Elis Karlsson

Elis Karlsson was born and grew up on Vårdö, one of the Åland Islands in Finland, at the beginning of the twentieth century, during the period when many of their prosperous and entrepreneurial farmers were engaged in the shipping business, by building, owning and sailing, initially small, wooden, vessels, to trade their produce around the Baltic ports. This culminated in the large fleet of steel-hulled, four-masted commercial vessels which Gustav Eriksson operated out of Mariehamn between the First and Second World War. He spent much of his working life as a seafarer, mostly in sail, rising through the ranks to earn his master’s ticket in 1933. He sailed at first in smaller vessels trading in the Baltic and North Sea, and later in the three-masted barque Penang to Africa and Australia. In 1933 he became First Mate aboard the four-masted steel-hulled Herzogin Cecilie under Captain Sven Erikson, and completed three of her round-the-world voyages in the South Australian grain trade before she became shipwrecked on the South Devon coast of England in April, 1936.
Although offered the captaincy of another Erikson ship, the L’Avenir, he declined in favour of becoming First Mate on the North Sea steam ship Bodia, of which the captain was his brother-in-law Ruben de Cloux. Alas, that vessel, too, was shipwrecked, on December 6th, 1936, near Ålsund in Norway. Karlsson retired to what was then Southern Rhodesia, keeping in touch with his former shipmate Pamela Bourne, who had similarly moved to South Africa with her husband, Sven Erikson, the former captain of the Herzogin Cecilie. He was interviewed there in 1963 by an Irish Journalist while writing his first book Mother Sea. Basil Greenhill recorded that Karlsson worked as a boatbuilder and died from emphysemia in February, 1989 at the age of 83.