Elis Karlsson

Elis Karlsson was born and grew up on Vårdö, one of the Åland Islands in Finland, at the beginning of the twentieth century, during the period when many of their prosperous and entrepreneurial farmers were engaged in the shipping business, by building, owning and sailing, initially small, wooden, vessels, to trade their produce around the Baltic ports. This culminated in the large fleet of steel-hulled, four-masted commercial vessels which Gustav Eriksson operated out of Mariehamn between the First and Second …