The Retired Officer Magazine
February 1998
MEMOIRS
Voyage of the Forest Dream and Other Sea Adventures. Capt. Niels P. Thomsen, USCG-Ret.
Thomsen, a runaway at age 15, a seaman and officer in the Merchant Marine, and a Coast Guard officer during World War II, wrote this book from his personal sea stories. His story doesn't end with his retirement as a captain in 1952. Thomsen entered the shipping business and operated the U.S. Postal Service mail boat in the Aleutian Islands and founded the Aleutian King Crab processing plant in Alaska. Thomsen toured the Mediterranean in his 100 foot sailing Yacht LILLI, and the West Indies in his yacht Zorba, and at the age of 78, served as the pilot of a Department of Defense dredge operating along the coasts of Washington and Oregon. He retired again at the age of 80. The focal point of Thomsen's memoirs is a chronicle of the FOREST DREAM, the last commercial sailing ship to depart from the Pacific Northwest on a nightmarish voyage to Mauritius.

 The Edmonds Paper
November 25, 1997
90-year odyssey began on historic sailing ship
By Judy Guitton
Captain Thomsen was born in Denmark, the great-grandson of a count, in 1907. His boyhood was spent in Fresno, California, where he was a friend of the young William Saroyan.
The voyage of the FOREST DREAM was a coming-of-age for him, a true-life sailing adventure, with a brutal captain and skeleton crew, salt pork, smuggled whiskey, fair winds and days becalmed, drenching rains and furling sails and boarding seas, violent gales, menacing sharks, malaria, a tragic burial at sea and, at last, a languid and luxurious shore leave in Mauritius.
Thomsen writes that in Newcastle, Australia, as he looked for the last time at the FOREST DREAM etched against the evening sky, "I knew that her image would forever be engraved upon my soul, and a profound wave of sadness swept over me for the boy I had left behind."
The voyage of the FOREST DREAM would be more than enough adventure for most lives, but it was only one experience in a lifetime holding many more for Captain Thomsen.
In 1990, he began writing his memoirs for his grandchildren. The project took on a life of its own, developing into three volumes The Journey of an Impatient Heart, of which "Voyage of the Forest Dream" is the first to be published.
About his life at sea, and especially the exciting voyage of the FOREST DREAM, Captain Thomsen says, "The most wonderful thing that can happen to a man is to be able to make his living at something he loves to do."

FRESNO - Fresno in 1922 was a place to get away from. Even at 15 years of age Niels Thomsen knew that. He had been hawking The Fresno Republican Newspaper as a newsboy on downtown Fresno street corners at a nickel apiece.

In Summer he loved to head out to Fancher Creek five miles East of downtown Fresno. There he would read Conrad novels, catch fish, and dream the impossible dream. From his pay, he would save $13.00. Not enough to fulfill his dream but, perhaps, enough to take him far away.

So, one night, he left Fresno and his friend William Saroyan and jumped a Northbound Southern Pacific freight train heading for Frisco. Perhaps he could find a place on board one of Joseph Conrad's sailing ships at the wharf. He was right.

It took him three years to reach Victoria B.C., and the barkentine the Forest Dream that would take him on an exciting voyage in 1925.

In later life he would tell of his adventures. To inspire his children, then he always told them 'When I was a boy of 13 I delivered the Daily Republican in the mornings and the Evening Herald after school and mowed lawns on Saturdays and Sundays.'

And so it was, that after leaving Fresno, Niels Thomsen lived a life of adventure and meaning in a span of more than 75 years. Now, at the age of 90, Thomsen has just published his memoirs. They are an amazing action-packed chronicle of the very last commercial sailing ship, the Forest Dream to depart from Victoria, B.C. in 1925 on a prolonged voyage around the world to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.

In this amazing tale Thomsen works his passage to Seattle at the age of fifteen in search of tall ships. He would find more than he dreamed of back in Fresno.

After ten years as a seaman and officer in the Merchant Marine, he entered the U.S. Coast Guard. By that time the United States had entered World War II in the Pacific. Thomsen then served four more years in harm's way in the South Pacific. And under his command his ship was credited for ramming and sinking of a Japanese submarine in Southeast Alaska. He was promoted to Captain and received the Legion of Merit medal for his role in sinking the enemy submarine.

Captain Thomsen's memoirs retell this story in rich detail and chronicle his connection to the sailing ship Forest Dream as a runaway from Fresno in 1925.

Thomsen, crossed paths with ship Captain Huycke in 1992 who had come into possession of a portion of the journal of a Malcolm Chisholm, written while on the FOREST DREAM on the voyage to Mauritius in that same year, 1925.

This was the diary of a fateful voyage. As Thomsen read of those events, it dawned on him that he, himself, was the last survivor of that voyage, a-la a Joseph Conrad story-line.

Thomsen was driven by an inner compulsion to fulfill a duty to his former shipmates. He would present the story of this tall ship. The story of those who in command were lost and of those who served and were gone, and those like him who who went down to the sea in ships and lived to tell about it. He could also tell of those who fell from the rigging to the hard cold decks below, and died at sea. He could tell what he alone had known and what he lived through those momentous times. He would tell the story of one Fresno boy's search for manhood and finding it at an early age, of his search in later life for clarification, redemption, and a return.

The Fresno Republican Newsboy made good. His amazing story is the best read to come our way. Get this book.

[The Voyage of the Forest Dream Von Buchholdt Press., 167 pages, w/photos & maps, Indexed. $25.00 post paid.Available from: Capt. Niels P. Thomsen, USCG(ret) 19222 Olympic View Drive Edmonds, WA 98020]Copyright 1992-1997 HTML Graphics By The Fresno Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved

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