A Danish Sea Captain

This is a painting of the Urania of Flensburg. Hans Hansen captained a ship very much like this one.
Source: www.schiffshistorisches-archiv.de. 

               Like almost every other man in Flensburg, Hans Hansen was involved in the rum trade. He must have started out as a lowly sailor, but eventually his abilities earned him the captainship of a vessel.
               He wasn’t home very often.  He typically left Flensburg at the beginning of March, sailed northwards around the tip of Jutland and through the North Sea, down the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay, slipped past Portugal and docked briefly at Madeira to obtain fresh water and foodstuffs for his crew.

               Doubtless he also took on barrels of the local wine. This wine was immediately fortified with a neutral brandy to help it not spoil during the long voyage. As the ship swayed, so did the barrels, so their contents were constantly mixed and agitated. Exposure to below-decks heat and salt air gave the Madeira its famous oxidized, salty, and nutty characteristics.

               Then Hans’s ship’s sails caught the trade winds and he reached the Danish West Indies by May or June. He unloaded his goods, restocked the vessel with raw materials, and rushed to leave port before the local autumn storms hit. Then he followed the North American coast northwards for a while, and finally cut back across the Atlantic. With a little luck, he was home before Christmas.

               This left his wife Dorothea as a more-or-less single parent to their four sons, Henry, Peter, Christian Martin, and Andrew Theodor. She was a tiny woman, but no clinging vine. When Hans died young, she “cared for and raised the children, preparing them for useful and honorable positions in the world”, according to an old Southern California history book. She arranged for her 15-year-old son Christian to be apprenticed to a Flensburg cabinetmaker, and three years later she decided it was time to send her younger boys to the United States.