Hemingway and the Estonians: an Estonian in every port
The most famous line by a foreign writer about Estonians circulates in Estonia as: “in every port in the world there is at least one Estonian”. It was said by Ernest Hemingway — but not quite like that. What the Nobel laureate actually wrote is even better: an affectionate picture of the Estonian sailors of the 1930s, who crossed oceans in tiny boats and financed their voyages by writing sea stories for Estonian newspapers.
What Hemingway actually wrote
In chapter 24 of To Have and Have Not (1937), describing the Key West yacht basin, Hemingway writes:
“No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sunburned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article.”
At least two of them, then — sunburned and salt-bleached, waiting for a cheque. Hemingway goes on: they sail boats of 28 to 36 feet and send articles to Estonian newspapers, where the pieces are hugely popular and earn their authors a dollar to a dollar thirty per column, printed under a heading he renders as “Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers”. He compares those columns to the baseball pages of American papers — that ordinary a part of Estonian journalism they were.
The reality behind the quote
Hemingway was not inventing. The 1930s were the golden age of Estonian small-boat sailing: Estonian seafarers made ocean crossings and round-the-world voyages in tiny yachts and funded them exactly as Hemingway describes — with travel dispatches for the papers back home. Readers in the pre-war Republic of Estonia devoured those stories, and in Key West their authors really did sit on the dock waiting for the cheque. See also: Estonian explorers.
How the saying grew in the telling
Folk memory did to Hemingway's sentence what folk memory always does:
two Estonians shrank to one;
the yacht basins of Southern waters swelled into every port in the world;
a concrete 1930s snapshot became a timeless proverb.
In 1999 the translator and columnist Enn Soosaar went back to the original to establish what Hemingway had actually written — but the shorter version lives on, because it is simply too good. And in substance it is not even wrong: to this day you find Estonians wherever the sea leads.
Sources
Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not (1937), chapter 24; Edasi — “Mida Hemingway tegelikult ütles?” (based on Enn Soosaar's 1999 correction); Estonian World Review — “Hemingway and two Estonians”; IPA Estonia — “In every port in the world there is at least one Estonian”.