a smaller ship is sinking; tiny figures are visible as they leap into the water and wave to an overcrowded lifeboat. Tall-masted ships fill the field of view in every direction, the horizon papered with overlapping sails as thick columns of smoke from firing cannons and burning boats rise into the sky. In the distance, the rounded turrets of Kronborg Castle are visible on the Danish coast. The scene looks chaotic and loud, and the violence occurring in close quarters—to the men on board one ship firing on another, the destruction and carnage would be immediately audible and visible on a very human level.
The powerful currents surging through the sound severely limited the ships’ maneuverability, and the fighting was fierce and at very close range. Four Swedish ships were captured, and the Dutch successfully drove the remainder of the fleet from the sound. Of Sweden’s 6,000 men, over 400 were dead, 650 wounded, and hundreds captured. Among the Swedish casualties was Mans Andersson, officially listed as a captain from the province of Smaland’s Jonkoping regiment, along with one of his sons. A second son, Jonas, survived the battle, and returned home to his family with the heavy heart of one who has paid the price of warfare with his dearest blood, but who has also gained something highly prized by his kinsmen—honor.
Like most residents in southern Sweden’s Smaland, Andersson’s family were peasant farmers who settled on the floodplains of fertile soil and arable land when the Scandinavian glacier retreated to the north circa 11,000 BC. The earliest settlers were hunters and fishers who soon evolved to cultivate farming skills and animal husbandry. By the sixteenth century Sweden had been a primarily agricultural region for centuries, and the Andersson family would have been accustomed to the area’s periodic crop failures and long harsh winters. Life for landed peasant families like the Anderssons was physically challenging, particularly in the grain-harvesting months of August and September when families could expect to work twenty-hour days. In the community of village and extended families, the Andersson family would have made the winter hours more passable by communal meals, fireside conversation, and the consumption of aquavit—homemade grain or potato-based alcohol vilified by one Swedish king as the ruination of the Swedish people. Seventeenth-century Smaland is also notable as the region in which Swedish witch mania first erupted—from 1668 to 1676—fifteen years before the infamous Salem witch trials in America’s Massachusetts.
In Scanian peasant culture of that time, personal honor was valued above all other qualities, and loss of one’s honorable reputation could result in ostracization from community—a punishment that was nothing less than the severance of a lifeline. In the sixteenth century, the Swedish King Gustav Vasa had ended compulsory military conscription, so that “the native peasantry may sit at home, tend their fields and meadows, feed their wives and children, and no longer go out to get themselves killed.” By Mans Andersson’s lifetime, the Golden King had devised new rules of conscription, and King Charles X Gustav made it clear that more was needed and expected of peasant families. When Denmark declared war on Sweden in 1657, county governors received word from the Swedish Council alerting them of the imminent war and asking them to do their part in bolstering the courage of their constituents and encouraging them to actively partake in the defense of the fatherland. In instances where King Charles X Gustav specifically requested that a county governor muster the unit of volunteers, the response was negotiated and agreed upon by the peasants themselves. But after many successive calls for volunteer soldiers, numbers and patience were growing thin. When a new request for the mustering of volunteer soldiers reached counties in the autumn of 1658, the Crown met with somewhat more resistance and found many fewer men stepping forward to answer the call. For that reason, the willing participation of men from families such as that of Mans Andersson was especially appreciated by the Crown.
In recognition of the honor and sacrifice of Mans Andersson’s service and death in the Battle of the Sound, he was posthumously knighted as Adliga ätter (untitled nobility) and introduced at the Riddarhuset—the Swedish House of Nobility—in 1668. With a family’s ennoblement, the Crown also presented them with a new name, and from that time onward the recipient would cease using the patronymic system and instead pass the noble surname down to each successive generation. These names were generally crafted to impart an imposing or admirable air—the one bestowed upon Andersson and his descendants at the Riddarhuset was Gyllenhammar—which translates as golden battle axe. A perusal of a list of 2,350 numbered noble family names produces eighty-one surnames with the golden prefix “gyllen,” including Gyllenpistol (golden gun), Gyllensvard (golden sword), Gyllengranat (golden grenade), Gyllenskold (golden skull), and the impressive if nautically dubious Gyllenskepp (golden ship). Other popular prefixes of the time were Silfver (silver) and the Germanic Adler and Ehren—meaning eagle and honor respectively.
In my childhood, there was little novelty in our name, and I felt no compunction to live up to the golden battle axe family standard. The Gyllenhammar lineage of nobility was a historical fact, but not a source of self-importance—on the contrary, my father was a very modest man who had no patience for ostentation or self-aggrandizing of any kind. My father was an insurance company executive, and my mother a pianist. I had one sibling—my sister, Anne, who was four and a half years my senior. We lived in a comfortable flat in Gothenburg, the rooms often filled with piano music as my mother played and practiced daily.
As young children, my sister and I were encouraged to be intellectually curious and to speak our minds—ours was the sort of family that preferred lively discourse at the dinner table over silence. Some of my earliest memories are of that sense of unease I associate with my Aunt Irma’s warnings about the atmosphere in Berlin. When the war broke out, I remember almost nothing but being evacuated to my great-uncle’s country home, owing to the expected German bombardment of Gothenburg. Like the much larger Pied Piper operation in London, children in geographically vulnerable cities like Gothenburg were relocated to rural areas in Sweden, as were some 70,000 Finnish children. My days in my great-uncle Oskar’s home were happy ones, and I grew deeply fond of him. Oskar Gyllenhammar was a lovely man and a very successful and interesting person.
Born in 1866 on the Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea, some sixty miles from Sweden’s southeastern coastline, Oskar Leopold Gyllenhammar began his career as a bookkeeper and office manager of the Ystad Sugar Refinery and was later a member of the Board of the Nordic Trade Bank 1917–1925. His biography in a Swedish collection of historical business profiles also lists him as founder of the Scandinavian letter pigeon union. But he is best known for his invention of a rapid-cooking porridge that made him the effective founder of the Swedish instant oatmeal industry as we know it. I was too young to be impressed by my great-uncle’s business success or prosperity—though I do recall feeling the silver tea he always drank was a notable beverage, I think what drew me to him at the outset was his capacity for listening. When I talked to him, he gave me his full attention, as one would with an adult, rather than listening as a kind of patient concession to a child. Even after we returned home to Gothenburg, I continued to visit him each week and always looked forward to spending a pleasant hour in conversation as he sipped his silver tea.
My father did not quite share my high esteem of Oskar. He thought Oskar was vain—and perhaps he was, though I do not recall him that way. My father was an enormously modest man, one who shied away from publicity and accolades, and as such he had no tolerance for vanity in others. He was also a person of enormous integrity, independent of thought, well read and well spoken. I admired him, but also differed from him in many ways. Even in my childhood I was determinedly independent as to how I wanted things done, a trait that often resulted in his disapproval. But we had some common ground as well. I inherited his great love for the sea, and like him, my affinity for sailing and racing boats began early in childhood. My father could not afford to buy a sailboat of his own until after the war, and even then, it was not a particularly flashy vessel, but it was sound, reliable, and unobtrusively seaworthy, not prone to accidents or liable to stray off course—rather like my father himself.
My parents had a true love match, which was perhaps more the exception than the rule in those days. I remember their frequent hushed-voice discussions during the war, and of being acutely aware as the war broke out of my father’s fear for my Jewish mother and her family. I’m sure that in part his fear was due to the fact that in spite of its official neutrality, Sweden was in reality accommodating the Nazis by allowing German military transports to travel through Sweden (often by use of their railroad