Description

Exposition Press [Published date: 1957]. Hard cover, 207 pp. Stated First Edition. Good in acceptable dust jacket. Grey cloth covered boards with black lettering on front and spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers and light overall aging to cloth along edges and spine as well. Binding tight. Light age spotting to edges of text block. Otherwise pages are lightly aged but unmarked, with occasional light spotting. Dust jacket has several 1/2" or less nicks and tears and creasing along edges. Moderate overall scuffing, aging and soiling to jacket as well with a bit of the color scuffed off along edges and spine. NOT price clipped. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-library. NO remainder marks. [From front jacket flap] 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 Tears 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 narrated in this remarkable chronicle, the excitement of which is doubled by its authenticity.