“Glad it’s Over”
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The following is taken from the Appleton Post Crescent December 21st 1959 article about Utopia’s three year long trip around the globe.
Shipbuilder makes three -year trip around the world in Schooner.
Appleton Post Crescent December 21st, 1959
Post Crescent News Service Sturgeon Bay.
Glad it's over! It's a long, long trip.
That is Captain Fred Peterson's terse comment now that he's home after a three-year voyage around the world on his 50-ton luxury schooner, the Utopia. The veteran Sturgeon Bay shipbuilder and sailor isn't planning on any more cruises, at least for a while.
Although this journey was a realization of a lifelong dream, the weather, browned skipper concedes, it is nice to have it over with. In the three years since November 17th, 1956, when the captain set his sails and headed on his long voyage, he has actually spent about six months at sea. The longest single stretch of sailing was from the Galapagos to the new Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific, which took 20 days.
For the first leg of the voyage down the Mississippi River to St. Petersburg, Florida, Peterson had a crew of local people. Since then, an international potpourri has served as Utopia's crew. Finding anyone who could get away for any length of time to share the adventures aboard the Utopia was a big problem, Peterson said.
Since he had planned to make the journey in a leisurely, easy stages, he realized that he would have changing personnel. Actually, as it turned out, working with people from all over the world has been one of the most rewarding experiences of the cruise, he says. From Florida, the Utopia dropped her anchor in Cuban and Jamaican ports before passing through the Panama Canal for the Galapagos Islands.
Islands visited on the South Pacific crossing were the Marquesas, the Samoa, Tutilia, Tahiti, The Society, the Tongo, the Fiji, the New Hebrides, the Yasaya and the Solomon.
The Utopia touched Dutch New Guinea, Indonesia and the Malayan Peninsula and after stops at Ceylon, crossed from the Indian Ocean and sailed up the Red Sea through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean. There, Peterson visited the Island of Rhodes, Greece, Italy, Capri, Monaco, Nice, Barcelona and the Balearic islands before passing through the Strait of Gibraltar.
Tangier and Lisbon were his next ports of call and then he set sail for the Azores. The North Atlantic crossing from the Azores to Sydney, Nova Scotia was made in 13 days and 6 hours. From there he crossed the Gulf of St. Lawrence and was given permission to come through the new St. Lawrence Seaway because of a broken chain which prevented raising of Utopia's fourteen and a half foot centerboard. The old seaway will accommodate a maximum draft of 13 and a half feet.
Aboard the Utopia for the final leg of the cruise were Capt. Fred's son and daughter-in-law Robert and Joyce who flew to Rimouski Quebec, late in September to join the crew. Other crew members on the voyage through the seaway and the Great Lakes were Miss Damayanthi Dunuwille, a young woman journalist from Colombo Ceylon, Wong Chin Chong, a cook from Penang Malaya, and Joe Swafford, a student from Silver Springs, Maryland.
Wong boarded the Utopia at Penang, Malaya, March 5th, 1959, he is a 24-year-old Chinese Malayan who speaks six languages and five Chinese dialects. Wong plans to work his way home via ship across the Pacific Ocean and has hopes of homesteading a coffee and rubber plantation in Brazil. Over 2,000 of his fellow Malayans have immigrated to Brazil under the homesteading plan he reported.
Miss Dunuwille, a petite Ceylonese, who is 26, will return to Europe where she will be married. Her fiancé is a member of the Portuguese diplomatic corps and expects to be assigned to Aden, Saudi Arabia. In April in the Mediterranean, after the Utopia had cleared the Suez Canal, the Utopia was challenged by an Egyptian gunboat.
Twenty men approached in a lifeboat armed with machine guns. The incident turned out to be only a routine search and examination of papers.
Indonesian authorities threw Peterson and his crew of eight into jail when they put in at Den Pasar, Bali. They were released unharmed after five days, but the Indonesians refused to sell them any fuel oil and they were forced to cover the 1,000 miles non-stop from Bali to Singapore on half tanks of fuel and strict food and water rationing. The adventure explained the detention was due to local political unrest.
During the around the world voyage, Peterson flew home three times. A business matter brought him back from Panama in June 1957. Then the following Christmas, he returned to spend the holiday with his family, leaving his yacht at Tahiti. Miss Peterson returned with him there and sailed for several months through the South Seas, ending her voyage at the Fiji Islands. Peterson also spent the Christmas of 1958 in Sturgeon Bay, flying west from Penang, Malaya.
The Utopia was designed and built by Captain Peterson at his shipyards here in 1946. She is a mainsail schooner, 65 feet long and with an 18-foot beam and an 8-foot draft.
Photo caption:
Crew members of the Utopia posed with some of the items picked up on a three-year trip around the world. Joe Swafford, left, holds a sword fashioned from black palm wood.
Next is Wong Chin Chong, then Fred Peterson, who is beating a New Guinea drum, and Miss Damayanthi Dunuwille, holding a bottle fashioned from a gourd. The gourd is used by betel nut chewers to carry clacked lime, a sweetening agent.
Photo caption:
Peterson holds a Fiji war club. The club is fashioned from a tree planted at the birth of a male child. At 15, the youth cuts down the tree, seasons the wood, and makes his war club, which he carries all his life.
“Very effective for cracking skulls”, Peterson notes.
Appleton Post-Crescent Dec-21-1959
