Left: no bringer of peace and harmony between nations she… Vanduara captured in 1880 ‘Victorious for Scotland!’ And (above) the Prince of Wales’s famous champion Formosa. ‘Champion’ and ‘famous’ that was until humbled by her impudent Scottish challenger


arrangement… outraging all ideas as to what a racing yacht should be’.


Science first From his earliest days Watson had been a courageous innovator. His attention to detail was coupled with total dedication to science as the basis for design, rather than the ‘rule-of-thumb’ and ‘feel’ that typically underpinned the construction of most prize racers in those days. Even so, he was always hands on. When inspecting a build it was not unusual to see him ‘swinging about among the staging in order to get the run of his sight lines’. He was utterly thorough with detail,


and practical above everything. Nothing could be left to chance. It was said that he ‘had the gift of a perfect eye’ alongside his mathematical understanding, a bit like perfect pitch for a musician: ‘not a genius in the meteoric sense, but one who took no step without seeing where it would land him. He possessed all the caution and dogged perseverance of his countrymen’, wrote an admiring journalist. Mackie himself was a skilled designer of


boats; one of his scaled-down models won many prizes in New York. He was described as ‘the only yacht captain in the kingdom who has any competent knowl- edge of scientific yacht building’. Watson


frankly acknowledged that without Mackie’s assistance as ‘coadjutor’ (some- one of equal knowledge but lesser status) all those careful calculations might well have miscarried.


Steel magnificence Steel had been chosen for Vanduara partly for economy. There were practical advan- tages in that many tons of molten lead could be poured straight and deep into her keel, lowering the centre of gravity and hence the boat’s ability to stand up to her canvas. The vessel enjoyed increased head- room along with her depth of hold. Another advantage of steel was pliancy:


earlier shipwrights were known to have created this artificially by half-sawing through structural timbers but Watson’s friend (and self-termed agent) Dykes described how he once turned his ankle very badly mid-race, so spent ‘four hours below with my foot in a bucket of water… able to witness Vanduara’s movement’, remarking on ‘the fish-like quality of the boat as she worked through short seas’. During her Glasgow build fish also


featured: the wits had it that ‘like a herring she was to have no inside at all, with internal fittings comprising a coat of paint, a water tank and a biscuit tin!’ In fact, the cutter was beautifully laid out, with a


ladies’ cabin and a saloon resplendent with bronze-coloured embroidered satin, gold leaf and ebony. Everything remained in situ when she raced, allowing an elegant meal to be enjoyed in comfort at the day’s end, as if the yacht had never left her mooring. Perfection had been a requirement of


construction. She boasted a 68ft boom, 44ft gaff and 48ft topsail yard, give or take some inches. All spars were of the topmost quality: apparently two masts were rejected before the third was finally deemed to be good enough.


Opinion south of the border But was she fast – fast enough to beat the Prince of Wales’s famous champion Formosa? As Vanduara sailed to England for her maiden race there had been unceas- ing discussion in the upholstered lounges of the elegant southern yacht clubs. A Scottish visitor noted these ‘Corinthians are splendid talkers and the style with which they lay off about displacements, “metacentres” and centres of gravity would frighten Fife of Fairlie out of his wits’. His implication being English pretension, rather than substance. Criticism was rife: steel was no proper


material, ‘as everyone knew’; Vanduara carried her ballast in an objectionable way; her design was governed by calculation alone, making her the ‘most scientifically 


SEAHORSE 43


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