"We had loaded everything imaginable on board" - Captain Peter Boehm
Peter Böhme first boarded a ship in Bremen in April 1956 and, 46 years later, he celebrated his retirement from Hapag-Lloyd as a captain on the “Hong Kong Express”. Here, the 85-year-old talks about his time as a young ordinary seaman, explains how to deal with a storm when in port, and thanks his wife, who spontaneously stepped into the galley many years ago.
A lot of seafarers say that the most important person on board is the cook. And perhaps that’s why Captain Peter Böhme remembers this story so well. “It was in the 1990s,” he recounts. “We were missing a cook on a voyage to East Asia because our cook had fallen in the cold store, injured his knee and had to disembark in Le Havre. Finding a replacement would take some time. So, what could we do? My wife, Elke – who’s a very good cook – happened to be accompanying me on this voyage, so I spontaneously asked her: ‘What do you think about cooking?’ She answered: ‘For so many people? I’ll need to think about that first.’ She disappeared, came back after a while, and said: ‘We’ll do it!’ Elke had spoken with the two other women on board, who were also accompanying their husbands. They cooked for our crew of 30 for six days until the next cook came on board. We had breakfast with all the trim - mings, two kinds of lunch and, of course, dinner. It was a culinary and logistical tour de force! We men only helped to carry the heavy sacks of rice and potatoes up from the cold stores.”
Cold start on the “Isarstein”, freshwater voyages in Canada
Although it was over 30 years ago, it is just as fresh in Böhme’s memory as his child - hood and youth in the 1950s. “At the end of the war, we had been bombed out in Thuringia and my father had died in the war,” he recalls, referring to a state in eastern Germany. “My mother then travelled with me and my sister to the West – via Westphalia to Bremen – where she found work. I had always been interested in seafaring, as my entire family was made up of merchants who worked all over the world. That’s how I started at North German Lloyd after finishing secondary school.”
Under normal circumstances, Böhme would have spent three months on the “Deutschland”, a training ship. “But somehow it turned out that I ended up on the ‘Isarstein’ right away,” he says. “I sailed to South America without a shred of knowledge about seafaring. I didn’t even know what a bosun’s locker or gangway was!” During a year at sea, the 16-year-old learned not only all the terminology, but also what it means to work hard. “There was knocking rust, painting and standing watch at the cargo hatches in ports at night,” he recounts.
“The ‘Isarstein’ was 159 metres long and 19 metres wide. We went everywhere with it, calling at at least 40 ports in South America alone!” When asked what it was like for a young man to be so far away from home in the mid-1950s, the captain answers: “Well, it was strange and exciting. But we hardly had any money for shore leave, as the gross monthly wage was just 50 German marks, so you couldn’t really splurge on anything.” After this voyage, his subsequent training on the “Deutschland” in Bremen was a piece of cake.
In the years that followed, Böhme travelled around the world as a third, second and, finally, first mate. The slim man has particularly fond memories of voyages on fresh water in the 1960s and 1970s, and the “Great Lakes Tour” in Canada and North America was always a highlight. “We sailed as far as Montreal, where we passed through the lock into the interior, and then came the ports on the Great Lakes – Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, Lake Huron and Lake Michigan,” Böhme says. “We called at ports in Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago. We had loaded everything imaginable on board, but especially whiskey, which we had brought along from Scotland. Today, it’s hard to imagine that the cardboard boxes were stacked one on top of the other in the holds.”
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