Clockwise from left: Herreshoff would often end the working day with a few hours’ cruising around Bristol Harbor on one of his dayboats. This is his personal favourite – the cat-ketch centreboarder Coquina; launched in 1890, the Herreshoff designed and built Cushing was the US Navy’s first purpose-built torpedo boat and was a direct derivative of Herreshoff’s high-speed gentlemen’s power craft; some of the hard edges to early New York Yacht Club Cup defences came from a handful of members with experience of the cut-throat world of sandbagger racing – one reason for the eventual demise of these centreboard classes was the high number of fatal capsizes; Herreshoff’s first catamaran, Amarylis, was launched in 1876 and carried all before it before being banned – ‘not a proper yacht’… obviously; inside the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company when the main focus was still on building power craft and their machinery; Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, he and the late Uffa Fox would have found much to talk about
reasons. First, they needed the work because there had been some trouble with the US Navy, for which they had worked full-time for many years building war- ships. Second,
their friend Edward
Burgess, America’s then most successful racing yacht designer and the designer of the most recent three Cup winners, had died suddenly of typhus. A year later the Herreshoff Vigilant
was selected to defend by the New York Yacht Club, whose Commodore was Altie Morgan. With Nat Herreshoff steering and in charge alongside another rich young man who enjoyed managing hot boats, Oliver Iselin, Vigilant won the first two Cup races against the Earl of Dunraven’s Valkyrie II, but then during the third race her big centreboard stuck halfway down. By the time Nat and his men freed it they were chasing Valkyrie. Rounding the windward mark, both
crews set spinnakers as Iselin ordered one of the crew to go aloft, shake out a reef and set the large topsail – jobs that required one
man to crawl out along the 80ft boom just a few feet above the water, and another to climb aloft and hand over hand his way along the violently shaking gaff. Vibrating with the strain, Vigilant roared after Valkyrie II, finally passed her and won the race by 20 seconds. It was rumoured that, after the finish,
Nat Herreshoff was persuaded by Oliver Iselin to take the first and only alcoholic drink in his long lifetime. That was one more step in a revolution
in racing yacht design led by the Her- reshoffs in America and by GL Watson in England. Almost every part of the boat was metal of one kind or another – bronze, steel, even the new material aluminium. Three years earlier most keels were
moulded onto the hulls. Now they were deep fins under massive sail areas requiring crews of 50 or more, and ever more sophis- ticated rigging. Not everybody liked these trends. The American yachting writer Win- field Thompson described Vigilant as ‘the prototype of a vicious type of yacht, whose
existence has been more a curse than a blessing to the sport of yacht racing’. Herreshoff was the designer, but the
approval came from Oliver Iselin, the New York Yacht Club member in charge of the boat. His sailing background included racing against professionals in sand - baggers – over-rigged, small-centreboard boats kept upright by moving heavy bags of sand from rail to rail. ‘There was no sentiment in the game of sandbag racing,’ commented WP Stephens. ‘The first thing was to win, the second was to get the prize after you have won it.’ Winfield M Thompson described Iselin
and the other managers this way: ‘Whatever popularity came to them through yacht racing arose from the results achieved by vessels in their charge, rather than the personality of the men themselves…’ Herreshoff, he added, was no different. His attitude ‘from the beginning of his success was one of contempt for the public’. Next month: Morton Plant and the schooners
SEAHORSE 41
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