Born aboard her father’s sailboat, Virginia Tangvald investigates his extraordinary and troubling legacy: seven marriages, two wives lost at sea, a fatal shipwreck and a son who later vanished.
In July 1991, on the wild eastern shore of Bonaire, a pale blue ruffled dress is found trapped in the reefs. Days earlier, the Artémis de Pythéas had shattered against the coast, killing Carmen and her father, Per Tangvald. Carmen’s fifteen-year-old brother, Thomas—the sole survivor—had staggered ashore naked and wounded, asking whether “the others” had arrived.
In Canada, Virginia would not learn of the wreck until the following year. Born aboard the Artémis and taken to Toronto by her mother at age two, she grew up haunted by the family she had lost and by the myth of the father she barely knew. Per was a renowned Norwegian-born sailor who rejected conventional life in pursuit of absolute freedom. He married seven times, and two of his children were born aboard his boats. Two of his wives died at sea in circumstances that left lasting questions. Years after surviving the Bonaire wreck, Thomas vanished while sailing from French Guiana and was never seen again.
Drawing on logbooks, letters, photographs, police reports, government archives and interviews with those who knew the family, Virginia follows the trail across continents and generations. She tests Per’s carefully constructed legend against the memories of the women, children, sailors, friends and officials whose lives intersected with his. What begins as an investigation into her father’s life becomes a reckoning with the ways his hunger for freedom shaped and damaged everyone around him, including Virginia herself.
Cinematic, psychologically acute and as propulsive as a mystery, Children of the Open Sea is a literary memoir about charisma and control, inherited trauma and the cost of the stories families invent.
