Johan Fabricius

Johan Wigmore Fabricius (24 August 1899 – 21 June 1981) was a Dutch writer, journalist and adventurer.

Fabricius was born in Bandung, Java. He wrote approximately 60 books, among them many books for children, including De Scheepsjongens van Bontekoe (1924), which was reprinted 28 times as of 2003.

Johan Fabricius was born in Bandung, Dutch East Indies, to Jan Fabricius and Minke Dornseiffen. His father was a journalist and a successful playwright, which facilitated Johan's entry into the arts. He was a tall and handsome man, charming and successful with women, and had an aptitude for various arts. Until the age of fourteen he spent most of his time in the Dutch East Indies (ten years in all) and would return for brief visits throughout his life, maintaining a strong connection to the area.

His schooling was varied; he was educated in different places in the Indies and the Netherlands, and briefly in Paris, and in the fall of 1914 he enrolled in the Hogere Burgerschool in The Hague, but soon left for the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, where he showed a great talent for portraits, later illustrating his own books. The success of the series De wondere avonturen van Arretje Nof, a series of five books advertising for the Nederlandsche Oliefabrieken (since 1928 part of Unilever), was due in part to his illustrations. In 1925 he married Ruth Freudenburg, and the couple had three children.

After his years in The Hague, Fabricius was eager for adventure and joined the Austrian army as a war painter. He spent a few months on the Pavia front, where mostly Bosnian soldiers were engaged with Italian troops. Some of his lively letters home were published in the literary magazine De Gids. In 1922 he managed to get Eiko van den Reigerhof, his first novel, published; it had been written a few years earlier. By that time Fabricius was trying his hand as an illustrator, painter, stage actor, and costume designer. Following in his father's footsteps he wrote plays, some of which were actually staged.

His breakthrough as a writer was Het meisje met de blauwe hoed, a humorous novel about a soldier's life based on his experiences in the military. The book was a commercial success, and was adapted for the movie screen in 1934; in 1974 it was adapted to a musical for television. His De scheepsjongens van Bontekoe (1934) was to become his best-known book; based on the real-life experiences of a 17th-century Dutch captain, Willem Bontekoe, who was shipwrecked on the way to the Indies, it became a best-seller after a slow start. The three fictional characters who set sail with Bontekoe allowed for easy identification for a young audience; statues of the three adorn the harbor of Hoorn since 1968.

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