Erik Smalhout was born a child of privilege in the Dutch East Indies in the early 20th century. His father sent him to boarding school in Australia just months before the Japanese seized the East Indies in 1942.
A few years later, Smalhout was drafted into the Dutch Navy. That experience led him to years of work post-war on commercial shipping lines crisscrossing the globe. Extraordinarily, at the end of it all, he wound up in the Mississippi Delta.
The University Press of Mississippi recently published Smalhout's memoirs under the title "Motherland, Fatherland, Whateverland." His granddaughter, Erika Berry, edited the book.