Youth and Early Career
Chapman was born at Nya Varvet, the royal dockyards in Gothenburg, on 9 September 1721, the son of Thomas Chapman, an English naval officer (born 1679 in Yorkshire) who had moved to Sweden in 1715 and joined the Swedish navy in 1716. His mother was Susanna Colson, the daughter of London shipwright William Colson. He showed a talent for shipbuilding when he made his first body plan based on a drawing of an Ostende privateer given to him by Flemish shipwright. Chapman went to sea in 1736, at the age of fifteen, and spent his late teens working in both private and state shipyards. In 1741, he helped build a Spanish merchant vessel, a project that provided him with enough money to allow him to work as a ship's carpenter in London 1741-44. After his stay in England, he returned to Gothenburg and established a shipyard with a Swedish merchant named Bagge. Together they built a few small vessels and provided maintenance work for the Swedish East India Company.
Read more about this topic: Fredrik Henrik Af Chapman
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