ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Troels Wiberg grew up in the Bahamas, where his father is the longest-serving member of the Consular Corps, having represented Sweden in the islands since the mid 1960’s. For over 30 years he has been reading naval history, particularly about shipwrecks. A maritime lawyer and licensed captain who has sailed inn over 50 countries during four trips around the world, Eric has over 80,000 nautical miles of seagoing experience under his keel, and his experience as a licensed US Merchant Marine Officer since age 25 colors the narrative and his understanding of events on the allied side. He has ridden aboard nearly a dozen tankers and bulkers in his 20-year maritime career.
By overlaying plots for the vessels in this study, he discovered that he has sailed over or at least within 20-50 miles of 43 the site of many of the attacks, including U-158. Many of his voyages (32 to or from Bermuda alone) took place in the Bermuda Triangle. He has been involved in a dozen ship or yacht casualty situations, including falling overboard naked in a snow storm, having a yacht burn and sink off Trinidad, and losing 2 ships and 4 men while operating tankers from Singapore.
Eric has written eight books or collections of writing since 1987, including a 200-pages master’s thesis on 85 modern ship casualties and the law of Places of Refuge. His studies have taken him to five universities in three countries, including Boston College, University of Oxford (UK), and Catholic University of Portugal’s Lisbon Law program. A member of the Boston Athenaeum, the New York Yacht Club Library Committee and the Massachusetts Bar, he has been actively researching U-Boats and German Raiders of both World Wars for several years. A US and EU citizen, he studied German briefly.
An active member of the Bahamas Historical Society, this project was germinated by the Society’s request for papers for their prestigious Journal of Bahamian History. It also stems from unfounded yet published rumors that his Swedish descendents, working for industrialist Axel Wennergren (founder of Electrolux) supplied U-Boats from Paradise Island - at the time Wennergren’s private island (relatives helped design a canal there which was used in the 007/Bond film THUNDERBALL as a U-Boat pen).
Eric has been published in roughly 25 periodicals, including a front-page story in the Nassau Tribune, and maritime articles in Cruising World, the Boston College Stylus, the Eleuthera Island Property Owner’s Association’s Newsletter, and the Concord Review of History. He lives in Norwalk, CT with his wife and family and returns to the Bahamas on a regular basis. Eric is well known to and has access to the archives, authors, and historians of the Bahamas at the highest levels. He has owned land in Eleuthera for nearly a decade and named his firstborn after Dunmore Town, Harbour Island, east of which half a dozen merchant seamen met their fiery end during a few months in 1942.
