Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

tion tells us, "Nixe was the only sailboat ever owned by the club"
(Geschichte: 84). In addition, in the club's lists of boats owned, the first Nixe
is specifically identified as a "Norwegian sailboat." If, by analogy, Felix's
own Nixe and the club's sailboat of the same name are perceived in relation
to his nickname, then Grove's recurrent tales in his autobiographical narratives
about sail-boats that he claims to have owned, cease to appear wholly
fictitious but have their factual basis here—including the Norwegian origin
of the sailboat which may indeed have once been in the Skandinavian
waters so often mentioned by Grove. As it happens, Grove turned his
"Uncle Jacobsen" into the instrument for the "purchase of the yacht" in
which they sailed from "Luebeck to Haparanda and Helsingfors; and even
down the Baltic, past Thurow into the Skagerrak, along Jutland, and down
the North Sea to Hamburg" (ISM 91). The old Rhenus sailboat Nixe, however,
was not known for easily traversing the Baltic and taking the famously
rough course from the Baltic into the North Sea, but for capsizing easily and
providing its crew with unwanted baths. Grove may have enjoyed an inside
joke here.
Indeed, in Grove's recollections, most of the episodes concerning
"Jacobsen," boating and sports seem to have their verifiable roots in Greve's
time in Bonn. Consider, for instance, Grove's other account of "Jacobsen's"
days of sailing with him:
Whenever we were near water, he had one of his fleet of boats shipped out from
Hamburg: a double skiff, or a half-outrigger boat; and finally two single seaters
with full outrigger row-locks and sliding seats. In these boats, some of them no
more than sixteen inches wide, we travelled thousands of miles, on the Rhine,
the Elbe, the Oder penetrating thence into the Moselle, the Main, the Neckar, the
Havel. We went to England to attend the great regattas and thus saw much of the
countryside. And finally he taught me to sail. (ISM 90)
Did the real Jacobsen own a small fleet of boats? We cannot doubt that back
in Hamburg Felix Grève must have acquired some experience in rowing, for
in Bonn he almost immediately started out in the Vega, a double skiff, and
did only seven kilometers less than the 270 km that a crew of six consisting
of the club's most experienced rowers had done in the Fiducit the preceding
week. It appears unlikely that the real Jacobsen, who both in Hamburg and
In Search o/MyseZ/significantly failed to contribute to the upkeep of FPG's
dying mother, ever owned several different sculls; on the contrary, it is more
than likely that Grove, in 1946, was thinking of the Rhenus boathouse's
ground floor which in 1899 accommodated about twelve boats of various