Marstal

Marstal sits at the eastern end of Ærø, a twelve-kilometre bicycle ride from Ærøskøbing along a road that climbs gently through wheat fields before descending to the sea. I made the trip on my second morning on the island, and the ride had the particular quality of those journeys where the weather changes twice and you arrive somewhere feeling like you’ve come from further away than you have. The town appeared from a slight rise as a cluster of white buildings around a harbour, compact and direct, without the studied prettiness of Ærøskøbing. Marstal has never been primarily in the business of looking charming. It has been in the business of boats.

At its peak in the second half of the nineteenth century, Marstal was one of the largest sailing ship ports in Denmark. The town’s fleet — at one point over three hundred vessels — carried cargo to South America, the Far East, West Africa, and everywhere in between. The captains and officers who commanded these ships often built the substantial stone and brick houses you still see along the main streets, the buildings of men who had been places and wanted their houses to reflect it: slightly larger than strictly necessary, with bay windows that face the harbour as if their owners never quite gave up the habit of watching the water for incoming ships.

The Marstal Søfartsmuseum is the town’s centrepiece and one of the best small maritime museums I’ve been to. The collection traces the history of Marstal’s seafaring community from the seventeenth century through to the decline of working sail in the early twentieth, and it does this with the kind of concrete specificity that makes history feel inhabited rather than presented. There are logbooks from voyages around Cape Horn written in the cramped handwriting of young officers doing their first passages. There are figureheads rescued from wrecked ships. There are the tools of navigation — sextants, chronometers, charts with pencilled courses still visible — that represent a technology precise enough to find a specific reef in a vast ocean and human enough to be wrong sometimes. The model ships are extraordinary: detailed to the point of being almost medical, each one representing a real vessel from the town’s fleet.

I spent two hours in the museum and came out into the harbour area in the early afternoon with a completely different relationship to the wooden boat moored at the quay. The boat, a restored gaff-rigged ketch, was available for day sails and I’d seen it as mere scenery on the way in. Now I looked at it as a working tool, a technology that Marstal captains had used to navigate between continents, and felt accordingly more respectful of its presence in the harbour.

The town itself is quieter than its history suggests it should be. The working harbour still functions — a fish auction operates a few mornings a week, and there are local fishing boats alongside the pleasure craft — but the industry that once sustained three hundred vessels has been replaced by a smaller economy of boat repair, marine services, and the slow accumulation of summer visitors who come for the sailing, not the history. The main commercial street has the functional plainness of a place that serves its residents before it considers its visitors, which is more restful than it sounds. I ate lunch at a café that had the feel of somewhere that had been serving the same lunch to the same approximate group of people for thirty years, which in Marstal may literally be true.

When to go: May through September for cycling the island and the harbour life. The Søfartsmuseum is open year-round in reduced hours. Arrive by the early Svendborg ferry to have the full day — the twelve kilometres from Ærøskøbing by bicycle takes an easy hour and passes through the island’s most open agricultural landscape.