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The unruly beast


Several recent articles in this magazine have referred to the 1901 America’s Cup challenge hopeful Independence as an important early exploration of the scow design concept in a very large racing yacht. John Rousmaniere looks at both an extraordinary yacht and her surprising heritage…


The Royal Ulster Yacht Club’s challenge for the America’s Cup in 1901 on behalf of Sir Thomas Lipton led to one of the most innovative, dramatic and controversial Cup summers in the trophy’s long history. Among the features was a radical new


40 SEAHORSE


appreciation of how to design a fast boat. And (as we will see at the end of this article) its consequences include a much loved class of racing boat and one of the most authoritative and handsome books ever published about yacht racing This story has many surprises, but few


were as startling as the four boats that com- peted that summer. Three of them were graceful 120ft LOA swans that (to quote a description of one of them) were ‘fair, fine and beautiful, with clear sweeps and an absence of hardness or freakishness’. That boat was Nathanael Greene


Herreshoff’s latest creation, Constitution, built for a confident New York Yacht Club syndicate of proper millionaires. To general astonishment she was thor-


oughly beaten in the American defender eliminations by her two-year-old Herreshoff- designed cousin Columbia, winner of the


previous Cup in 1899 and again in 1901. Columbia was not all that fast against


Constitution, yet no boat with the Scots- born tactical genius Charlie Barr at the helm needed breakneck speed. Routinely within feet of violating one racing rule or another, he pushed, pulled and willed the older, slower boat to one narrow victory after another over the confident Constitution. In the subsequent Cup defence against


Lipton’s superb Shamrock II, designed by GL Watson with the assistance of a pio- neering towing tank, Barr eeked out one of the closest victories in all of Cup history. The taut last race – described by one observer as ‘an Homeric contest’ – ended with the two boats luffing side by side across the finish line, Columbia winning the race and the Cup by mere seconds against her faster opponent. These three boats seemed even more


F A WALTER


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