbattened hatches pouring.
“Don’t think you will see again your native town,”
they heard the tempest scream as the canvas ripped,
“or ever be warm again before you drown.”
“Abandon ship!” Was she grounded, hulled, dismasted?
“Pull!” and the death-bound lifeboats pulled away.
It was snowing, we know, and the cold wind blasted,
while every boy Jack of them strove with his might and mate,
and the Humboldt Current bore them through the spray,
till the Roaring Forties drove them to their fate.
Absalon: Absalom (son of David): Ab Shalom!
“Father of Peace,” Hammer of the Wends,
conduct these sailors safely to their home—
to where the seas are not high nor the winds cold,
to where their life begins right where it ends:
a place beyond the limits of the world.