Left: there were no dry docks like this in Bermuda… that was lucky, then. Valkyrie II receives a freshen-up ahead of the 1893 Match when the GL Watson design gave Nat Herreshoff’s defender Vigilant a real fight, leading on the opening weather legs of races one and two and rounding the weather mark well ahead in the strong breezes of race three before being passed on the final run. Barlow Moore’s oil painting of Valkyrie II blowing out her second spinnaker in the final race is one of the iconic images of the America’s Cup
Dunraven’s political persuasion was so
independent that he said of himself that he had a ‘cross-bench mind’ that stubbornly refused to consistently follow any one party’s policies. He was, in a phrase, as stubbornly contrarian as many of our obstinate modern-day officials… though perhaps driven by better and more public- spirited motives than some of them. A serious sportsman with a diversity of
interests and passions, Dunraven owned racehorses in partnership with his friend Lord Randolph Churchill,
father of
Winston Churchill. He also hunted big game in the American West, guided by Buffalo Bill Cody on 6,000 wild acres of Colorado Territory that he had acquired and set aside as a game preserve. As for sailing, Dunraven was so pas-
sionate about racing and cruising that one Prime Minister publicly rebuked him for making yachting his first concern. His first challenge for the America’s Cup, in 1889, ended, characteristically, in a disagreement – this time with the defending New York Yacht Club about the rules laid out in a new Deed of Gift. Unlike the original, lucidly written deed
laid down at mid-century by John Cox Stevens and George Schuyler, this one was drafted by lawyers, and Dunraven was not alone in scorning it for being ‘altogether too complicated a document to govern a matter of sport such as yacht racing’. Such complaints always come in the
America’s Cup, usually from driven, impulsive, brilliant men who soon enough make their peace with the system and issue a challenge. In 1893 his cutter, Valkyrie II, sailing off
New York against Nat Herreshoff’s first defender, Vigilant, fell two races behind,
with just one more loss to send her packing. In one of the most exciting races in Cup history, both boats deeply reefed in the heavy conditions and barely in control, and with Vigilant leaking badly and brass bands in crowded spectator boats playing God Save the Queen and The Star- Spangled Banner, Valkyrie II led by more than two minutes at the windward mark. She set a spinnaker, which blew out. She set another spinnaker. That one blew out too. Meanwhile, the American syndicate
head, Charles Oliver Iselin, ordered one of his 70 sailors to get up on the boom with a knife and cut the reef points. Secured only in a bowline at the end of a halyard, he crawled along the spar, just a few feet above the water rushing by at over 12kt, cutting the reef points one by one. When he finally sliced through the last
reef earing at the end of the boom the crew hoisted the mainsail, an enormous feat in itself without the assistance of winches. Once the mainsail was two-blocked the masthead man doused and secured the small topsail above the gaff and a large club topsail was sent aloft. Under this great display of canvas abaft the mast and the huge balloon jib and the spinnaker before it, Vigilant, vibrating with the strain, roared after Valkyrie II, whose more cautious (and sane) crew declined to shake out the reef and instead set the big topsail. As Dunraven’s second spinnaker blew
up a crewman called Herreshoff’s atten- tion to it and was told, ‘Look at our own!’ The enormous bulging spinnaker on the American Defender had a rip right across the middle of the leech that ran as far as the first vertical seam. ‘I hope that seam holds,’ Herreshoff shouted, and so it did. ‘As we had to give Valkyrie one minute
48 seconds’ time allowance we had to get a considerable distance ahead of her at the speed we were going to save our time,’ recalled Herreshoff many years later. In the end the margin on corrected time was just 40 seconds in favour of the Defender. Back home, Dunraven challenged again
for 1895 and now he devoted much of his own time to studying naval architecture. When a small boat of his design beat an imported Herreshoff boat he got it in his head that his new champion (the sophisti- cated GL Watson cutter Valkyrie III) was fated to beat the Americans… Her opponent, Herreshoff’s intricate
new Defender, was built in total secrecy with an unprecedented hull constructed out of steel, aluminium, bronze and other metals so incompatible in saltwater that the US Navy later used the now rapidly disintegrating yacht for floating experi- ments into advanced metallurgy. Dunraven, never the best manager of
time, made the mistake of arriving too late in New York to form his own judgments about his opposition and so became depen- dent on rumours. Many of his people had become convinced, with no concrete evi- dence, that the Americans were prepared to cheat by secretly adding ballast to lengthen their waterline and increase their boat’s speed (years later, some America’s Cup 12 Metres employed a similar trick, allowing seawater to partially flood the hull once at sea rather than shipping ballast which would have put the boat in question out of measurement). Dunraven, who knew just enough about naval architecture to believe he knew everything, was very suspicious. After a straightforward first-race victory
by Defender, the second start was compro- mised by a spectator motorboat that
SEAHORSE 53 w
BARLOW MOORE – COURTESY OF THE NEW YORK YACHT CLUB
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