The Ghost: The Adventures of a Swedish Sailor by Karl E. Stahl (.PDF)
File Size: 19.2 MB
The Ghost: The Adventures of a Swedish Sailor by Karl E. Stahl
Requirements: .PDF reader, 19.2 MB
Overview: BEFORE HE was five years old, Sven Svenson (the name the author assumes in these adventure memoirs ) had run away from home for the first time, and by the time he was seven he had vowed to kill his father. These beginnings presaged the violence and tribulations that were to beset Sven on both land and sea before he reached the land of his dreams, America, at the age of eighteen.
Born on a Swedish feudal farm in 1887, the son of a drunken, wife-beating tenant farmer, handyman and inventor, Sven was driven from his home several times by brutality. At fourteen, thinking he had killed his father in a fight, he fled to sea to escape retribution and to earn money to help support his mother and nine brothers and sisters.
If his experiences on land were bad, those at sea were worse—experiences in the tradition of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast and Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. He was shanghaied on a Congo-bound hell-ship and after months of mistreatment jumped overboard and almost died before another vessel rescued him. He ultimately signed on a cargo ship that might bring him to America but incurred the hatred of an alcoholic and sadistic mate who eventually forced him at gun point to leap into the sea.
How Sven survived, terrorized the ship as a “ghost” and at last reached America half dead from exposure and hunger, are dramatically nar-rated in this remarkable chronicle, the excitement of which is doubled by its authenticity.
Published 1957 by Exposition Press, New York
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs
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