Word: erma
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...sailing koster was hardly bigger than a lifeboat; she seemed even smaller when she left the Swedish coast and beat out into the foul weather and seam-starting seas of the Skagerrak. The 16 Estonian refugees-seven men, five women, four little children-who had wedged themselves into the Erma's tiny cabin had no visas, no charts of the Atlantic, no food but potatoes, cereal, bread and canned fish. But they did not complain. After years of war and wandering, they were going to America...
They had fled from their Baltic homeland after it was taken over by Russia, refused to go back to their Communist-dominated country. It had taken virtually all their money to buy the Erma's 36-ft. hull, to install an old marine engine, and equip her with sails and stores. The Erma was small but she was seaworthy. And the leader of the expedition, tough, blue-eyed Harri Pahlberg, was a master mariner. So was the first mate, leathery Arvid Kuun...
...stood alternate watches night & day, four hours off, four hours on. Bad weather seemed to follow the Erma. For weeks her people endured the racking eccentricities of her progress from grey gully to dirty crest of endless rain-pocked seas. But 62 days after leaving Stockholm the Erma lay anchored under a hot sun off the green hills and white buildings of the Island of Madeira. They wanted to go ashore, but the port authorities said: "No Communists wanted here...