The Dohm Family of East End
By Jaime Elliott
St Thomas was a far different place when the Dohm family’s 33-foot wooden double-ender first plied the waters off its pristine shoreline in 1937. Grainy black and white family photos of that time reveal Charlotte Amalie waterfront with lots of empty docks and small trading sailboats with no motors, loaded with people fruits and vegetables.
There were almost no cars just a few trucks. No Safari taxis, no traffic jams! Horses and donkey’s. Those first impressions of St. Thomas stayed with the Dohm’s would remember the V.I. as a Sailors paradise. Anna Dohm Nose, who still calls St. John home, never left after the family’s return to the V. I. In the 194Os.
Early sailing charter excursions, the first Water taxi to St. John, Snack shop and Boat repair businesses in Red Hook, where no one else lived. All would come thanks to the Dohm family.
At first, however, the islands were simply a breathtakingly beautiful place for an adventuresome sea-faring European family.
Peter and Elsa Dohm weren’t like average Danish families in the late 1930s. Instead of settling down and eking out a living in the bustling city of Copenhagen, the young couple with one year-old Lars and Anna, just a few months in the world, in tow set sail aboard Restmore out of Copenhagen in 1934.
“The first five years of my life were spent on a boat 33 feet long with my older brother and my parents,” said Anna. ” My brother was about a year old and I was three or four months when my parents decided to take off and go sailing on an “Around The World” tour. They were sea gypsies they just wanted to sail for the adventure and fun of it.
“We were in no hurry, it was probably one of the slowest sailing cruises ever.”
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 Square 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 still feeding at the breast.
After enjoying the sailing wonderland of the Virgin Islands for some months, the family continued on their voyage and set a course for Puerto Rico, Cuba and Florida.
There the Dohm’s stopped long enough for Elsa to give birth to the youngest of her sailing brood, Per, who was born in 1939, in Miami.
Before long though, the Dohm’s were headed south again.
The family cruised the waters off Cuba and relished their last care-free adventures. , their last voyage together. 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. 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. Her German-born father remained behind with the sailboat.
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 children were stranded in Copenhagen for the duration of the Nazi regime.
“My father was very lucky to be able to stay behind during that time,” Anna said. “If he had gone back to Germany, he might very well have been killed.”
In Copenhagen, the Dohm children attended school and tried to stay safe in the occupied city. Despite her best efforts to stay out of the way, Anna still vividly remembered the fear of daily life at the time.
“I remember when a young German soldier stuck his gun in my stomach” Anna recalls” There was a big intersection and the soldiers were rounding everyone up. My girlfriend and I were just coming home from a Girl Scout meeting and we were still in our uniforms.”
“One Dane there could speak German and told the soldier, let the children go home,” said Anna. “And My brother Lars’ teacher disappeared from school one day and never seen again because he was a member of the underground.” “We were walking through a small park and then here comes this soldier with a gun.
He shoved the gun right in my stomach and I started crying and my friend said, don’t cry, or he’ll shoot you.” Then he told us to go home. We had that fear every day.”
Peter Dohm didn’t stay long in Cuba and soon found himself back down in the Virgin Islands which had left an impression when he sailed through with his young family only a few short years before in 1937.
“My Parents had made many friends here” said Anna.
While Peter still suffered repercussions of being German during World War II, he enjoyed a relatively quiet time in St. Thomas.
After being interred in Fort Christian as an enemy alien for six months, Peter was given permission to remain on his vessel moored in Charlotte Amalie but he did have to hand over his radio and navigation charts, that any sailor could get free, if they promised to tell the harbormaster of any unmarked obstruction or rock they might discover!
After the war ended in 1945, the Dohm’s still had years to wait before being able to reunite with Peter in St. Thomas.
“There was a law in Denmark back then that if your father was German, the children got their father’s nationality and it was not a good thing to be German at that time,” said Anna. “It was actually better to be stateless. It took a long time to get our Passports.”
“There were so many families split up during the war,” said Anna. “Four years sounds long, to wait for a passport but we actually got preference because they wanted families to be reunited.”
Finally in 1949, with an official “ stateless” passport, Anna and family boarded a freighter once again, this time bound for the Virgin Islands. The ship was not schulded to stop in St Thomas but the West Indian Company made a change to the route it would take and carried them with their belongings of clothes and bikes to St Thomas harbor where the ship would anchor to let them off.
After two weeks at sea, the first glimpse of the lush green hills of St. Thomas sent teenage Anna into awe, she recalled 60 years later with tears welling in her eyes.
“I will never forget the day I woke up in the morning and I could see the islands, the green hillsides,” said Anna. “This is America,” I thought. I was so excited. I was 15 years old and I remembered a poem saying “ In America the streets are paved with gold!!”
“The Pilot boat at the time was a friend of Peter’s and so it was there I got to see my father for the first time in 10 years.” Remembers Anna.
The Dohm family was finally back together again, and in a very real sense, home. Peter started an early charter business, taking guests staying at Bluebeard’s Castle out on a little sailboat.
“They would sail out to a little island off-shore and my dad would have a pail and a jar of mayonnaise,” said Anna. “He’d catch a lobster and cook it up on the beach and then sail them back. The tourists would have so much fun, they’d go back to the hotel and tell everyone and we’d get more customers.”
Never ones to conform to the norm, however, the Dohm family soon hightailed it to the remote East End of the island, which was still called Shark Wharf back then.
“ At one time there was an old shark factory there and people still called it Shark Wharf, but we wanted the tourists to come and go swimming so we preferred to call it Red Hook,” said Anna.
There was nothing there. No houses, no Electricity. It was beautiful. To me there was everything birds, fish, and turtles, beaches and I was learning how to sail!” While enamored with the beautiful surroundings, Peter Dohm also saw a golden opportunity at Red Hook.
Viewing the area as a stepping stone to St. John, Peter started a water taxi business.
“My dad used different motor boats over the years, but he started with a boat that was sunken in Yacht Haven that he pulled up, repaired and put an engine in,” said Anna. “That was the 37′ foot boat Shadow X.”
Peter took guests to Cruz Bay, Caneel Bay, Tortola, Virgin Gorda and Anegada. Soon the family’s enterprise expanded when Peter build a workshop where the new Urman Victor Fredericks Marine Terminal is located. He also constructed a dock and a place to haul and build boats, a small house that doubled as a store with a porch for people to sit and wait for the boat to go to St. John. In later years people would drive for a Sunday outing in the “Country” (what anyplace outside of town was called back then) & sit and talk with my mother Elsa while enjoying the view of St. John and the cool breezes.
People would use our phone to call St John to say “I missed the Boat, I Comm’n on the next one” and we sold sandwiches, candy and drinks” said Anna. “We were the only ones out there in the wilderness so we tried to accommodate whatever people needed. She was so special, my mother. If someone didn’t have money, she would say, ‘pay me next time.” So many people loved to sit and talk with her (Mama Dohm as they called her).”
Slowly more people started moving out to Red Hook, a few houses popped up along the hillsides and soon ferries were docked at the Government dock. When Peter retired from the business. It was continued by Elsa, daughter Anna, son Per and the grand kids Guy, Fawn,& Hans. The water taxi would deliver the “Rich and Famous” as well as late comers that “Just” missed the last ferry to St. John, at anytime day or night. It is still there for anyone who has flown in from the states too late or just been in town to long. Yes the old buildings are now gone and the old boats long since retired but the names live on. Per later on would help create the St. Thomas Yacht Club with his friends of the island and go on to help in the creation of the U.S. Virgin Islands Olympic Team. It was with that team that he competed in the games of ’68 and went on to coach in many more games finely collimating in a silver metal for the V.I. in Sailing (Finn Class) by Peter Holmberg. The Dohm sailing blood having shown the way.
Anna’s son was raised in that boat yard of Red Hook and she would run the water taxi with this toddler running around the boat while nervous guest look on worried that he might fall in to the bay But Anna would always reassure them that this is how we Dohm’s have always done it, on the sea. Anna would meet the first of her husbands in Red Hook while serving sandwiches from that very shop to a man that was building the National Parks buildings in Red Hook and Cruz Bay in the early ‘60s. Later on Anna, her husband AL and Theo Moorhead would build places like the New Julius Spruve School and the V.I. Bank building ( now the home of “Connections” ) in Cruz Bay.
Anna would let the Red Hook Water Taxi business be run by her brother Per and Mama Dohm to be with her husband Al Brodeur and live in a small house above Cruz Bay.
Anna from a early age was like anyone else of that time a part of the extended family that was the Keethings, Miss Mira and Miss Meeda of Cruz Bay. Their kitchen open to all who cared to say “Hello, How you doin’.” A gesture that was not lost on the Dohm’s and Anna would smile to this day at how the people of the islands treated her as family.
“That is how I met my second husband in Cruz Bay” said Anna “We were part of the circle of friends there and Bob Nose needed my help with day sails. Bob was a St. John icon and a book unto himself. Owner of the Lobster Hut, The dive shop and “Alcyone” Day Sails.
It seems somehow fitting that the Dohm’s, European ex-patriots put their stamp on a former Danish Island, Now a young American territory in the Caribbean Sea in the aftermath of World War ll. But the Dohm’s weren’t just an enterprising family, Peter and Elsa were both now Virgin Islanders forever and live on in the hearts and minds of so many Virgin Islanders, young and old. They were laid to rest in the sea they both loved near Frenchman’s cap. You see once you visit the Virgin Islands it stays with you forever. Anna still to this day calls St. John home.
“I used to say, ‘well if this isn’t home, then I don’t have one,” said Anna. “Denmark is too cold and I’m an Island girl.”