TWO years of seafaring left a lasting impression of the best and the worst on teenaged Thord. As a trainee at the helm of the full-rigged Abraham Rydberg – its brass ‘shining like new coffee pots’ – he guided the ship past thousands of islands in the Stockholm archipelago: ‘I felt as if the world belonged to me’.
Two years later, as crew member aboard the Frederik av Nyhamn bound for Cape Town, he was unjustly flogged for a blunder committed by the son of the enraged, drunken skipper, and jumped ship in Cape Town.