Herreshoff’s 10 Rater Dacotah bears direct equivalence with today’s TP52. This 50ft day-racer went afloat in 1894 and, after being shipped to the Clyde by her Scottish owner Henry Allen, swept all before her winning 25 of her first 33 races. Dacotah could easily be mistaken for a much later design from the 1930s; add a sloop rig and you could be looking at a modern classic. The design was also notable for Herreshoff’s now fully evolved spoon bow. Like a TP52 Dacotah was not cheap: $6,600 was a great deal of money in 1894


total have been launched over the years and when the class celebrated its centenary at the 2014 nationals more than 50 boats came to the line. The Herreshoff H 12½ also remains the


only Herreshoff class with its designer mentioned in the name.


Mike Vanderbilt The world was changing in 1916. Times had got harder but Captain Nat still had a shipyard to run. Fortunately several old, faithful clients stepped in to assist, including Robert E Tod, Oliver Iselin and several other yachtsmen who assembled a fund to support the Herreshoff Manufacturing Co. until it was finally sold on in 1924. One member had a longtime relation-


ship with the Herreshoffs through his family. Harold S Vanderbilt had tagged along with his father and uncle when they visited the Cup yachts they helped to finance around the turn of the century. Spending time in Newport, ‘Mike’, as


he was known, found out soon enough that he too liked the water. His parents bought him and his older brother, Willie, a Herreshoff-built 15ft skiff that they raced


44 SEAHORSE


off the town, sometimes with their parents watching from their giant steam yachts. They later gave him a Herreshoff sloop for his graduation from boarding school. He named it Trivia and cruised and raced it often (Trivia is now stored at the Herreshoff Museum in Bristol). Mike Vanderbilt’s Harvard graduation


present was a 76ft schooner he named Vagrant in which he won the Bermuda Race. Later came another larger yacht, an 80ft sloop named Prestige, followed by the string of America’s Cup winners built at Bristol that Vanderbilt supported through the 1920s and later sailed himself in 1930 and 1934. Nat Herreshoff and he had a respectful


relationship. Here is what Nat said about him: ‘I had much to do with Commodore Harold Vanderbilt and I will simply express my admiration for the way he studied every detail when taking up the defence of the Cup, selecting and training his assistants and crew. ‘In each year of racing he had shown


that wonderful ability, backed by determi- nation as well as by “means”, to carry through that has saved our country’s


reputation. All I can say is hats off to all persons interested. Harold S Vanderbilt deserves it!’ They reunited during the 1930s when


two of Vanderbilt’s J Boats were launched at Bristol, and all three spent extended time there for maintenance, repairs or measurement. The old man by now being too old to go sailing, the sailors brought sailing to him in the form of movies that Rod Stephens made. Although much of the rigging was different from the old days, people who attended reported that Captain Nat was quick to identify each innovation and accurately describe its purpose onboard. After Nat’s death Vanderbilt, in his fine


book (On the Wind’s Highway) about his victory in the 1937 America’s Cup on Ranger, took the time to pay tribute to his master – in language he would have appre- ciated, without sentiment, in a section on a technical issue that Nat had helped him solve. ‘I cannot leave the subject of winches,’ he wrote, ‘without paying my respects to the mechanical genius of that master designer, the late Mr Nathanael G Herreshoff.’


q


ALAMY


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