Sam Siber was a Care taker of the island of Great St. James off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands and came to know my family well over the years that he traveled to and from Red Hook to Great St. James. He took great pleasure in writing this history down for me and my family about the life of Peter Dohm my grandfather. His work on this one chapter of his book has me in awe of the person I knew so little about and I can never thank Sam enough for saving this history.<\/p>\n
Hans Dohm Grandson of Peter Dohm<\/p>\n
Peter Dohm, a world-class mariner who had brought his family across the Atlantic to the West Indies and then years later sailed off to Tahiti, taught Brandy and me how to sail like old salts.\u00a0 In fact, it was he who had alerted us to the fact that Molly Bloom, our 19-foot day-sailer, was for sale and introduced us to the owner.\u00a0 He had been living in the South Seas when Brandy and I came to Great St. James, and so he had assumed a certain mythic stature before we finally met him.<\/p>\n
During my first year in the islands Mama Dohm had told me a little about him.\u00a0 But I had sensed that she did so reluctantly as if Peter were either too large a character to be encompassed in a brief conversation or a source of pain that she preferred to forget.\u00a0 Probably it was a combination of both.\u00a0 And then, about a year after I had returned from my temporary retreat to the city, she announced that Peter had returned to St. Thomas and was living with her once again.\u00a0 Peter was now 64 years of age and Mama was 69. The year was 1971.<\/p>\n
A week or so later I was walking along the water taxi dock to our boat when I saw an elderly man whom I assumed to be Peter sitting languidly on the edge of the dock, the dock that he himself had built with youthful vigor and ambition many years earlier. But now as he sat swishing the surface of the water with a stick, he had the appearance of defeat and frailty.\u00a0 Even though he was in his sixties and wearing thick glasses, however, he still had a rugged body, ham fists, and a prominent jaw that made his face look like a citadel of strength.\u00a0\u00a0 I introduced myself and after a brief conversation invited him to visit us on the island.\u00a0 He was delighted and flashed a wonderful smile, and a time was arranged for me to pick him up.\u00a0 And so Peter was introduced to life on Great St. James.\u00a0 And his gratitude for our rescuing him from confinement in Red Hook and from his memories of past misfortunes in the South Seas was boundless.\u00a0\u00a0 Later he gave us a thank-you note with the drawing of a magnificent sailing yacht on the front.\u00a0\u00a0 He had inscribed inside as follows: \u201cwith Tanks for warmly helping Hand.\u201d\u00a0 It is standing on my desk to this day.<\/p>\n
On his first visit to our house Peter was pleasantly amazed by our many shelves laden with books.\u00a0\u00a0 He asked if I had the poetry of Goethe or Schiller.\u00a0 I replied, \u201cYes, I have both,\u201d whereupon he was stunned that a bucolic hideaway on an otherwise uninhabited island in the West Indies contained the beloved literature of his country.\u00a0 For Peter was by no means a rustic.\u00a0 He was reasonably well read, especially in the literature of the sea, articulate in his adopted language, familiar with history, and politically attuned.\u00a0 And his memory for detail was phenomenal.\u00a0 When he recounted a famous voyage, such as Slocum\u2019s lone voyage around the world or the pursuit and sinking of the Bismarck, he was graphic in his details and relived every episode in the telling.\u00a0 \u201cBy golly!\u201d he would exclaim, chuckling at the tokens of Slocum\u2019s ingenuity throughout his perilous adventure as if he were hearing about them for the first time.\u00a0 And when we played duets for him on our recorders and challenged him to a game of chess, he was thoroughly hooked on our style of life.\u00a0 Books, chess, and two literate drop-outs like himself, one of them a bewitchingly beautiful and charming young woman, living in a hut aloft in the trees\u00a0 . . . I think he felt that he had found a home second only to Tahiti.\u00a0 But it was the island itself that attracted him the most for he enjoyed sitting and meditating in the little sanctuaries I had carved out in the woods.\u00a0 In fact, Peter had a special reverence for islands and a profound rapport with them.\u00a0 Once when I mentioned Great St. James\u2019 owners, he gazed at me for a moment and then said, \u201cIslands should belong only to God.\u201d\u00a0 One sanctuary that I had made especially for him was a \u201crondel,\u201d as he called it, that provided a flat rock for a seat where he could linger while eating a sandwich for lunch, reading, or scribbling observations in his small, spiral notebook.\u00a0\u00a0 Seeing how pleased he was to be on the island, we welcomed him to visit us any time, join us for dinner, and spend the night\u00a0\u00a0 Eventually, his evocative sea stories, cheerfulness, love of chess, sound advice about everything from boat handling to house construction, and his avidly outspoken heretical opinions made Peter our dearest friend in the islands.\u00a0 He admired and envied us for commuting in our little sailboat, even if it was prone to capsize; and he was impressed that we were teaching ourselves the rudiments of sailing (with the help of our little manual and Brandy\u2019s memories of her sailing as a teenager).\u00a0 And who, one might ask, had taught Peter <\/em>to sail?\u00a0 The answer to this question might surprise the reader.\u00a0 It was none other than Mama Dohm, the matriarch of Dohm\u2019s water taxis.<\/p>\n When Mama introduced Peter to this noblest of pastimes and professions he was in his twenties, and he discovered in sailing both his m\u00e9tier <\/em>and his raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/em>.\u00a0 It was exactly the life he had been searching for throughout his years of restless wandering on dry land, the answer to his wanderlust and his contempt for the corruption of urban society and rotten politicians, including the horror of Hitler\u2019s rants.\u00a0 And it was an answer that led him into adventures that could fill a book, adventures that kept Alexandra and I enthralled for hours at night while he sat in our candlelit cabin open to the wind and sea regaling us with vibrant sea stories, his own and others.\u00a0 For Peter\u2019s life had the quality of a tragi-comic opera filled with both ecstasy and anguish, and devoid of a single dull moment until his final years of illness and old age.\u00a0 Yet even in his dotage he was indomitable.\u00a0 His life story is worth telling if for no other reason than because it commemorates the generations of sailors of all nationalities who have roamed the seven seas in search of a safe and sane harbor in some remote paradise, a refuge from mankind\u2019s turmoil and its desecration of the human spirit in its urban warrens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sam Siber was a Care taker of the island of Great St. James off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands and came to know my family well over the years that he traveled to and from Red Hook to Great St. James. 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