At the time of Per’s birth the family planned to continue up the Atlantic coast to the St. Lawrence river, and then to follow the river to the Great Lakes. From there they planned to voyage down the Mississippi to the Gulf, and then through the Panama Canal to the South Seas, India, South Africa, and back to Denmark. But their plans of circumnavigation were aborted when they faced the harsh reality that their two older children needed to be placed in school. And Mama’s preference was to give them an education in her own native country of Denmark. So first they sailed up the eastern coast of Florida as far north as Jacksonville where a local newspaper announced, perhaps for the last time, that the family’s was holding an open house for anyone who wished to hear about their voyage. Then they sailed the short distance to Cuba, their last voyage together, where Peter bade farewell to his family who returned to Denmark on an ocean steamer. For the sake of the children, Mama and Peter had agreed to part for the first time since their marriage, a period of about six years, at least for the duration of the children’s basic education.
After Mama’s and the children’s departure for Denmark, Peter sailed to Jamaica where he was joined by a friend, Dr. Blak, whom he had known in Denmark. The two intended to sail the sea-hardy, beloved Restmore to the South Sea islands by way of the Panama Canal. On the fourth day of their voyage, however, they miscalculated their position because of an inability to take noon sights for the three days due to an overcast sky and a strong current. It was night. Having scanned the horizon while there was still enough light and found it clear, they lashed the tiller and prepared to take a much needed rest down below when suddenly they went aground on the Serrana Banks. And there they were marooned for 18 days while passing fishermen supplemented their stores with handouts of food. A Panama newspaper article tells the story of their rescue and the resourcefulness of the two mariners in bringing it about.
The two men traveled the 14 miles from where their yawl went
aground on North Cay to the light house on the South West Cay
in a small fishing boat. They carried with them the signal light from
the yawl.
Although they knew it was against the navigation laws to tamper
with the lighthouse, the two men reasoned that a break in its regular
signal would attract the attention of mariners. So Dr. Blak held his
coat over the light for five minutes for intervals of ten minutes while
Captain Dohm flashed an SOS signal with the yawl’s signal light. . . .
The broken signal from the light house finally brought the Andrea
Luckenbach to the rescue . . .
Peter was confident that the Restmore would sail again, although some had deemed it a complete loss. As a newspaper article took pains to point out, no doubt reflecting Peter’s upbeat prognosis:
The Restmore is not a total wreck as was reported here, the two men
emphasized, but had only run aground and when thy left her two days
ago was in excellent condition except for a few small holes in her hull.
With the aid of another vessel, she could be refloated and brought into
Colon.
But when Peter and his mate returned to tow the boat to Panama, they found that it had been stripped and dismantled so thoroughly by scavengers that it was now a total loss.
This must surely have been one of the most dispiriting episodes in Peter’s life. His beloved vessel upon which he had and Mama had lavished so much care, his home for five years while his children were growing up, his passageway to triumph and fame as well as freedom and self-reliance had been wrenched from his life by people he would have happily befriended.
Peter’s friend departed, but Peter acquired an 18-foot sailboat
and roamed the San Blas islands located a few miles off the coast of Panama for several weeks. Since there are from 365 to 378 islands in the San Blas group, and since they are inhabited by the indigenous and highly artistic Kuna Indians, there was much for Peter to see and experience of God’s islands. But even the exotic San Blas islands was not nearly as foreign to Peter as his next port of call: New York City.
Peter read an ad in a newspaper soliciting a captain of a 70-foot schooner to sail about a dozen people to Puerto Rico. He traveled to the city, landed the job, and set sail with his crew and passengers. And it was on this voyage that he became acquainted with a woman and her husband who were to figure prominently in his future life in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Half of the crew and several of the passengers, including the couple he had befriended, abandoned the schooner in Puerto Rico and bought a small (23-foot) sailboat named Tolufa. They then sailed on to St. Thomas with Peter at the helm.
The year was now 1940, a year in which disaster struck in Denmark. Hitler invaded the country and subjugated it for five years until its liberation by the allies in 1945. Thus, Mama Dohm and her 3 children were stranded in Copenhagen for the duration of the Nazi regime. Working as a telephone operator for the Germans, she was at least able to engage in mild forms of sabotage, such as passing on occasionally garbled messages.
After reaching St. Thomas with his passengers on the Tolufa, the small sailboat they had bought in Puerto Rico, Peter anchored in the harbor of St. Thomas in an area called the Mud Hole. He erected a sailboat shop for tourists on shore, rented out a few small boats, and lived on the Tulofa for the duration of the war. The couple with whom he had become acquainted on the cruise from New York to Puerto Rico, and who had then accompanied him to St. Thomas, stayed in the islands and remained close friends of Peter.
When war broke out in the following year of 1941 Peter was picked up by the authorities and jailed as an enemy alien. He recalled looking through the bars of his window and witnessing a patriotic ceremony in the town square, an event spangled with speeches laudatory of freedom and civil liberties, speeches that were the height of hypocrisy to a man placed behind bars for nothing more that his place of birth—and a place he had fled at that! But Peter was duly released after a short stay because he had become known in St. Thomas. Thus, he was allowed to live on the Tolufa and to do odd jobs on boats for a living even though he was officially interned for the duration of the war.
One day in 1942 a boat sailed into the Mud Hole and dropped anchor. It was owned by Dick Bertram and his wife who were cruising in the Caribbean. About twenty years later Bertram, who was already a famous, record-breaking oceanic single-hander, founded a powerboat manufacturing business that became one of the most successful in the world. In the early ‘forties he and his wife became fond friends of Peter and the three sailed together in the islands. In view of Bertram’s exceptional seamanship, it is a tribute to Peter that the famous sailor lauded him for his fastidious shipshapeness in the following words:
We salute Peter Dohm, skipper of “Talofa”, the best kept yacht
we have seen in months.
Bertram was less charitable about Peter’s dinghy, however, which he called “the cheese box.”
Many years later when Bertram was visiting the islands Peter brought him over to Great St. James to meet Brandy and me. On the way to the island Bertram trimmed the main so hard on his borrowed 17-foot sailboat that he put the mast through the step and had to limp back to the marina for another boat. In other words, he behaved like an inveterate racer. Peter thought that racing was ridiculous because it violated the principle that sailing was for relaxation and communing with the sea, not for madly competing with another like people do on land.
When the war was over, Peter managed to locate Mama and the children through the Red Cross. He asked them to come to the islands where they could all live together again. And so Mama and the three children returned to Peter on St. Thomas in 1949. The family rented an apartment on St. Thomas overlooking the harbor where Peter was plying his boat business. Soon thereafter, however, the company that owned the property where Peter had set up his tourist shop evicted him. So he tied together his little flotilla of boats (about half a dozen in all) and with the help of his children towed them to the small harbor at the east end of St. Thomas in an area called Shark’s Wharf. And it was there on the east end of St. Thomas that Mama and the children remained for most of the rest of their lives, with the exception of the first-born son who wanted to finish his schooling in Florida and where he remained after graduation. (Peter had had to deliver a boat to Florida, so he took his son Lars with him and left him there with a Danish family.)