330 pages paperback, 64 colour photos, 154 black and white photos, ISBN 978-2-8052-0536-1
Published  September 2021
 www.peterjakobson.com

 

The book I have written, “The Estonian Sea Captain” on the adventurous life of my father, Captain Evald Jakobson, has now been published both in Estonian and English.

The Estonian version, published by Hea Lugu, was launched in Tallinn in the beginning of September at the Paks Margareeta maritime museum – with a second smaller launch in Pärnu, my father’s home town, at the Yacht Club.

 

The English version was also published in the beginning of September with a launch planned in London early next year.

 

Estonia’s history has always been closely linked to the Baltic Sea, its trade and adventurous seafarers.

 

My father, Captain Evald Jakobson, went to sea soon after Estonia’s independence in 1918.

 

His ships carried varied cargoes throughout Europe, from smuggling vodka to Finland to delivering arms to the Spanish Civil War.

 

His ship, the Yorkbrook, was ‘the prize’ in the major sea battle between Franco’s flagship and the Basque Republican Government’s armed trawlers, the subject of the narrative poem, the ‘Nabara’, by Cecil Day Lewis (later Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom).

In 1938 he built Kapteni Villa, a notable modernistic house in Pärnu, his home town.

Aware of the threat to Estonia from its Nazi and Soviet neighbours, he prepared to move to England with his wife and first son as WWII broke out. I was born there in 1941.

Evald’s house in England became a centre for the Estonian diplomatic and shipping exiles. He worked integrating Estonian ships into the British wartime convoys.

In late 1943 he was flown up to Stockholm on a mysterious mission for the British Government.

 

Neutral Sweden was home to Estonian exiles but also to British, Nazi and Soviet spies.

Post-war, he set up his “Boreas” publishing company to promote Estonia with 21 publications in English or translated from Estonian, some overtly political, others literary.

 

He continued his support of Estonia until his death in London in 1973.

To us, his children, Estonia seemed a distant part of the family’s history.

 

Like many exiles, he spoke little of his life in Estonia pre-war or of the fate of his two families, seafarers on my father’s side, farmers on my mother’s side who endured three brutal occupations.

All this was to change dramatically in 1991 when Estonia regained its independence and returned properties to their original owners.

 My career in the liquor business took me to marketing vodka in the Baltic region, the link that set me off on my voyage of discovery with numerous trips to Gdansk (Danzig), Bilbao, Stockholm, Tallinn and the British Government archives in Kew.

“The Estonian Sea Captain” is a dramatic account of Captain Evald Jakobson’s life and the story of his country, weaving in first-hand accounts with archival research against the backdrop of 20th century European history (of the rise and fall of the Nazi and Soviet empires).

Peter Jakobson