Peter was the first mariner to set out a mooring in the small harbor of Shark\u2019s Wharf, a well-known harbor that today is crowded with about twenty-five vessels on moorings and another seventy at the docks of the two large marinas and four smaller marinas that have been constructed since Peter settled there.\u00a0 He then rented a small plot of land at the entrance to the little harbor, and built a small, two-story dwelling with a porch on the water (where I encountered Mama for the first time in 1968).\u00a0 Behind the house were two trailers for living quarters. And it was there that he established a boat repair business to support the family, including rails for hauling boats and a shed large enough for working under shelter.\u00a0 As he built up the business with the help of Per and his sister Anna, the family became revered members of the boating community, which included many West Indian natives who lived near the shore on the east end of St. Thomas.\u00a0 His know-how and hard work, good-natured disposition, lack of racial or cultural prejudice, and generous assistance to others whenever it was needed won him the respect of everyone.\u00a0 Stories that circulated widely about his voyage to America with the family no doubt also enhanced his reputation.\u00a0 One token of their acceptance and support is the fact that the approximately one-quarter acre where Peter set up his boat business in the early \u2018fifties was rented from Sammy Hartman Sr. to the Dohms for the paltry sum of one dollar a month.<\/p>\n
Peter soon expanded his business to include a water taxi service.\u00a0 His first water-taxi for transporting passengers to the island of St. John, which was a favorite tourist destination even then, was not a motorized vessel, however, but a sailboat.\u00a0 Although the four-mile trip under sail can take up to an hour because of headwinds and a contrary current, it was the first and only water taxi business on St. Thomas for customers who had missed the regular ferryboat or desired more pleasant accommodations for the trip over, and it could even deliver them directly to their beach hotel.\u00a0 Once again Peter had shown his business acumen in seeing the need, and the commercial benefits, of a water taxi service.\u00a0 The most troublesome part of the journey was entering the harbor of St. John when necessary, which is located on the west end of the island beneath a 1,000-foot mountain that sends willawahs (strong, sporadic gusts of wind) down its slopes, obliging sailors to make several tacks directly into the teeth of unpredictable gusts.\u00a0 And between the gusts a boat could become becalmed and at the mercy of any current that happened to be running.\u00a0 But after many years of sailing throughout Europe and the West Indies, Peter had the necessary skills for dealing with such tricky circumstances.\u00a0 Today almost no one enters the harbor under sail and risks making several tacks with the gusty wind in their teeth.\u00a0 The danger of colliding with any of the numerous boats moored on both sides of the channel is very real.\u00a0 I did it occasionally myself with Molly<\/em> Bloom<\/em>, but it was a perilous undertaking.<\/p>\n A short time later Peter acquired a motor vessel that was more suitable as a water taxi.\u00a0 There was one problem that remained, however:\u00a0 the name of the neighborhood on St. Thomas where Peter docked the water taxi.\u00a0 On the maps it was called Shark\u2019s Wharf, hardly a reassuring name for a jumping-off place for tourists yearning to relax in paradise.\u00a0 Peter eliminated the problem by renaming the area \u201cRed Hook,\u201d the name that it bears today both officially and colloquially some 50 years later.<\/p>\n Although it might appear from these bare facts about Peter\u2019s business activities that he had finally succumbed to the businessman\u2019s lust for ever greater riches, nothing could be farther from the truth.\u00a0 He knew that money would never grant him the happiness that he sought, perhaps the world\u2019s most common misapprehension which is most memorably embodied in Horace\u2019s line \u201cThe money comes and comes, but always there is something lacking.\u201d\u00a0 Basically, Peter did not feel easy in the role of a settled, ambitious bourgeois.\u00a0 In fact, when a fabulously wealthy gentleman offered to stake Peter for a substantial expansion of his business, Peter declined, saying, \u201cSmall business, small headaches.\u00a0 Big business, big headaches.\u201d\u00a0 Thus, he settled for a moderate loan of $10,000 which he used to purchase the motorized vessel for transporting guests to the rich man\u2019s hotel on St. John.<\/p>\n But there was another cockle burr in Peter\u2019s saddle.\u00a0 His loneliness for female companionship during Mama\u2019s long absence had lured him into a liaison with the woman (Hellen Pane) whom he had met on the voyage from New York City to Puerto Rico, accompanied Peter to St. Michael, later moved to St. John with her husband, and purchased land on St. John right on the harbor.\u00a0 Later, before Mama\u2019s return, she had fallen in love with Peter and divorced her husband.\u00a0 And soon Peter and his girl friend were living the sweet life, and not only in the sense of romance.\u00a0\u00a0 For chocolate was rationed in the States during the war, but was easily available in the islands.\u00a0 So when the U.S. Navy came ashore on leave in St. John, Peter and his girlfriend were waiting to sell them fudge.\u00a0 Peter once calculated that they had made and sold at least a ton of the stuff.<\/p>\n Although Peter was supposed to have ended his romantic relationship before the family\u2019s return, his girlfriend\u2019s attachment to him was not easily severed, and she tried to win him back.\u00a0 Thus, it appears that to some extent Peter lived a real-life version of Alec Guiness\u2019 Captain\u2019s Paradise <\/em>with a wife in one port and a mistress in the other.\u00a0 Unfortunately, unlike the case of Alec Guinness, the two women were aware of one another\u2019s existence.\u00a0 The result, of course, was acrimony and jealousy, which soured both<\/em> relationships.\u00a0 Over time the situation became so stressful that Peter felt that the only solution was to move on again in search of peace and sanctuary somewhere over the horizon.<\/p>\n Probably carrying greater weight in his decision to move on was the fact that after 10 years the inveterate wanderer had reached the end of his tether as a sedentary business and family man.\u00a0 Further, his son Per was now old enough to run the business with Mama\u2019s help.\u00a0 But whatever the predominant cause, a decade after the family\u2019s return Peter set sail alone for Tahiti, the dream-destination of all erstwhile vagabonds on land or sea, at the helm of a sailboat called Secret<\/em>.\u00a0 After all, the South Seas had been on the family\u2019s itinerary 24 years earlier when they had been put off course by Mama\u2019s return to Denmark; and he had tried again and failed when he went aground and lost his boat on his way to Panama.\u00a0 So it was time for the obstinate romantic to make his young dream come true.\u00a0 The year was 1959 and Peter was 52 years old.<\/p>\n His girlfriend, however, was not easily forsaken.\u00a0 When Peter arrived in Panama for his passage through the Canal, he found her waiting for him and took her on board.\u00a0 The two runaways then sailed south and landed in the Galapagos Islands where Peter stayed for awhile with a German family and where he would have been content to live forever.\u00a0 But the law of the Islands prohibited visitors from remaining longer than a short period of time, and so they sailed off together in the direction of the South Sea islands. .<\/p>\n And now the story of Peter\u2019s life reaches another of its operatic climaxes.\u00a0 While the couple was below deck (why they were both below deck I cannot say for sure because Peter never explicitly divulged it to me, but certain hints suggested that they were either making love or arguing), and while the boat was sailing without a captain at its helm, they struck a reef that destroyed the vessel.\u00a0 Peter claimed that his girlfriend had deliberately detained him below deck after she had noticed that the boat was headed for the reef.\u00a0 By destroying Peter\u2019s mode of escape, according to Peter, she had counted on her being able to render him dependent on her wealth, thereby gaining the upper hand with her obstreperous lover.\u00a0 But she had underestimated her quarry.\u00a0 Peter was enraged, and when they boarded a liner for Tahiti to continue their journey, which she had paid for, Peter crawled into his bunk and sulked for the entire voyage without uttering a word.\u00a0 Finally, upon reaching Tahiti, he told her to go to hell and abandoned her once again, leaving her no choice but to return to the West Indies bereft of her headstrong, wayward lover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Peter was the first mariner to set out a mooring in the small harbor of Shark\u2019s Wharf, a well-known harbor that today is crowded with about twenty-five vessels on moorings and another seventy at the docks of the two large marinas and four smaller marinas that have been constructed since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-20","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21,"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20\/revisions\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}