5 ms·
A broken man's homemade, seaworthy ship rests in the Canadian prairie (2015)
- acc_297 4y agoWow its wild to see this posted here my great grandfather knew this man . He was famous for building that ship in a small part of Saskatchewan.
- acc_297 4y agoMy grandfather still has a farm in the region and had this to say > Tom knew that building a boiler to power a steam engine was beyond his scope so he wanted Alex to fashion one for him. My dad said he was definitely a different kind. Tom was determined, no doubt. However he made a set of false teeth - they didn’t fit very well and yet he would persist - showing up in town with his mouth bleeding. Our local region, say, within a radius of 25 miles which would have been served by the villages of Lucky Lake, Birsay, Beechy, Dinsmore and Macrorie contained a relatively large number of Finnish settlers.
- busymom0 4y agoCan someone explain what it means by: > The keel was sealed with horse blood in keeping with Finnish tradition I tried googling “keel horse blood” but didn’t find anything useful.
- walrus01 4y agoBlood and other binding agents are combined with fibrous material that gets pushed into the cracks between wood planks. Much more commonly done with types of tars and heavy oil. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakum https://www.google.com/search?q=caulking%20ship%20wood%20rope&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-m https://www.google.com/search?q=caulking%20ship%20wood%20rop...
- rsaarelm 4y agoSounds made up. Finnish boat-sealing tradition is all about pine tar.
- deltarholamda 4y agoYeah, and I'm not all that sanguine about calling that boat "seaworthy" either.
- sdfghswe 4y agoSealing with something that's soluble in water does sound like a silly idea.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoI wouldn't really call Minnesota landlocked
- drewcoo 4y agohttps://www.worldatlas.com/articles/landlocked-states-of-the-united-states.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/landlocked-states-of-the...
- George83728 4y agoUsually rivers don't count against 'landlocked'. It does seem a bit silly though, there's a ton of ship traffic on the Great Lakes and through the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic.
- dhosek 4y agoMinnesota also borders on Lake Superior, but it does raise the question of how big the body of water needs to be to disqualify a geographical entity as landlocked.
- pintxo 4y agoIsn’t the concept of „landlocked“ usually referring to your ability to do trade at scale with the rest of the world without being dependent on the goodwill of some other actor? Seems Minnesota would still depend on the goodwill of whoever controls the waterways between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic. So they are still landlocked.
- petre 4y agoBy the same logic, all the Black Sea nations depend on the goodwill of Turkey to let them pass to the Aegean. Are they landlocked? No. Are Azerbaidjan and Turkmenistan landlocked, even tough they have access to the Caspian Sea? Maybe if it's a water body that somehow connects to an ocean, then it's not landlocked.
- Robotbeat 4y agoThey should sail it, with his remains, to Finland.
- bgoldste 4y agoI had the exact same thought.
- jacquesm 4y agoI don't see much proof for it being seaworthy other than the claim in the title. Definitely wouldn't chance my life on that thing.
- osigurdson 4y agoSounds like the making of a YouTube channel. If only it existed back then.
- watersb 4y agoHe won't rest until he's home
- jnsie 4y ago> (Of course, Sukanen may indeed have been mentally ill. He apparently attempted to patent wife-beating implements.) That took a nasty turn
- Aeolun 4y agoI’m not sure if that would have made a difference considering he didn’t have a wife any more? Maybe he was still angry with her for dying while he was away?
- moffkalast 4y agoMore like a nasty gas station on the road made out of nothing but nasty turns that was his entire life.
- ShadowBanThis01 4y agoThis wasn't explained: "the two made for the Canadian border only for the boy to be rejected and sent back to his foster home." "Rejected" by whom, and on what grounds?
- Jagerbizzle 4y agoLikely forgot to fill in his ArriveCan application.
- VHRanger 4y agoHis cell phone ran out of batteries on the way and he couldn't download the app. Back to your country you go!
- bombcar 4y agoI would assume rejected by the Canadians because his son wasn't legally his son anymore.
- harryf 4y ago> Sukanen may indeed have been mentally ill. He apparently attempted to patent wife-beating implements. This wasn’t explained either…
- osigurdson 4y ago“Built a rowboat and headed for the Hudson”. As in Hudson Bay? That looks like a very challenging journey on its own.
- rpeden 4y agoIt seems that it was Hudson Bay: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/105820900/tom-sukanen-1878-1943/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/105820900/tom-sukanen-1878-1... When I saw "the Hudson" I thought of the Hudson River. It seemed plausible he might be able to row to Lake Winnipeg and then follow rivers and portages to Lake Superior, and from there paddle his way down to Lake Erie and the down the Erie Canal to the Hudson. Not exactly an easy trip, but NYC seemed to me like a better place to find a steamship to Finland than Hudson Bay!
- osigurdson 4y agoI think that would involve a lot of upstream rowing (though I don't know for sure).
- leke 4y agoIt's called sisu in Finnish.
- moffkalast 4y agoGuy walked 600 miles to Canada, I think that sounds about right tbh.
- scoopr 4y ago”Sontiainen” means dung beetle. Knowing this added very little to the story though..
- lotophage 4y agoIt's think it's very fitting. The dung beetle is the worldly embodiment of Sisyphus. Doomed to forever push a boulder uphill only for it to roll down again when he was near the top.
- viciousvoxel 4y agoalthough probably unintentional, there's a bit of synchronism too, since the dung beetle (aka scarab) is the ancient Egyptian (Coptic) symbol of resurrection (among other things).
- blincoln 4y agoThe way it's been described to me, the ancient Egyptians viewed dung beetles sort of like a phoenix (phoenices?) or an ouroborous, because they believed the beetles to have the power of self-creation (from the mistaken assumption that a dung beetle could survive entirely on dung it produced itself). So I wouldn't be so sure it's an unintentional reference.
- osigurdson 4y agoWhat I don't really understand is why he went back to Canada after he managed to get back to his homeland the first time.
- kevingadd 4y agoNot uncommon for sailors to stay aboard ship even when they reach land. It's possible he wouldn't have been allowed to disembark.
- leke 4y ago> Of course, Sukanen may indeed have been mentally ill. He apparently attempted to patent wife-beating implements. It would be really interesting to see these applications. I just can't imagine what something like that would actually look like. Also, my wife says Sontiainen is the name for some bug that likes to live around shit.
- fsckboy 4y agowiktionary agrees with your wife. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sontiainen https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sontiainen dung+insect https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-iainen#Finnish https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-iainen#Finnish
- nightowl_games 4y agoI went to this museum as a child. It was a great museum, it had a lot more than just the ship. I never knew this man's full story. It's very sad.
- freeopinion 4y agoA (disputed) story goes that a community wanted a church house and tasked a likely local to get it built. He protested that the only thing he knew how to build was sailing ships. So in 1868 they built an upside down ship and called it a church. The Pine Valley chapel is still in operation today in the mountains of southern Utah. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Valley_Chapel_and_Tithing_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Valley_Chapel_and_Tithing... https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/485 https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/485
- dddddaviddddd 4y agoMy understanding is that roofs of church naves in the style of a ship's keel are fairly common: https://www.google.com/search?q=keel+nave+roof+church&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=keel+nave+roof+church&tbm=is... The metaphor is that the Church is a ship that protects and carries its congregation.
- JasonFruit 4y agoThe same story was told about a chapel that was part of the Little Norway museum in Wisconsin. I think these stories might be completely made up in response to the ship-like style of the roof.
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y agoReading between the lines of the "aww shucks, how endearing", this guy destroyed many lives, including his own, by doing something totally unnecessary only for his own self-serving ends. Might be an allegory for the current shenanigans at Twitter.
- Nursie 4y agoOn a smaller scale, when I lived there a few years ago there was a man in Southampton (UK) who had a large catamaran in his garden. It took up the entire garden and was easily visible from the road as they had a corner plot. According to local hearsay he had rebuilt and restored it (perhaps even designed and built it from scratch) in place, but having done so it could never be moved due to power lines and other obstructions. There was a dispute of some sort with the local authorities on the grounds it was an eyesore or some such, but as it actually couldn't be moved without being destroyed... Sometimes when I drove past I would see him out polishing the handrails and other metal adornments. (Doing some searching, it appears to have fallen into disrepair in the last few years of the owner's life, and may have finally been demolished after he passed last year. It's possible it had been there since he started building it in the mid 1960s! "Bitterne Park Catamaran" for the mildly interested... if you see the aerial shots, the boat has a bigger footprint than the house.)
- MrGilbert 4y agoIt's still preserved on GMaps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/1g5pid6qEfYg3RrGA?g_st=ic https://maps.app.goo.gl/1g5pid6qEfYg3RrGA?g_st=ic
- jaclaz 4y agoAnother article with more details on the life of the builder: https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/settlement-immigration/dreams-in-the-dust-the-story-of-tom-sukanen https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/settlement-immigration...
- tonyarkles 4y agoI’m just amazed by all the comments here about visiting the museum! I grew up near there and… it’s definitely pretty far off the beaten path for almost anyone!