anecdote that suggests why it was that so many people called Nat ‘Captain’. It seems that a wealthy owner who wanted to get his boat as quickly as possible from Bristol Harbor out through Narragansett Bay and up the coast to Padanaram, Massa- chusetts, had once asked Captain Nat for advice. Without checking the local tide tables and weather maps Nat proceeded to describe how to sail out of the Bay in great detail, almost mile by mile, with advisories on how to make the best use of the tides and where to find the afternoon breeze. After finishing his narrative he told the man, ‘You will be at Padanaram at 3:30.’ ‘But, Captain Nat,’ the owner protested,


‘that may be how long it would take you, but I’m not as experienced as you are.’ Nat replied without skipping a beat,


‘I’ve already taken that into account.’ He could be hard on people, most


especially, it seems, his own sons. After Jon B’s death in 1915 Nat quickly discovered that he could not carry on in both roles as designer and boatbuilder, but he declined to ask his sons – two of whom (Francis and Sidney) were studying yacht design – for assistance. With characteristic (and


perhaps unfortunate) bluntness he told one of them, L Francis, ‘After your uncle Jon died it was obvious to me that not one of my boys had the ability to run the shops.’ After Roger Taylor quotes this hard letter in his superb biography of Francis,


he adds, ‘Nathanael’s lifelong habit of being competitive did not lapse when he dealt with his son.’ L Francis recalled with contentment the


wholly different relationship he enjoyed with his father’s favourite captain, Charlie Barr. He may have been ferocious on a starting line (‘He knew the rules and his rights under them,’ observed WP Stephens, ‘and claimed all that was coming to him – and sometimes a little more.’), yet on shore Charlie Barr was a pleasant companion for sensitive L Francis. ‘Those evenings onboard the Avenger


with Capt Barr were about the pleasantest in my whole life,’ the young Herreshoff recalled, adding, ‘Capt Barr seemed to have the whole history of each yacht stored away in the archives of his memory.’ Nat Herreshoff had that kind of


memory, too, but evidently could not draw on it so amiably.


The one-designs The lasting artefacts of the Herreshoff era include some schooners, a few racing boats and a good number of small, inexpensive w


SEAHORSE 41


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