How I Got Started

The event that started me down the this path occurred on June 21, 1963. I was ten years old, a passenger on the ocean liner Kungsholm in mid-Atlantic on a voyage between New York and Gothenburg, Sweden, with an intermediate stop in Copenhagen. I remember the date because the crew was erecting a Maypole on the aft well deck as part of the midsummer night festivities (much more important to sun-starved Scandinavians than it is in the US). After watching some of the activity, I went back into the promenade deck through the aft door. The door, a heavy weathertight thing, was hard to close for a child because its spring was disconnected. I braced my hand against the door frame to give more leverage and, you guessed it, slammed the door on my right thumb.
The ship’s doctor spoke no English, but he X-rayed my hand and gave me pills to control the pain (they worked a little). For the next 6 weeks, I had to hold my thumb above my heart or it would start throbbing unbearably. I was completely disabled for almost everything a 10-year old likes to do, except reading. So, next day, I made my way to the ship’s library and took out the book Famous American Ships by Frank O. Braynard, the first that caught my eye.
That book changed my life. When I got to the clippers and read about their records, I was hooked. I went to the big stairwell where the chart of the North Atlantic was posted with pins to mark each noon position and the list of day’s runs. (This was a fixture in transatlantic liners, one which has disappeared in today’s cruise ships, whose passengers aren’t that excited about their scheduled arrival. You have to be middle-aged at least to remember it). I went over the day’s runs and discovered that with all her thousands of horsepower, with all her advantage in size, Kungsholm had not once succeeded in traveling as many miles in 24 hours as Donald McKay’s Lightning had in 1854, using nothing but the wind. In addition, the sailing ships of that period were works of unsurpassed artistry, things of beauty as well as function. Later, when I learned to sail, I came to appreciate even more what a huge accomplishment it was to set those records, but for a time, I was mainly in information-gathering mode. Maritime museums in Scandinavia provided me with plenty of additional data.