Who is The Supercargo?

The Supercargo

My name is John Nixon. I was born in England at the end of July in 1958, which makes me a little over 50 at the time of writing.

In my life, I have lived in several different countries, but I spent most of my youth in Britain (23 years give or take a few months). In September 1985, I came to Sweden to work and I stayed. Now I’ve lived longer in Sweden than in the land of my birth.

For most of my working life, since my early 20s, I’ve been a teacher or at least engaged in some way with education. I’ve worked in night schools and summer schools, in compulsory and voluntary education, with teenagers and adults.

I have carried out and published research into education and co-written and published a textbook for teachers. During the last 4 years I have also translated and created teaching material for a weekly e-letter published and distributed in Sweden.

I have also made my living partly as a commercial translator - working from Swedish to English.

Photographs and illustrations of mine have been used in both commercial and not-for-profit publications in print and on the Internet.

My speaking voice has been used in commercial voice-overs and I have also recorded sound tracks for teaching material. Mine is also one of the voices used for the Swedish national listening comprehension tests for English in schools.

Please feel free to contact me for further discussion …

… if you would like to commission images, text or speech recordings from me,

… if you think I might be able to help you develop a project or contribute to your creative work,

… if you see something on these pages that you would like to use in some way,

… or simply in the spirit of developing synergy.

John Nixon (The Supercargo)

Gothenburg, Sweden
January 2009

Why "Supercargo"?

The Supercargo was the man in the merchant trading ships of yore who was responsible for the cargo the ships were carrying. He was, if you like, the superior officer in charge of the cargo. I live in Gothenburg in Sweden, a city that grew rich initially on the East India Trade. The Swedish East India Company was based here, the great trading ships sailed from here and returned here and the goods they brought back were sold here. Our city museum is housed in the old East India Company warehouse. The crews and officers of the merchantmen were likely to be Swedes, but many of the Supercargos were Scots or English. (The most well-known was the first, Colin Campbell, that's him to the right there.) And here I am, an Englishman of partly Scottish descent operating out of a Swedish port. I also chose "The Supercargo" as the name for this site because I see the site as a ship carrying a selection of my creative work to show and maybe sell around the world. Then again, I hope visitors will be impressed by the site and go away thinking: "My what a super cargo that Supercargo has!"

More than this, looking for a name for the site (and inadvertantly an alter ego for myself) I wanted something that was easy to say and write, distinctive in form and sense and not widely used. I think "The Supercargo" fits the bill. There are supercargo sites around which have specifically to do with ships' cargos and 'the supercargo' crops up as a phrase in on-line books. (There are also some weird and wonderful other uses - there's a private skateboard/hiphop site in the states which uses an alternative spelling - you can find it for yourself if you want!)

The Supercargo's associations with the sea also gave me the idea of the colour scheme for the site and one or two other features. (Scrimshaws, for example.)

This site has been up for a little less than two months at the time of writing, though I've been using "supercargo" as a moniker for a year or so in various forums. If you Google supercargo, as I just did, you'll find me on page 3, but if you Google the supercargo or thesupercargo I'm on page one, and in the first two or three hits. I think that's a good sign.

JN (The Supercargo)