29. Heading Out to Sea at Age Seventeen
Carl-Emil Pettersson was born in a small rural community north of Stockholm in 1875. In 1892, he left home at the age of seventeen years for a life at sea as a sailor aboard merchant ships. Family and friends heard nothing from him for a decade and a half, until a now-fully-grown Pettersson suddenly showed up out of the blue at his mother’s door in Stockholm. He had spent years in the Southwest Pacific, in and around the Bismarck Archipelago, and boy did he have a tale – or tales – to tell.
During that time, Pettersson had experienced multiple shipwrecks and sinkings. He survived them all, coming through healthy and hale, and little the worse for wear. The most dramatic of his shipwrecks took place in 1906, and he eventually washed up in Tabar Island. It was inhabited by cannibals, but Pettersson got along well with them. So well in fact that he had not returned to Sweden to stay, but just to say hi, see his mother, take care of some things, then head right back to the cannibal island.
