The text above was embroidered by a young girl from the Àland Islands in 1906 on a wall tapestry for her fiancee and accompanied the seaman (later captain) for the next thirty years as a reminder of home and those who awaited his return. This story neatly summarizes an established, if somewhat idyllic, view of the emotional bonds between seaman and home: that at the bottom of the itinerant mariner's heart was a constant longing for hearth and kin. While this perception has some foundation, merchant seafaring not only made it difficult to have a permanent abode but also loosened or severed the seaman's ties with his birthplace. A good indication of the scale of this problem is an 1886 estimate that onethird of the seamen entering London lacked a real home.

Among these homeless mariners were a great many Finns who in the late nineteenth century served on foreign vessels. They decided on this path in search of higher pay, because they were deserters, or because they preferred employment abroad. In the case of deserters, the prescribed punishment must have further deterred returning. As a consequence these men became itinerant and internationalized. Perhaps as many as 6000 sailed the oceans in 1881, or about as many as served in the Finnish merchant marine. Whether their work experiences differed substantially is unknown, but the intensity and level of contact with home certainly differentiated the two groups.

Finnish seamen serving on domestic vessels, whether on regular routes or longer voyages, had an automatic opportunity to return home that the itinerants lacked. But perhaps as important, Finns on domestically- owned craft in a very real sense never left home: they served mostly with other Finns and shared a language (and perhaps even memories). On the other hand, those on international vessels tended to become alienated from their home and past.