Left: with her truncated wide stern, flat run aft and spoon bow, during trials in early 1901 Independence is already hinting at future trends in yacht design; three months later she will be cut up for scrap. One minute after the reaching start of one of the NYYC’s early season races of 1901 and in flat water Independence is going well to leeward of that year’s Cup-winner Columbia – steered by Charlie Barr – with (the faster) Constitution up on their hip. Independence clearly displays a quite different profile from her rivals with the full bow and flat sheer… with a shallow hull and distinct keel and rudder arrangement she is even more dissimilar beneath the waterline
handsome when that year’s fourth Cup boat was nearby. A very different sort of yacht, and anything but ‘fair, fine and beautiful’, Independence looked awkward. She sailed that way too, broaching around the racecourse. Designed by a little-known naval architect, for a social rebel and financial adventurer from Boston who bla- tantly despised the New York Yacht Club, Thomas W Lawson, Independence was a totally different sort of boat. The Her- reshoff and Watson boats’ bows were sharp and compact, yet hers was blunt and broad. Their underbodies were deep and round, but much of hers was flat. They suffered occasional leaks and damage, but she was often on the edge of survival. Independence was surrounded by a
distracting controversy entirely of her owner’s making. Although he claimed his goal was solely to produce an America’s Cup winner from Boston, the major city in New England, he went out of his way to repeatedly thumb his nose at the organisa- tion that held and controlled the Cup: the New York Yacht Club. Lawson wanted Independence to race in
the club’s races for the opportunity to sail for the Cup, but he was not allowed to enter because he was not a member of the club. The Cup’s rules, in the Deed of Gift written by the club’s founder, were in the club’s favour. There it was written that the America’s Cup was held by clubs, not sailors. The trophy was to be ‘sailed for by the Yacht Clubs of all foreign countries’, and ‘It is to be distinctly understood that the Cup is to be the property of the Club, and not of the members thereof.’ Choosing to ignore these rules, Lawson
on his own decided that all Americans had an individual, non-institutional right to race for the Cup. He must have known that his chances of
being admitted to membership were at best slight. Commodore JP Morgan and other bankers and financiers who were trying to stabilise the country’s unstable markets were not favourable to his line of work, as an erratic and disruptive securities speculator who had left a trail of booms and busts. However, the club made it clear it was not inhospitable to having Independence
on the starting line. All Lawson had to do, the officers repeatedly told him, was charter the boat to a club member who, because he was a member, would be accountable to the America’s Cup and race committees. After several patient but fruitless exchanges on this simple request, one club officer finally lost his temper, telling Lawson, ‘Your last letter indicates a settled purpose on your part to misunderstand the position of the committee, which has been again and again stated to you in terms too plain to any but willful misconstruction.’ If the name Lawson defiantly chose
for his boat reflected his own self-image, so did her strikingly original and daring design. To create her Lawson chose a Harvard-educated, Boston-based naval architect, Bowdoin Bradlee Crownin- shield. A member of a well-known mer- chant family from Salem, Massachusetts, he had designed a broad range of vessels, from fishing schooners down to experi- mental small boats called ‘scows’. A Dutch name for flat-bottomed, square-
ended boats, the term scow came to include a new type of racing boat that appeared in w
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