put one end in a cup of water and blow on the other end. If bubbles came out it was not white oak.’ Nat Herreshoff’s personality might also


be considered a system because it was so predictable in its passion for the privacy that harboured so many creations. Named after a hero of the American Revolution who was also from Rhode Island, the smallest and proudest state in the United States, Nat was a natural contrarian. For instance, he declined almost all oppor - tunities to co-operate with the press, and often threw reporters off the property. The fact was he was regularly abused in


print, sometimes for not being successful enough and sometimes for being too successful. In 1901 he was disappointed when his new boat and personal favourite, Constitution, lost the eliminations to deter- mine the Defender of the America’s Cup to one of his older boats, Columbia, the winner of the previous Cup match. This somehow inspired the fire-breath-


ing editor of the leading American yachting magazine of the day, Thomas Fleming Day of The Rudder, to launch a personal attack on Herreshoff, declaring first that he hoped Sir Thomas Lipton would win the next match and, second, that Herreshoff should retire and remove ‘the Herreshoff shadow’ from American yachting. ‘When all the fast craft come from the hand of one man,’ Day insisted, ‘yacht racing ceases to be anything but a question of money and a sport of certainties.’ Wrapped up in the oddities of this abstract radicalism, Day refused to recognise that Herreshoff might object. If he was disappointed in the press


sometimes his clients were disappointed in him. A man interested in buying a Herreshoff boat became so frustrated by the paucity of information that he chased down other owners, who explained that this was typical. ‘This, I have been told, was the Herreshoff custom,’ he wrote, ‘and for that reason all the creations of this wonderful genius are clouded in mystery and lack of details.’ When Sherman Hoyt, the great American


racing sailor of the early 1900s, went to Bristol to ask how the boat he had ordered was coming along, he was, he wrote, ‘decidedly disturbed to be informed by the blind Mr John B Herreshoff that since submitting their bid brother Nat, on further study, had become convinced that a somewhat larger craft than the one origi- nally conceived would prove faster. This would of course cost more.’ By the time the syndicate had accepted


the new bid Captain Nat had become con- fident in a third, more pricey iteration. Of course, the Herreshoffs were hardly the only boatbuilders to keep secrets. All that was in the past when he finally


sold the shipyard in 1924 and entered a long retirement that ended in his 90th year in 1938. To the surprise of many, he actually relaxed on long vacations in Bermuda or Florida, always with a small boat close at hand for his ritual daysail. He


40 SEAHORSE


opened up to new friendships, including one with one of the journalists whom he had long treated as an enemy: WP Stephens. Their revealing correspondence, edited by John Streeter, has been collected in a fascinating book, Their Last Letters: Nathanael G Herreshoff and WP Stephens.


Lucky in his clients As the Herreshoff brothers were building their business some wealthy members of the New York Yacht Cub began to get serious about sailing. There were the Van- derbilts, and also JP Morgan, the banker and New York Yacht Club Commodore. Though not a racing sailor himself, as a backer for America’s Cup contenders, Morgan was familiar with the Herreshoffs. According to his biographer Jean Strouse, Nat ‘was Morgan’s kind of nobleman – an engineering genius who was making naval architecture into a science’. His distant cousin Edwin D ‘Altie’


Morgan was also in the Herreshoff circle. The heir to a large merchant fortune, he was a full-time sportsman, sailing on Long Island and at Newport. ‘My fondness for sailing was bred in me and I have never lost it,’ he wrote in his autobiography. In fact, he aggressively built on it. Bored by the usual routine of driving around Newport in carriages, attending band concerts at Fort Adams and sipping champagne at Bailey’s


Beach, he chartered a rotting sloop for the summer for $90 and, following a tutorial on scrambling eggs from his grandmother’s cook, went cruising with friends. That was the modest start of the career


of the man whom WP Stephens called ‘one of the great characters in American yachting’. Stephens added that Altie ‘thought no more of buying a yacht than the average man does of picking up a paper as he passes a newsstand’. (I was reminded of this observation several years ago when, after a talk I gave at the Her- reshoff Marine Museum in Bristol, one of Altie’s descendants asked me, ‘Where did all the money go?’) A new kind of sailor in this world, being


in command of his own yacht, with the professionals following his orders, Altie learned by racing and quickly moved on to better-performing boats – meaning boats from Bristol. One of his acquisitions in 1891 was the


newest, most radical Herreshoff racer, 70ft on deck and 46 on the waterline. Called Gloriana, she was famous for her unusu- ally long and spoon-shaped ‘Herreshoff bow’ providing more speed. Before long the Herreshoff brothers


were designing and building two new boats to contend for the right to defend the America’s Cup. The Herreshoffs were available and appealing for two unhappy


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