Born in Germany in 1907 and raised in a devout Catholic family (his sister had become a nun), Peter ran away from home at the age of sixteen several years after his natural mother’s death and dedicated himself to the life of an inveterate wanderer. As part of his liberation he disavowed the religion of his step-mother as a bundle of fairytales, repressive practices, and narrow-mindedness, and he would shake his head and curse at the thought of his sister having become a nun. Piety and conformity were not Peter’s strong points. In fact, he was a wayfaring, European hippy of the thirties, affable to a fault but without reliance on drugs or any other artificial stimulants. During the years of our friendship I never saw him touch liquor, not even wine. Books, islands, the sea, and friends, especially women, were heady enough. I had the impression that Peter rejected mood-altering substances because they would interfere with his natural communion with the beautiful and fascinating world that he sharply perceived all around him.
After leaving home Peter roamed Europe peddling postcards door-to-door, postcards that were collages of little photos he had assembled showing places he had allegedly visited on his travels. (A small picture of the Sphinx on one of his creations, however, hints at a possible weakness for exaggeration inasmuch he had never been to Egypt). Peter was joined by two other youths who gave performances on the street and occasionally switched duties as look-outs when the police were endeavoring to enforce local ordnances against drifters and their unlicensed enterprises. Once Peter was jailed in Switzerland for some minor infraction and spent his time happily playing chess with a jail mate.) The three boys were not down-and-outers, however. A photo shows the trio of street entrepreneurs to have been respectably dressed in knickers and caps, jovial as Yalies on a spree, and reasonably well groomed.
Then one fateful day Peter entered a certain apartment building in Copenhagen to sell his pictorial creations. His first stop was an apartment on the ground floor where an attractive young lady answered the door but declined to purchase his wares. So he proceeded upstairs in search of other customers. When he returned downstairs he noticed that the young lady had left her door ajar. And when Peter paused, she invited him inside for tea and cookies. She was the future Elsa (Aka Mama) Dohm..
Mama had been raised in a sail-making family and was working for her father when Peter met her. Thus, she was an accomplished mariner, and in fact her family hailed from one of the small islands off the coast of Jutland that bore her family name. And so Mama taught Peter the art of seamanship, whereupon he discovered the two great passions of his life: Mama and the sea. (Evidently Peter had been as lucky in his accidental encounter with Mama as I had been in my discovery of Brandy.) The couple married and, true to Peter’s devotion to peregrination, they took a “walking honeymoon trip,” as a newspaper story called it, through central Europe into Greece.
When they returned to Denmark Mama gave birth to two children, a son born in 1933 and a daughter in 1934. By then Germany was in turmoil. Hitler and his Nazi Party had risen to plenary power by l933 on the crest of the depression, while other nations of Europe were suffering their own political and social convulsions. But it was only the Germans who frightened Peter and Mama inasmuch as Denmark had a 42-mile boundary with Germany. Peter was outraged by Hitler’s policies and rants and resolved to escape his clutches. And so, in August of 1934, Peter and Mama decided to turn their backs on Europe and sail around the world with their two infants.
The decision was made in the same adventuresome spirit that had infused Peter in his youth and never abandoned him, even in old age, a spirit that he obviously imparted sufficiently to Mama to coax her into a voyage to anywhere and everywhere. Having wandered together on land, Peter no doubt reasoned, it was now time for them to wander on the sea, which after all was Mama’s preferred element. As she told a reporter who wrote a profile of her when she was 69 years old, “Sailing is in my blood—very likely through generations. . . I still sail. I even sail the Sailfish with my daughter sometimes.” And because Peter had been inspired by sea stories, and especially those of Jack London, he was eager to transfer his wanderlust from land to water.
Their boat, which Mama and Peter carefully renovated and prepared for the circumnavigation, had been built in England in 1911 and had made many safe passages. She was yawl-rigged (with spar aft of the rudder), only 34 feet long and 10 feet wide, and with 213 feet of sail. She had a five-foot draft and a capacity of nine tons, and was powered by a Ford motor for handling in rough seas or difficult harbors. Her name was Restmore. Among other improvements, netting was installed around the deck so the two infants would not crawl or fall overboard. They then set out from Copenhagen in high spirits with a boat stocked with food and many gifts, leaving all of their friends behind as they bade farewell in the harbor of Copenhagen and headed seaward. When they embarked on their round-the-world trip, Peter was only 26 and Mama only 29. The two children were infants, one (Anna) still feeding at the breast.
The family visited Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, England, France, and Gibraltar (eventually they were to visit more than three hundred ports in Europe, Africa, the West Indies, and the United States) and in many of their ports-of-call they were welcomed and celebrated. They were also given food, clothing, and other useful items for their voyage. Peter’s daughter recalls that they had accumulated so many toys during their years of traveling that her father had to throw some of them overboard. The spectacle of a young husband and wife traveling blithely around the world with two infants in times of rampant unemployment, rising social unrest, trade wars, and growing political extremism and anti-Semitism must have been a balm to Europeans who heard about them. And because Peter had arranged with several newspapers and magazines to write stories about their trip as a means of drawing income, the family was probably well-known and widely admired and envied. Indeed, their little floating oasis on which they lazily meandered over the sea might have been one of the few remaining civilized spaces on the continent. (In addition to the income from his articles about the voyage, the family received some support from Mama’s father and her brother. Peter, incidentally, intended eventually to write a book about the entire voyage, but it never came to fruition.)
From the beginning, their travels were a voyage de triomphe. They were written up locally in the newspapers of the harbors they visited, and were befriended by the inhabitants. When they reached Spain, a documentary film clip was made of the family and shown publicly while they were still guests in the country. Unfortunately, two other harbors in Spain were not so welcoming, and in fact it was there that they encountered the only man-made menaces to life and limb in their entire voyage. The Spanish Civil War had just broken out, and when the family tied up at a dock in Malaga with the intention of purchasing stores and gasoline, guns were fired in their direction that sent bullets flying overhead and Mama diving down into the cockpit with the children. According to an account of this episode written by one of Peter’s friends years later in a book about their own life on the sea, “Peter, who was too thrifty to cut good manila dock lines, stepped ashore with his hands up and managed to slip the lines off the pilings with his feet.” The family then immediately shoved off and acquired supplies from an American freighter anchored just outside the harbor. But misfortune struck again. Becalmed by the weather they used up almost all of their water and gas before arriving in Gibraltar, their intended port of call only sixty miles away (“Sixty miles can be a long way in the Mediterranean,” the freighter captain had warned). They therefore had to put into shore at another Spanish port for supplies. But here once again gunfire broke out, and this time bullets penetrated the jib and mainsail. Mama started the engine with verve while Peter managed to raise the anchor without becoming a casualty of war, and the family scampered out of the harbor. But their troubles were not over yet: their engine ran out of gas within sight of Gibraltar, which left their little ark becalmed beneath a blazing sun for five maddening days at the mercy of strong currents running to and fro. Finally, they were able to reach Gibraltar where they spent two happy months. With the exception of the misadventures in Spain, the family was received with affection and help throughout their voyage.
After sailing hither and yon for four years and visiting numerous harbors on the European continents and England, the family reached Dakar in Africa and, finally, the Canary Islands. Here they set their course for Barbados in the West Indies, a distance of 2,300 miles across the open Atlantic. And after a voyage of 30 days on the open ocean, during which time they were becalmed in the Sargasso Sea, they finally made landfall in the West Indies. There they were warmly welcomed by the crew of a U.S. naval vessel and assisted at no expense, including a donation of much needed paint for the boat. Casually roaming up the archipelago where they spent time on Guadeloupe, St. Thomas, Cuba, and other islands, they occasionally held open house for anyone who wished to hear about their trip. And it now became apparent that Peter was as consummate a publicist of his travels on the sea as he had been as a wanderer on land with his postcards. In fact, I do not think I have ever known a more resourceful person. He contacted the newspapers along the way and collected numerous clippings from a variety of countries that described the intrepid voyage, clippings that are cherished by his children (and grandchildren) to this day as memorials of the most exciting and romantic years of their lives
Peter and Mama were acutely aware, however, that the time was approaching for the birth of another child. And so they set course for Miami where there was a community of Danes that embraced them with special cordiality. Indeed, the hospital and attending physician donated their services to the expectant mother. The first name of the physician was Per and the hospital was located on Alton Road; thus, in appreciation of the community’s generosity, the baby was given the name of Per Alton Dohm, the water taxi captain who had delivered us to Great St. James on our first trip while his own son, Peter’s grandson, sat on his lap, thirty years after Per’s birth.
The admiration, envy, and personal affection that were lavished on the family during their voyage can be gleaned from the following quotations from newspapers:
Mr. and Mrs. Peter Dohm and children are enjoying a life on
the ocean free from many of the cares of more stable life.
. . . Peter has solved most of the problems of existence.
The responsibility of taking one’s family in a frail boat on a trip around
the world rests lightly on Dohm. He was as enthusiastic as a boy in an
interview yesterday. His English is broken and he laughed loud and long
over his mishaps.
. . . Peter Dohm, descendant of the Vikings.
These snippets are only the English language versions of the many acknowledgements of their adventurousness inasmuch as newspaper stories appeared in almost every country of Europe and the West Indies as they proceeded on their historic voyage.
The people who personally befriended them, however, were the warmest and most gratifying. Peter was the guest of honor at the annual dinner of the Guadeloupe Club Nautique where he was hailed in the elaborate card of invitation as Skipper du “Rest-More.” The captain of a yacht in Jacksonville, Florida, sent Peter a poem dedicated to “the man who is doing what I have always wanted to do.” And the poem ended with the prophetic words, “The urge of the seas is in your knees /And you’ll never stay home for long.” And the poet added a note in prose: “Here’s wishing that the best of winds and other pleasant things blow your way throughout the remainder of your ‘round the world’ trip and always afterwards.” A Cuban wrote in his farewell note, “Don’t forget you have good friends here, and in case you need something from here, I’m quite sure you will get it.” In Florida, the director of the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology wished the family “smooth sailing, best winds, and friendly ports.” Per’s nurse at his delivery wrote a farewell note to the family in which she observed that at his birth he “most loudly and powerfully protested the crib, evidently as a poor substitute for his ship;” and she added, “Dear Per Alton, some day, while captain of a ship big enough for another passenger, please reserve the ticket for your first nurse.” And the hospital dietitian summed up the affection of many when she wrote, “Best love and all good wishes to the entire family.”
Apart from the courageous romanticism of their voyage, the public and the people whom they met were enchanted by Peter’s and Mama’s personalities. To look into Peter’s face in a photo taken in those years is to witness the cheerful, open visage of a man who appeared ready to tell anyone who cared to listen about the wonderfully exciting things he had done, or was in the midst of doing, or planned to do. And Mama’s ingratiating smile and sparkling eyes must have enchanted their acquaintances and been a welcome foil to Peter’s effusiveness. Peter was simply in love with life and its possibilities, providing one had the spunk to stray from the traveled road. And he was handsome as well, with strong features and a lean, muscular body. He could have been a movie star who played roles that required a combination of hearty amiability and grit. Mama was also a strong personality, although it was often hidden beneath her exquisite manners and congeniality. An occasional flash of sardonic wit revealed the tough lady underneath, however. (Once in later years when I was unburdening myself about my travails with a girl friend, I interrupted myself and said, “Mama, I’m sorry to bother you with my problems.” And Mama replied quietly with a smile, “They’re your problems.”)