‘I want a x%zzx*# schooner for Class B, and I want her to be xxx!!%zzx good…’ Railroad tycoon Morton Plant places the order for Herreshoff’s glorious first schooner – the 127-foot Ingomar (left). A beautifully built but incomplete replica of Ingomar is on the market today for $700,000 with the steel primary structure complete, teak deck laid and much of the deck joinery in place (or to put it another way, rather less money than a Fast 40). Right: the largest Cup yacht ever built, Herreshoff’s mighty 1903 winner Reliance was 201-foot overall on a (Deed of Gift) waterline length of 90-foot. Requiring a racing crew of 64, Reliance prompted Captain Nat to write the Universal Rule to replace the previous Seawanhaka Rule in an effort to curtail unsustainable excess
Master designer Part II
And cantankerous genius… Buying a design from Nathanael Greene Herreshoff did not earn you special treatment, as John Rousmaniere relates
Morton Plant and the schooners The same technology and massive crews of their successful America’s Cup defenders went into the 19 big offshore schooners that the Herreshoffs built for crossing the
40 SEAHORSE
Atlantic and racing in Europe. Fundamen- tally Nat did not favour the schooner rig because he thought a sloop or cutter was more efficient, but when a rich client wanted a schooner he got one, with a sail plan that yachting historian Llewellyn Howland has characterised as ‘a divided rig on steroids’. Some of those schooners are around today in their original or copied forms, and they are described well by Jacques Taglang in his 2010 book Mariette & the Herreshoff Schooners. The big schooners attracted some
colourful owners. One was Morton Plant, Florida railroads tycoon who owned a series of grand yachts, including the first Herreshoff schooner, the 127ft Ingomar. He was a very different man from the
austere Captain Nat Herreshoff. The young L Francis Herreshoff, then a boy in his father’s house, left a record of the
entire telephone conversation in which Plant, with characteristic profanity, ordered a new boat from Herreshoff: Plant: ‘Is this NG Herreshoff?’ Captain Nat: ‘Yes, I think so.’ Plant: ‘I want a x%zzx*# schooner for Class B, and I want her to be xxx!!%zzx good.’ Captain Nat: ‘Humph. Alright.’ Though once described as ‘articulate
only on the drafting board’, Captain Nat did have a sense of humour at times. Reporting on a summer of racing Vigilant in England in 1894, he advised visiting yachtsmen to challenge the advice of the local pilots assigned to their boats. ‘This is particularly so,’ said Nat, ‘if the foreign yacht is ahead of the yacht owned by the Prince of Wales.’ He could be, and often was, more blunt. His grandson, Halsey, once told me an
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