blundered near Valkyrie III, setting off a chain of events that ended with Valkyrie’s lengthy boom raking Defender’s rigging and breaking her upper stays. With Defender limping badly, Valkyrie won the race but was disqualified. After talk of resailing the race stalled,


Dunraven refused to sail the third race, and went home, where he complained publicly that Defender’s sailors had surreptitiously added ballast. Not the first claim of cheating in the


America’s Cup (and hardly the last), Dun- raven’s charge was taken very seriously by the New York Yacht Club, which estab- lished a hearing before a panel respected on both sides of the Atlantic, including the banker JP Morgan and the naval strategist Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. After Dunraven and others had testified


at length the panel decided that his accusa- tion was without merit. ‘The Dunraven Incident’, as this unfortunate controversy came to be known, threw a shadow over the America’s Cup that was only cleared away with the entry into the competition of British yachtsman Sir Thomas Lipton with his first challenge in 1899. Dunraven himself stopped racing yachts


but cruised widely in steam yachts under his own command (he held a boatmasters’ licence). Meanwhile, he established a notable public life away from the water.


54 SEAHORSE In the Boer War he raised a regiment


called Dunraven’s Sharpshooters, and during WW I he converted his steam yacht into a hospital ship that carried wounded home from Gallipoli and other battles. Still a bit of a radical, he supported land reform for Irish farmers, addressed the demand for Irish independence, and in the 1920s, in his eighties, served as a member of the Irish Free State’s first Senate. When this ‘Victorian character’ reviewed


Above: Dunraven’s Valkyrie II gets away nicely to weather of Vigilant during his first America’s Cup challenge in 1893. Left: It is the autumn of 1895 and Uncle Sam looks on as John Bull clutches the twice-vanquished Dunraven. ‘Say, John, is there any game you can beat me at? If there is, trot it out!’ It would be another 50 years before Churchill gave a famous speech, ‘In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnanimity!’ (OK, we added the exclamation mark)


his life in the autobiography that he wrote in 1922, four years before his death, Dunraven employed his ‘cross-bench mind’ to comment on how much the America’s Cup, and sports in general, had changed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ‘I am not sure I like international


contests,’ he wrote. ‘… I think they tend to demoralise sport by turning it into a serious business in which national advan- tage is at stake, and to convert amateurs playing a game for the game’s sake into professional specialists competing for their countries’ sake.’ Dunraven’s aim, in part, was of course


to attempt to justify his own behaviour in 1895. And yet this man – the last of the long line of aristocratic amateur yachts- men who created the America’s Cup and guided it through its early days – was putting his finger on issues that we continue to wrestle with today.


q


KEPPLER & SCHWARZMANN/1895


JOHN JOHNSTON/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS


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