The sea has featured on both sides of my family.
My mother was English/Welsh; her grandfather Christopher Taylor went to sea in the age of sail, transitioning to be chief engineer under steam. Allegedly he was once jailed for punching his captain.
My father, Erik Hamre, left Norway aged 16 at the end of 1945. He became a whaler in South Africa, returning to Norway to complete his navigation studies. Through the 50’s and 60’s he whaled in the Indian Ocean off Durban, with the whaling season running from February until September. Until the mid-60’s he would spend the southern summers on 18-week whaling trips to Antarctica. Erik was both captain and gunner. Whaling ceased in South Africa in 1975, under considerable – and understandable – international pressure. He then worked on various commercial ships, captained an oil pollution vessel and finally worked on tugs in Durban harbour. His sailing ended with his death at age 57 in a car accident.
Erik’s father, Hans Hamre, who was from the Sognefjord area of western Norway, lost his farm in the Great Depression. With a wife and 4 children to support, he sent the family back to live with his parents while he found day work on fishing vessels. By the late 30’s he was fully at sea, and had bought a new farm in Sandefjord in eastern Norway, where the family was installed. When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940 his ship sailed into the port of Singapore and joined the British Merchant Navy. He spent most of the war on the Atlantic convoys supplying the Allied war effort, surviving two of his ships being torpedoed and sunk by U-boats. (He was what the Norwegians call “a war sailor” – and was quite literally that: he served as gunner). At the end of the war he went directly to South Africa to become a whaler – making his first visit home to Norway in 1948 (and yes, quite extraordinary to think that he hadn’t seen his wife or 3 daughters since early 1939 – this was a very different world). In the late 1950’s he retired to Norway, where he tended his apple orchards. A large man – only 5’5” tall but weighing in at 130kg (286lb, or over 20 stone) – he died of a heart attack aged 66.