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Divers find 18th-century Danish warship

Divers in Denmark have located a warship that sank near the island of Læsø 238 years ago.

Published: 13 November 2018 17:27 CET

Divers find 18th-century Danish warship

Parts of of the wreckage under the sea near Læsø. Photo: HANDOUT/Undervandsgruppen.dk/Ritzau Scanpix

The 52-metre, 70-cannon Printz Friederich went down with almost 500 men on board during a storm on September 30th, 1780.

A diving team named Undervandsgruppen (The Underwater Group) has worked to locate the wreck for over ten years.

“We’ve sailed 2,500 nautical miles and combed 100 square kilometres of seabed. We were ready to give up because we thought we weren’t going to find it,” the team’s leader Kim Schmidt told Ritzau.

“This ship was overlooked a little. After 1781, no one gave it a second thought,” Schmidt said.

Divers from the group have recovered a number of objects from the shipwreck, including a lead plate with a royal crown and some lead cannon balls.

Authorities will now decide whether to recover more objects from the sunken ship.

Almost all of the ship’s 500-strong crew were rescued after it ran aground and sank. Between 6-8 men are thought to have died.

“The sinking was a complete disaster for the Danish navy, since the ship constituted one fifth of the fleet,” Schmidt said.

The ship was engaged in a mission when it ran aground in stormy weather.

“The captain was taken ill and the first mate was in charge. The ship was blown completely off course, and they had no idea where they were. They could not see landmarks or stars to navigate by,” Schmidt said.

But boats sent from the nearby island of Læso were able to save the majority of the people on board after the ship went down.

“It was quite turbulent for the people of Læsø. They had to find food and shelter for 500 people. Many were given lodgings with single women, and that resulted in a lot of descendents (from the crew),” the diving team leader said.

The story of the Printz Friederich shipwreck is to be featured at Læsø Museum, Ritzau writes.

READ ALSO: Wreckage of German WW2 ship found in seas north of Denmark

'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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