Pt 1.4: The Sandbaggers

 

Sandbaggers Racing in Long Island Sound by James Edward Buttersworth (1817-1894).

While Truant and Una were awakening the British to the potential of the beamy “skimming dish” centreboarder, the Americans were taking the concept to the extremes. [1]  By 1885 there were 1000 catboats and jib and mainsail boats in the USA. [2]  Although some followed the deeper and narrower style of pilot boats and the schooner America, most were beamy centreboarders, especially around the New York area.  “The whole tendency of the time, in small and large classes alike, was toward the extreme development of the smooth-water skimming-dish, of great breadth and limited draft” wrote Stephens. [3]    “Local conditions, as exemplified in the shoal waters of the anchorage ground and of parts of New York Harbor where short cuts were possible to yachts of light draft, with the reaching course down the river and back, all tended toward the one dominant type that prevailed from 1860 to 1880.” [4]

Although designs were becoming more sophisticated, there was still often little distinction between workboats and pleasure craft. Even yachts as fast and famous as Maria ended their careers as working craft, while the New York Yacht Club allowed Hudson River working sloops into its early races, and at least two big oyster sloops, Cap’n Joe Ellsworth’s 60’ Admiral and 45’ Commodore, raced as part of the Brooklyn YC fleet when they were not earning a living. [5] [6]

Of all the many breeds of working boat turned racer, the breed that became the fastest and most famous was the “sandbagger”, which seems to have evolved from the oyster fishing catboats that harvested seven million oysters a year from the shoals of New York harbour.  In time-honoured fashion, the inevitable informal races between working craft probably developed into match races and regattas.  Boatbuilders found that a working boat worth $250 (about 15 weeks’ wages for a carpenter or blacksmith) could be sold for $400 to $600 if it was was a winner, and inevitably, the boats became faster and more extreme.

Susie S, one of the fastest and most famous sandbaggers. She was built quite early in the sandbagger era (1869) but raced successfully into the 1880s. W.P. Stephens noted that Susie S “lacked the power of later boats, but she was very fast in light winds.” Although Susie S was slightly narrower than some later boats (3.35m/11ft wide on an overall length of 8.23m/27ft) her lack of power may have been due to the hollows in her waterlines forward and in the floors, each side of her keel. The top illustration is a painting by Frederick S Cozzens, who did many depictions of canoes, yachts and boats of the era. This plan and illustration are from Stephens’ ‘Traditions and Memories of American Yachting.’

Like so many boat types, the sandbagger was the creation of local winds (in this case, the light airs of the New York summer), geography and economy.  “The superior speed of the light displacement, lightly built centre-board yacht over the keel boats of the pilot-boat type in the races which were each year becoming more popular, and the convenience of very light draft in mooring off the flats of Hoboken, Communipaw, and Gowanus, appealed strongly to both owners and builders” wrote W.P. Stephens [7] ;[8]  “The farmers who dwelt along these shores in the fifties were amphibious by nature, many of them fishermen and oystermen.  This entire community was devoted in one way or another to yachting.”.[9]

“Racing was the regular amusement of the community” noted Stephens in his encylopaedic book “Traditions and Memories of American Yachting”.….. “here, as well as along the Staten Island shore and in sheltered nooks on the East and North rivers, were boat shops, waterside saloons frequented by boat sailors, and fleets of cat-boats, jib-and-mainsail boats, and small cabin yachts, all of the centre-board type. It was not until well along in the sixties that yacht clubs became general, but from the first a strong community of interest and friendly rivalry united all these localities”.

Communipaw, New Jersey, in the 1850s. It was shallow areas like this that bred the sandbaggers, and the sandbagger sailors. The fisheries gave them their work, their work gave them the sailing experience to handle the tricky sandbaggers, the shoals gave them free moorings, and the waterfront bars gave them docks and clubhouses.

“All that was now needed was a foothold on shore for a dinghy and a landing float, and these were provided by a waterside pub.  This popular institution provided, in default of a yacht club, shore shelter, landing facilities and social discourse, while mine host was at least an enthusiastic sailor if not a builder as well.”[10]

The races organisation was simple.  Boats were normally divided into four classes based on their length,[11] although boats that were outclassed could be moved to a different class.  Many regattas had four classes; First Class, 26 to 30 feet in length; Second Class, 23 to 26 feet; Third class, 20 to 23 feet; Fourth class, under 20 feet.  Within each class there was normally an allowance for length, typically two minutes per foot over a 20 mile course.[12]

Sail area was not measured.  This was standard at the time, from the biggest boats to the smallest.  Apart from the fact that no one had worked out a good measurement system for sails, it was often felt that “a tax on sail is a tax on skill”.  The simple rules almost inevitably meant that, as sandbagger and America’s Cup designer A Cary Smith noted, “the intention was to get as large a boat for the length as possible.”  Designers and crews created boats of vast beam, kept them upright with movable ballast, and crammed on sail area until, as one sandbagger sailor recalled, they became “a thing of small body and great wings.” [13]

The last of the sandbaggers. The remarkable 8.8m/29ft Annie was built around 1880 in Mystic, Conn. Her racing rig measured 20.7m/68ft from the tip of the bowsprit to the clew of the main. Annie was preserved by the far-sighted Maine Historical Association in the early 1900s and is now at the Mystic Seaport Museum. Pic from the Museum site.

The claims that the sandbaggers broke convention by using movable ballast seem to be one of those myths born of a desire to paint “mainstream” sailors as archaic throwbacks trying to hold back the tide of development. [14]  Shifting ballast had been common in racing yachts when sandbaggers were still evolving. Ironically, the practise had become common in English yachting because of rules intended to make boats less extreme. When clubs and regatta organisers banned boats from setting larger sails in light winds, racing sailors started to keep their their largest sails up all the time, and stacked ballast to windward to make the boats stable enough to handle the extra power.

The British soon found that shifting ballast with 19th century technology was an expensive, unpleasant hassle. Before each race, interiors had to be stripped out so that bags of lead shot could be thrown from side to side during tacks. Ledges were fitted to hold the ballast bags, hidden behind ornate Victorian cabinets. Amateur crews quickly rebelled when they were asked to spend a day cramped down, below heaving weights from side to side and being covered in muck oozing from the shotbags, so owners had to pay professionals to smash up their expensive furniture with dirty bags.  By the time the sandbaggers were evolving the British were already starting to ban shifting ballast, to their general relief.

But while the sandbaggers didn’t invent shifting ballast, they did take it to a new level. The flat, beamy shape of the sandbaggers meant that shifting ballast had more leverage and was more effective than it had been on the narrow English cutters.  The typical sandbagger of around 26’/8m overall carried from 25 to 34 bags, each weighing around 55lb/25kg, and a crew of about nine men (in addition to the sheet handlers and bailer boy) to throw them up to the windward gunwale each tack. “When quick work was not done some sandbags went over board, not infrequently a man or two, and sometimes also, all hands and the skipper” remembered sandbagger sailor William E Simmons years later. Despite the “sandbagger” label, gravel was the preferred filling because it dried out faster. [17]  Some boats, especially in New Orleans, piled the sandbags onto a board mounted on 3ft/1m long swinging “arms” that pivoted out to windward like a modern skiff’s wings, but it was too cumbersome for general use. [18]

In spite of the lack of class rules, the sandbagger hulls became “standardised to an extent seen today only in the one-design classes; plumb stem and stern-post, a breadth of about 36 percent of the length, a draft of about 7 percent, the midship section about 66% of the total length from the bow.”[15]  This stereotyped shape had “the stern well cut away, so that when the boat was afloat the tuck was well out of the water in order to leave the water cleanly (so that)… the boat steered better when well down by the stern.”[16]

The sandbagger followed the trends of the time in adopting a fine bow and wide stern, in place of the old-bluff-bowed “cod’s head and mackerel tail” shape. The sections showed the same “all deadrise and no bilge” soft-bilged shape as Una, but where the older catboat flattened out along the keel line the sandbaggers had a deeper vee, normally with about 19 degrees deadrise. Some of them, like the famous Susie S, had hollow sections in the floors, just outboard of the keel.

Two famous sandbaggers. Top, the small 1868 sandbagger “Cruiser”, which was successful both racing around New York with movable ballast, and with her ballast fixed in place when she raced under Boston rules. Although only 6.35m/20’10” long, her beam measured 2.9m/9’9″.  The contrast with Truant’s beam of around 2.1m/7′ shows how fat the sandbaggers became in the name of increasing their power to carry sail. Cruiser’s deadrise was measured by Stephens at 15 degrees, which was flat for a sandbagger. It may have been her flatter, wider shape that allowed her to win even when she was racing in Boston, where shifting ballast had been banned decades before.Below is Parole, created by the famous Jake Schmidt. Both Cruiser and La Parole show the stereotypical sandbagger shape – vast beam, a shallow hull, slack sections and buttock lines that rose steeply at the stern to form a “wineglass” transom, ensuring an uninterrupted flow of water onto the huge rudder.  Illustrations from George Belitz’s Seglers Handbuch, digitised by the http://www.yachtsportmuseum.de/

Although most illustrations show boats carrying just a jib and mainsail, other accounts say that sprit topsails and jib topsails were sometimes being set in light winds (especially among the New Orleans fleet) but that “the extra gear involved kept it from general use”. [19]  [20]  The stability provided by the movable ballast allowed the sandbaggers to carry longer gaffs and more area up high in the mainsail than earlier American boats.[21]   The vast fore-and-aft spread of the sail meant that the sail trimmers, especially the jib trimmer, had a vital role in steering; if the jib was not eased in a gust the helmsman could not luff and the boat was likely to fill or capsize. [22] Spinnakers, which were still new, were rarely carried. [23]  Many of the smaller and earlier boats had two mast steps so that they could sail under cat rig.  They carried vast low-aspect centreboards and enormous “barn door” rudders, in line with Bob Fish’s mantra “the more sail a boat has, the more board she wants”.[24]

 

La Parole. Although she was only 27′ overall, she measured 70′ from the tip of her bowsprit to the end of her 39′ boom.  Her jib and mainsail measured 1574 sq ft – almost half as big again as the jib and main on a Farr 40.

By the 1870s a typical sandbagger like the 27’ Parole, by the renowned builder/skipper/saloon owner Jake Schmidt, was 11’3” wide at the gunwales, 10’ wide on the waterline, and drew 7’3” draft with board down. The outrigger that supported the mainsheet extended 10′ from the transom, while the bowsprit stretched  22’6″  from the stem. A mainsail of more than a thousand square feet and a jib of nearly 500ft2 were hung from a mast that was a full 10″ in diamater. With a full load of 77 sandbags, 600 to 700lb of fixed lead or iron ballast (to keep her upright at anchor) and 17 crew, she had a displacement of 4.1 tons.  In contrast, a heavy displacement long-keel Itchen Ferry from England of the same length could weigh 6.5 tons and spread 1041ft2 of sail when racing, whereas a lighter English cutter would displace as little as 3.5 tonnes.[27]

Although A Cary Smith wrote that in 1860 “lightness of construction was then considered as vital to speed as it is now”[25] and some boats were made in clinker to save weight, the sheer power of the sandbagger demanded a strong hull.  Hull planks could be as thick as ¾”.  Even then, the sandbaggers were famously flexible, and could be seen clearly twisting under the battle between the power of the rig and the weight of the sandbags.  Despite the strain, the boats lasted well by the standards of their age, and some returned to fishing when their racing days were over.[26]

An ad for the sandbagger builder and skipper Pat McGeighan, described by WP Stephens as “a good judge of bad whisky”. The artist made McGieghan’s boatyard look a bit more impressive than it was in the 1894 pic below, from the Bayonne Public Library.

 

As Ben Fuller, former curator of Mystic Seaport Museum and one of the few people who are experts in both traditional and modern  small craft says, the sandbagger’s design was all about speed in the light breezes typical of the New York harbour area, rather than a high top speed. The sandbagger shape was nothing like a planing hull.  When Fuller tried towing a replica of A Cary Smith’s 18’ sandbagger Comet, it merely sank into the water further without changing the attitude of the fore and aft trim. While the sandbaggers could not beat the big schooners or sloops – waterline length and stability were too important in those days of heavy rigs and displacement hulls – their combination of a beamy hull and movable ballast made them the fastest boats of their length, and Americans were not surprised if a sandbagger ran a cabin yacht “hull down” in smooth water. [28]

Sandbagger races attracted fleets of up to forty boats, but as W.P. Stephens wrote “the gambling element, however, predominated: and exercised a controlling influence over both building and racing.”[29]  Many of the most famous races were privately arranged match races where the winner would take home $1000 to $1500, three times the annual average wage, and the public on the spectator steamers would bet up to $50,000. Races and boats were adopted by waterfront bars, whose patrons would fight hard for the honour of “their” boat.

Sandbagger racing, as the newspapers saw it. Although the sandbaggers got vastly less publicity than the big boats, and even less than sailing canoes, they were the best known of the medium-size craft.

While some of the owners were said to be working “watermen”, the cost of the big rigs and powerful hulls and the demands of professional crews meant that owning a sandbagger was not a hobby for poor men; “the average cost was about $1,000 and the cost of maintenance, on account of the large crews required was considerable” noted Rudder magazine.[30] Some of the rich owners merely watched from a steamboat, but some of the rich joined the watermen in fighting it out on the water. Despite popular myths, this was not an underground hobby for the underclasses – every club apart from the New York Yacht Club openly encouraged the sandbaggers, and even prominent NYYC members owned them and raced them with other clubs.[31]

“No better evidence of the popularity of the sandbagger in its day can be offered than the fact that some of the smallest of them were owned and raced by wealthy men who either then or afterwards were prominent members of the New York Yacht Club” wrote a former sandbagger sailor years later.[32] “The recognition of the sandbagger was not therefore confined to yachtsmen of moderate means and obscure associations.”   While the list of sandbagger owners included men like immigrant hatmaker, saloon keeper and boatbuilder “Jake” Schmidt, boatbuilder Pat McGeihan, and the sea captain turned successful oysterman “Cap’n Phil” Elsworth, they raced alongside establishment figures like Judge Charles F Brown and former NYYC commodore William Edgar.  Even the forbidding and aristocratic C Oliver Iselin, who later led the syndicate that owned Reliance (the largest America’s Cup yacht in history) “not only learned the alphabet of sailing from them, but also first came into yachting notice as a sandbag racer”….. [33]

The close and serious racing in tricky boats bred outstanding sailors. “With the single exception of Charlie Barr, all of the famous yacht skippers learned the trick in the sandbagger” it was said. [34] “Them’s the boat that makes sailors” wrote a correspondent in Outing magazine. “When a man’s fit to be trusted with a racing sandbagger in a blow, he’s forgot more about sailing, ballast and trim, than half these (other) skippers ever dreamed of.”

It’s sometimes implied that Australians and New Zealanders were the first to really use human ballast. It’s a silly claim, as the examples of sailing canoes and even ancient Greek writings prove, and here’s a pic that seems to underline the point. Nathaniel L Stebbings took this pic of the sandbagger Hurley on 6 September 1886 and it shows 12 men, most of them hiking hard, on a boat just 22ft 6in overall. Around this time Hurley was sailing in the Delaware, where human ballast in even more radical forms was popular. Although it was commented that she did surprisingly well in a race against big schooners and sloops that year, she was still well beaten by the big yachts – more evidence that, contrary to myths, the big boats could match (and exceed) the speed of the sandbaggers. In the days of heavy displacement boats, length and power ruled. Pic from the Stebbings Collection from Historic New England. For a better image, go here. Details of Hurley’s dimensions from The American Yacht List 1889.  Race details from Amateur Yachting by Benjamin Adams, 1886.

Sandbagger racing was hard work for hard men. As one report put it, a sandbagger crew was “a mass of human ballast warranted to stick three feet overboard to windward in spite of anything in the shape of sea or motion (with) the minimum of pleasure, the ballast working for so much a day and agreeing to get wet – drowned even if necessary – at that figure.”  Accounts of one of the last sandbag ballasted classes, the 20 ft Sneakboxes of Barnegat Bay, noted that the bags put “a tremendous strain…. on the hull and rigging, to say nothing of that on the crew and skipper…one of the disadvantages of this class was the difficulty of obtaining crews and when procured, sufficient in number, the physical effort was too much, except for the well seasoned.”  [35]

Crewing a sandbagger was such hard work that few people would do it without pay. The modern commentators who claim that there was a backlash about the sandbagger sailors because they were paid simply don’t know their history. Professional crewmen and skippers were accepted universally in those days in all types of boat, from the biggest cutter or schooner of the NYYC or RYS, all the way down to the part-timers in dinghy clubs or aboard small cruisers. Even basic of books about sailing would include advice about pay rates and allowances.

A sandbagger in its element – reaching in light winds and flat water under an enormous amount of sail. Photos of sandbaggers racing are rare, because they came and went before marine photography was common. Charles Edwin Bolles caught this classic photo of the 21 footer E.Z. Sloat in 1896.

Racing for cash brought out the bad sportsman as well as the honest fan.  The sandbagger owners included men like Nick Duryea, who ran one the illegal gambling operations known as “policy dealing” or “the numbers racket”.  He pulled a gun on a race judge before being expelled from one club for punching a fellow owner, from another club for breaching club rules against racing for cash, and being stabbed to death in the street by a fellow and being shot dead by a fellow gambler.[36] From the safe distance of years such tales sound colourful, but those who were there were unhappy about sharing the racecourse with men like Duryea – “as bad an egg as I ever came across” and ruthless enough to kill a drunk who knocked him into the water, according to one of his own pro skippers. “You had to fight all the way around the course, and if you should win you had to fight again to get the prize” recalled Iselin.[37]  “There is no one cause which has brought the matches of this class of boat into so much disrepute as the fact that in almost every instance where the stakes have been above a $10 bill, there has been a dispute over the money after the race” noted a sports newspaper. “Clearly the men that have, for the most part, owned the sand-bagger in the past, are not the men to sustain the yachting of this neighborhood in the future……”[38]

Despite the thuggery that went on, the sandbagger’s speed in flat water and light winds made the type famous across the world. [39]  New York builders were soon exporting sandbaggers to Germany and France, while French merchant seamen who saw sandbaggers took the style home, modified it with a deep keel to handle the Mistral, and called them “houaris Marseillais.”

A Houaris Marseillais, the deep-keeled French version of the sandbagger. Similar boats with centreboards were sailed  on the Seine.

While the sandbaggers were the most extreme and influential examples of the move to beamy centreboarders, they were far from the only example of the beamy centreboarder. Out at Boston there was keen racing in “splashers”, which were similar to sandbaggers but with fixed ballast and smaller rigs.  Less extreme cat-rigged open catboats from about 15 to 30 feet overall were to be found racing all across the north-eastern USA. But none of them were as influential in the wider world as the sandbaggers and the earlier catboats, which can justly be acclaimed as the boats that introduced the world to the  beamy “surface sailing” centreboarder.

 

 

[1] In The History of American yachting,      ed, Captain RF Coffin noted that The Southern yacht club,

with its head-quarters at New Orleans and

its racing course on Lake Ponchartrain,

was the second club organized, but it was

purely a local organization ; its yachts

were small open boats,

[2] SMh 28 feb 1885 p 10 quotin Satuday Review

[3] American Yachting, WP Stephens p 100

[4] American yachting, WP Stephens p 81

[5] American Yachting p 32-33

[6] The Gaff Rig Handbook, John Leather, p 83-4.

[7] History 73

[8] History 77

[9] History 77

[10] Memories and traditions of American yachting, MotorBoating June 39 p 118

[11] L Francis Herreshoff notes that after some boats developed “ram bows”, the mean of the length waterline and length on deck was adopted.  Golden Age of Yachting, p 75.

[12] Spirit of the Times, 1884 p 773

[13] Traditions and Memories., MotorBoating Sept 39 p 35

[14] For example, it has been claimed that “sandbaggers and skiffs were the first racing yachts to employ movable ballast” (Higher Performance Sailing p 8) but this is clearly incorrect since the use of movable ballast was common in English keel yachts before sandbagger racing formed.

[15] Traditions and Memories, MotorBoating Sept 1939 p34.

[16] Small yacht Racing in 1861 by A Cary Smith, The Rudder (Vol 17) 1906

[17] Normally used instead of sand because it dried out faster. BAG

[18] Traditions and Memories, MotorBoating Sept 1939 p34.

[19] BAG Fuller.  The North River sloops had carried square topsails, ringtails, water sails and studding sails in light winds (Rudder 1890 Nov p 6) so the sandbagger sailors would have been obviously aware of them.

[20] Traditions and Memories of American Yachting, MotorBoating September 1939 p 34.

[21] How Sails are Made and Handled, Charles G David, Rudder publishing, p 24

[22] See for example A Cary Smith “Small yacht racing in 1861” The Rudder vol 17 1906 and How Sails are Made and Handled, Charles G David, Rudder publishing Company 1917, p 33.

[23] A New York Times report of the Newburgh regatta 1877, published June 19, refers to sandbaggers like W.R. Brown, Fidget and Freak using “spinigers”.  However,  “The History of Small yacht design part II” by Russell Clark, Wooden Boat July/August 1981 p 30 says that spinnakers were only used from 1879 in the USA.

[25] Small yacht Racing in 1861 by A Cary Smith, The Rudder (Vol 17) 1906.  A very heavy centreboard was fitted in the well-known Dare Devil in 1882  but it did not perform well; see Stephens in Forest and Stream p 433. Another sandbagger was fitted with a bulb keel, before Nat Herreshoff introduced the idea successfully with Dilemma.

[26]  The Rudder of     p 105 mentions that the 35 year old sandbagger Walter F Davids was still working as a fishing boat. The Jan 1906 number of that magazine included a photo of the Pat McGeighan sandbagger Sadie, perhaps the most successful sandbagger of them all, still sailing actively.

[27] Belitz, Kemp and Stephens give slightly different measurements for La Parole. The “lighter English cutter” is the Dan Hatcher design shown on p    of Uffa Fox’s

[28] Kunhardt,  Forest and Stream  Sep 21 1882 p 156

[29] Trad and Mem MotorBoating Sep 1939 p 88

[30] See for example Bethwaite Higher Performance Sailing p 10).

[31] The Sandbaggers by William E Simmons, The Rudder, Vol 17 No 3 (1906)

[32] The Sandbaggers by William E Simmons, The Rudder, Vol 17 No 3 (1906).  Other “establishment” sandbagger sailors include charter members of the Larchmont YC and Frank Bowne Jones, who WP Stephens credits as the main organiser of US Sailing  (latter May 44 MotorBoating p 109)

[33]

[34] Spirit of the Times April 29 1876

“Match sailing has latterly become such a business with a certain class of vessels and owners, and the tonnage of the yachts themselves is so great, that an owner who used to steer and handle his own craft now shrinks from the responsibility…owners have got more and more into the habit of trusting every thing to their skippers, and even often to the builders, who are thus made much more the real proprietors of the vessels than the men who pay for them….like passengers on board.”^[34]

[35] “Barnegat Bay Sneak Boxes” by Edwin B Schoettle, “Sailing Craft” p 607.

[36] Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 18 Dec 1872 p 4 and 25 Nov 1888 p 6.

[37] Golden years of yachting p 75. From the description, it was probably Iselin who ended an argument about who had won a sandbagger race by grabbing the winnings and swimming away with them, as described by WP Stephens. Sandbagger sailor A Cary Smith and Thomas Day of The Rudder also confirmed that cheating, such as using pie tins to paddle in calms, was common in the sandbagger fleets; see for instance Smith’s first hand account of building and racing his sandbagger Comet in “Small yachting racing in 1861”, The Rudder Oct 1906 p 592.

[38] Spirit of the Times 1884 p 773

[39]

[40] Forest and Stream,   1878 p 49

[41] The sail area was controlled by limiting the circumference to 48’. “The Delaware Ducker” by BAG Fuller, Wooden Boat Sept/Oct 1982 p 83

[42] Information from Ben Fuller and Traditionalsmallcraft.com.

SailCraft Pt 1.4: The Sandbaggers

 

While Truant and Una were awakening the British to the potential of the beamy “skimming dish” centreboarder, the Americans were taking the concept to the extremes. [1]  By 1885 there were 1000 catboats and jib and mainsail boats in the USA. [2]  Although some followed the deeper and narrower style of pilot boats and the schooner America, most were beamy centreboarders, especially around the New York area.  “The whole tendency of the time, in small and large classes alike, was toward the extreme development of the smooth-water skimming-dish, of great breadth and limited draft” wrote Stephens. [3]    “Local conditions, as exemplified in the shoal waters of the anchorage ground and of parts of New York Harbor where short cuts were possible to yachts of light draft, with the reaching course down the river and back, all tended toward the one dominant type that prevailed from 1860 to 1880.” [4]

Although designs were becoming more sophisticated, there was still often little distinction between workboats and pleasure craft. Even yachts as fast and famous as Maria ended their careers as working craft, while the New York Yacht Club allowed Hudson River working sloops into its early races, and at least two big oyster sloops, Cap’n Joe Ellsworth’s 60’ Admiral and 45’ Commodore, raced as part of the Brooklyn YC fleet when they were not earning a living. [5] [6]

Of all the many breeds of working boat turned racer, the breed that became the fastest and most famous was the “sandbagger”, which seems to have evolved from the oyster fishing catboats that harvested seven million oysters a year from the shoals of New York harbour.  In time-honoured fashion, the inevitable informal races between working craft probably developed into match races and regattas.  Boatbuilders found that a working boat worth $250 (about 15 weeks’ wages for a carpenter or blacksmith) could be sold for $400 to $600 if it was was a winner, and inevitably, the boats became faster and more extreme.

The Susie S, one of the fastest and most famous sandbaggers. She was built quite early, in 1869, but raced successfully into the 1880s.  Stephens noted that she “lacked the power of later boats, but she was very fast in light winds”. Although Susie S was slightly narrower than some later boats (3.35m/11′ beam on 8.23m/27′ length) her lack of power may have been due to the hollow in her forward waterlines and in the floors, each side of her keel. The top illustration is a painting from Frederick S. Cozzens, who did many illustrations of New York boats and yachts of the era. Illustrations from Stephens’ Traditions and Memories of American Yachting.

Like so many boat types, the sandbagger was the creation of local winds (in this case, the light airs of the New York summer), geography and economy.  “The superior speed of the light displacement, lightly built centre-board yacht over the keel boats of the pilot-boat type in the races which were each year becoming more popular, and the convenience of very light draft in mooring off the flats of Hoboken, Communipaw, and Gowanus, appealed strongly to both owners and builders” wrote W.P. Stephens [7] ;[8]  “The farmers who dwelt along these shores in the fifties were amphibious by nature, many of them fishermen and oystermen.  This entire community was devoted in one way or another to yachting.”.[9]

“Racing was the regular amusement of the community” noted Stephens in his encylopaedic book “Traditions and Memories of American Yachting”.….. “here, as well as along the Staten Island shore and in sheltered nooks on the East and North rivers, were boat shops, waterside saloons frequented by boat sailors, and fleets of cat-boats, jib-and-mainsail boats, and small cabin yachts, all of the centre-board type. It was not until well along in the sixties that yacht clubs became general, but from the first a strong community of interest and friendly rivalry united all these localities”.

Communipaw New Jersey in the 1800s. The unspoilt shallows of areas like this bred the watermen and the boats they sailed. The marine life gave them their work, their work gave them the experience to handle the tough sandbaggers, the shallows gave them free moorings, and the waterfront pubs gave them unofficial clubhouses and sponsors.

“All that was now needed was a foothold on shore for a dinghy and a landing float, and these were provided by a waterside pub.  This popular institution provided, in default of a yacht club, shore shelter, landing facilities and social discourse, while mine host was at least an enthusiastic sailor if not a builder as well.”[10]

The races organisation was simple.  Boats were normally divided into four classes based on their length,[11] although boats that were outclassed could be moved to a different class.  Many regattas had four classes; First Class, 26 to 30 feet in length; Second Class, 23 to 26 feet; Third class, 20 to 23 feet; Fourth class, under 20 feet.  Within each class there was normally an allowance for length, typically two minutes per foot over a 20 mile course.[12]

Sail area was not measured.  This was standard at the time, from the biggest boats to the smallest.  Apart from the fact that no one had worked out a good measurement system for sails, it was often felt that “a tax on sail is a tax on skill”.  The simple rules almost inevitably meant that, as sandbagger and America’s Cup designer A Cary Smith noted, “the intention was to get as large a boat for the length as possible.”  Designers and crews created boats of vast beam, kept them upright with movable ballast, and crammed on sail area until, as one sandbagger sailor recalled, they became “a thing of small body and great wings.” [13]

The last of the sandbaggers. The remarkable 29’/8.8m Annie was built around 1880 in Mystic, Conn. Her racing rig measured 68’/20.7m from the tip of the bowsprit to the clew of the main. Annie was preserved by the Maine Historical Association in the early 1900s and is now at Mystic Seaport Museum. Pic from the Museum site.

The claims that the sandbaggers broke convention by using movable ballast seem to be one of those myths born of a desire to paint “mainstream” sailors as archaic throwbacks trying to hold back the tide of development. [14]  Shifting ballast had been common in racing yachts when sandbaggers were still evolving. Ironically, the practise had become common in English yachting because of rules intended to make boats less extreme. When clubs and regatta organisers banned boats from setting larger sails in light winds, racing sailors started to keep their their largest sails up all the time, and stacked ballast to windward to make the boats stable enough to handle the extra power.

The British soon found that shifting ballast with 19th century technology was an expensive, unpleasant hassle. Before each race, interiors had to be stripped out so that bags of lead shot could be thrown from side to side during tacks. Ledges were fitted to hold the ballast bags, hidden behind ornate Victorian cabinets. Amateur crews quickly rebelled when they were asked to spend a day cramped down below heaving weights and being covered in muck oozing from the shotbags, so owners had to pay professionals to smash up their expensive furniture with dirty bags.  By the time the sandbaggers were evolving the British were already starting to ban shifting ballast, to their general relief.

But while the sandbaggers didn’t invent shifting ballast, they did take it to a new level. The flat, beamy shape of the sandbaggers meant that shifting ballast was more effective than it had on the narrow English cutters.  The typical sandbagger of around 26’/8m overall carried from 25 to 34 bags, each weighing around 55lb/25kg, and a crew of about nine men (in addition to the sheet handlers and bailer boy) to throw them up to the windward gunwale each tack. “When quick work was not done some sandbags went over board, not infrequently a man or two, and sometimes also, all hands and the skipper” remembered sandbagger sailors William E Simmons years later. Despite the “sandbagger” label, gravel was the preferred filling because it dried out faster. [17]  Some boats, especially in New Orleans, piled the sandbags onto a board mounted on 3ft/1m long swinging “arms” that pivoted out to windward like a modern skiff’s wings, but it was too cumbersome for general use. [18]

In spite of the lack of class rules, the sandbagger hulls became “standardised to an extent seen today only in the one-design classes; plumb stem and stern-post, a breadth of about 36 percent of the length, a draft of about 7 percent, the midship section about 66% of the total length from the bow.”[15]  This stereotyped shape had “the stern well cut away, so that when the boat was afloat the tuck was well out of the water in order to leave the water cleanly (so that)… the boat steered better when well down by the stern.”[16]

The sandbagger followed the trends of the time in adopting a fine bow and wide stern, in place of the old-bluff-bowed “cod’s head and mackerel tail” shape. The sections showed the same “all deadrise and no bilge” soft-bilged shape as Una, but where the older catboat flattened out along the keel line the sandbaggers had a deeper vee, normally with about 19 degrees deadrise. Some of them, like the famous Susie S, had hollow sections in the floors, just outboard of the keel.

Two famous sandbaggers. Top, the small 1868 sandbagger “Cruiser”, which was successful both racing around New York with movable ballast, and with her ballast fixed in place when she raced under Boston rules. Although only 6.35m/20’10” long, her beam measured 2.9m/9’9″.  The contrast with Truant’s beam of around 2.1m/7′ shows how far the sandbaggers moved to increase their beam and power. Cruiser’s deadrise was measured by Stephens at 15 degrees, which was flat for a sandbagger. It may have been her flatter, wider shape that allowed her to win even when she was racing in Boston, where shifting ballast had been banned decades before.Below is La Parole, created by the famous Jake Schmidt. Both Cruiser and La Parole show the stereotypical sandbagger shape – vast beam, a shallow hull, slack sections and buttock lines that rose steeply at the stern to form a “wineglass” transom.  Cruiser  Illustration from George Belitz’s Seglers Handbuch.

Although most illustrations show boats carrying just a jib and mainsail, other accounts say that sprit topsails and jib topsails were sometimes being set in light winds (especially among the New Orleans fleet) but that “the extra gear involved kept it from general use”. [19]  [20]  The stability provided by the movable ballast allowed the sandbaggers to carry longer gaffs and more area up high in the mainsail than earlier American boats.[21]   The vast fore-and-aft spread of the sail meant that the sail trimmers, especially the jib trimmer, had a vital role in steering; if the jib was not eased in a gust the helmsman could not luff and the boat was likely to fill or capsize. [22] Spinnakers, which were still new, were rarely carried. [23]  Many of the smaller and earlier boats had two mast steps so that they could sail under cat rig.  They carried vast low-aspect centreboards and enormous “barn door” rudders, in line with Bob Fish’s mantra “the more sail a boat has, the more board she wants”.[24]

 

La Parole. Although she was only 27′ overall, she measured 70′ from the tip of her bowsprit to the end of her 39′ boom.  Her jib and mainsail measured 1574 sq ft – almost half as big again as the jib and main on a Farr 40.

By the 1870s a typical sandbagger like the 27’ Parole, by the renowned builder/skipper/saloon owner Jake Schmidt, was 11’3” wide at the gunwales, 10’ wide on the waterline, and drew 7’3” draft with board down. The outrigger that supported the mainsheet extended 10′ from the transom, while the bowsprit stretched  22’6″  from the stem. A mainsail of more than a thousand square feet and a jib of nearly 500ft2 were hung from a mast that was a full 10″ in diameter. With a full load of 77 sandbags, an extra 600-700lb of lead or iron ballast (to keep her upright at anchor) and 17 crew, she had a displacement of 4.1 tons.  In contrast, a heavy displacement long-keel Itchen Ferry from England of the same length could weigh 6.5 tons and spread 1041ft2 of sail when racing, and other displacement British cutters of similar length could weigh 3.5 to 5.2 tons with masts of half the diameter. Such figures confirm that the sandbaggers were not ultralight boats, even by the standards of their day.[25]

Although A Cary Smith wrote in 1860 that “lightness of construction was then considered as vital to speed as it is now”[25] and some boats were made in clinker to save weight, the sheer power of the sandbagger demanded a strong hull.  Hull planks could be as thick as ¾”.  Even then, the sandbaggers were famously flexible, and old photographs show them clearly twisting under the battle between the power of the rig and the weight of the sandbags .  Despite the strain, the boats lasted well by the standards of their age, and some returned to fishing when their racing days were over.[26]

An ad for the sandbagger builder and skipper Pat McGeighan, described by WP Stephens as “a good judge of bad whisky”. The artist made McGieghan’s boatyard look a bit more mpressive than it was in the 1894 pic below, from the Bayonne Public Library.

 

As Ben Fuller, former curator of Mystic Seaport Museum and one of the few people who are experts in both traditional and modern  small craft says, the sandbagger’s design was all about speed in the light breezes typical of the New York harbour area, rather than a high top speed. The sandbagger shape was nothing like a planing hull.  When Fuller tried towing a replica of A Cary Smith’s 18’ sandbagger Comet, it merely sank into the water further without changing the attitude of the fore and aft trim. But the sandbagger’s combination of beamy light displacement hull and movable ballast made them the fastest boats of their length, and Americans were not surprised if a sandbagger ran a cabin yacht “hull down” in smooth water. [28]

Sandbagger races attracted fleets of up to forty boats, but as W.P. Stephens wrote “the gambling element, however, predominated: and exercised a controlling influence over both building and racing.”[29]  Many of the most famous races were privately arranged match races where the winner would take home $1000 to $1500, three times the annual average wage, and the public on the spectator steamers would bet up to $50,000. Races and boats were adopted by waterfront bars, whose patrons would fight hard for the honour of “their” boat.

Sandbagger racing, as the newspapers saw it.

While some of the owners were working “watermen”, the cost of the big rigs and powerful hulls and the demands of professional crews meant that owning a sandbagger was not a hobby for poor men; “the average cost was about $1,000 and the cost of maintenance, on account of the large crews required was considerable” noted Rudder magazine.[30] Some of the rich owners merely watched from a steamboat, but the sandbaggers were not sailed only by the working watermen. Every club apart from the New York Yacht Club openly encouraged the sandbaggers, and even prominent NYYC members owned them and raced them with other clubs.[31] “No better evidence of the popularity of the sandbagger in its day can be offered than the fact that some of the smallest of them were owned and raced by wealthy men who either then or afterwards were prominent members of the New York Yacht Club” wrote a former sandbagger sailor years later.[32] “The recognition of the sandbagger was not therefore confined to yachtsmen of moderate means and obscure associations.”   While the list of sandbagger owners included men like immigrant hatmaker, saloon keeper and boatbuilder “Jake” Schmidt, boatbuilder Pat McGeihan, and the sea captain turned oysterman “Cap’n Phil” Elsworth, they raced alongside establishment figures like Judge Charles F Brown and former NYYC commodore William Edgar.  Even the forbidding and aristocratic C Oliver Iselin, who later led the syndicate that owned Reliance (the largest America’s Cup yacht in history) “not only learned the alphabet of sailing from them, but also first came into yachting notice as a sandbag racer”….. [33]

The close and serious racing in tricky boats bred outstanding sailors. “With the single exception of Charlie Barr, all of the famous yacht skippers learned the trick in the sandbagger” it was said. [34] “Them’s the boat that makes sailors” wrote a correspondent in Outing magazine. “When a man’s fit to be trusted with a racing sandbagger in a blow, he’s forgot more about sailing, ballast and trim, than half these (other) skippers ever dreamed of.”

Sandbagger racing was hard work for hard men. As one report put it, a sandbagger crew was “a mass of human ballast warranted to stick three feet overboard to windward in spite of anything in the shape of sea or motion (with) the minimum of pleasure, the ballast working for so much a day and agreeing to get wet – drowned even if necessary – at that figure.”  Accounts of one of the last sandbag ballasted classes, the 20 ft Sneakboxes of Barnegat Bay, noted that the bags put “a tremendous strain…. on the hull and rigging, to say nothing of that on the crew and skipper…one of the disadvantages of this class was the difficulty of obtaining crews and when procured, sufficient in number, the physical effort was too much, except for the well seasoned.”  [35]

Crewing a sandbagger was such hard work that few people would do it without pay. The modern commentators who claim that there was a backlash about paid crews simply don’t know their history. Paid crew were accepted universally in those days in all types of boat, from the biggest cutter or schooner of the NYYC or RYS, all the way down to the part-timers in dinghy clubs or aboard small cruisers. Even basic of books about sailing would include advice about pay rates and allowances.

A late sandbagger (A.H Sloet?) in its element; flat water, light winds, and a vast spread of sail.

Racing for cash brought out the bad sportsman as well as the honest fan.  The sandbagger owners included men like Nick Duryea, who ran one the illegal gambling operations known as “policy dealing” or “the numbers racket”.  He pulled a gun on a race judge before being expelled from one club for punching a fellow owner, from another club for breaching club rules against racing for cash, and being stabbed to death in the street by a fellow and being shot dead by a fellow gambler.[36] From the safe distance of years such tales sound colourful, but those who were there were unhappy about sharing the racecourse with men like Duryea – “as bad an egg as I ever came across” and ruthless enough to kill a drunk who knocked him into the water, according to one of his own pro skippers. “You had to fight all the way around the course, and if you should win you had to fight again to get the prize” recalled Iselin.[37]  “There is no one cause which has brought the matches of this class of boat into so much disrepute as the fact that in almost every instance where the stakes have been above a $10 bill, there has been a dispute over the money after the race” noted a sports newspaper. “Clearly the men that have, for the most part, owned the sand-bagger in the past, are not the men to sustain the yachting of this neighborhood in the future……”[38]

Despite the thuggery that went on, the sandbagger’s speed in flat water and light winds made the type famous across the world. [39]  New York builders were soon exporting sandbaggers to Germany and France, while French merchant seamen who saw sandbaggers took the style home, modified it with a deep keel to handle the Mistral, and called them “houaris Marseillais.”

 

While the sandbaggers were the most extreme and influential examples of the move to beamy centreboarders, they were far from the only example of the beamy centreboarder. Out at Boston there was keen racing in “splashers”, which were similar to sandbaggers but with fixed ballast and smaller rigs.  Less extreme cat-rigged open catboats from about 18 to 30 feet overall were to be found racing all across the north-eastern USA. But none of them were as influential in the wider world as the sandbaggers and the earlier catboats, which can justly be acclaimed as the boats that introduced the world to the  beamy “surface sailing” centreboarder.

Smaller boats seem to have been almost ignored around by the sandbagger sailors. Although there are mentions of people sailing the famous Whitehall rowboats, searches reveal no races for them. There are reports of some racing catboats as short as 12’/3.66m, which were said to be so tippy that their skippers had to part their hair down the middle, and laugh only out of the centre of their mouth.[40]  But to the sandbagger sailors, boats under 16 feet didn’t count.

There’s a reason they called these Delaware 15 footers “Hikers”. In this Thomas Eakin painting, three crew up forward hike outboard hanging onto ropes leading up from the bilge. Note the “whiskers” projecting from the gunwales. They increased the width of the stay base, making it easier to support the huge cat rig.

However, a few miles further south, another group of Americans were sailing “real” dinghies.  Four types of clinker 15 footer were to be found hunting waterfowl or picnicking along the still-unspoiled Delaware River near Philadelphia. In typical fashion, as time went by they started racing their rigs grew bigger, but they did not follow the catboats down the route of great beam and great power.

Because the narrows of the river required short tacks, the Delaware classes relied on crew weight for ballast instead of sandbags.  Some of them even carried wooden centreboards instead of the iron ones customary in other areas. The double-ended canoe-like Duckers were restricted to 48” beam, about 115 sq ft of sail in a sprit cat rig, and two or three crew.[41]  The transom-sterned Tuckups carried four crew and about 144 sq ft of sail. Like the Ducker crew, the Tuckup sailors hung onto lines secured in the bottom of the cockpit, so they could extend their weight further outboard.

The Delaware Hiker catboats relied on human ballast instead of bags of rocks. Lighter and slimmer than the sandbaggers, they seem to be the most modern boats of their era in some ways. A “tuckup” like Priscilla, above, earned its name because the planks at the stern were “tucked up” at the stern. As maritime historian Ben Fuller notes, the Tuckups resembled the famous Whitehall rowboats of New York, but were slightly flatter and fuller to improve their performance under sail.

The transom-sterned Hikers had unlimited sail area that stretched up to 450 sq ft, wider beam for stability, and masts over 20 feet tall that were supported by stays that ran to “whiskers” or outriggers that extended out each side of the bows in the style of a modern “Open 60” shorthanded racer.  They supported their vast sail by squeezing up to eight hard-hiking crewmen into their 15 foot long hull.  If the wind dropped off, some of them would be thrown overboard and (hopefully) picked up by the spectator steamers following astern.  If the wind picked up, two or three of them would creep out onto a huge hiking board that projected several feet from the windward gunwale.

The Tuckups, Duckers, Hikers and sailing canoes were stored in boathouses along the Phladelphia riverfront. “Here there are several long wharves, lined on each side with rows of two-story boat houses, twenty to thirty in a row” wrote W.P. Stephens. “In these houses are stored hundred of duckers and tuckups, while the upper story of each is fitted up more or less comfortably for the use of the crews; gunning, fishing and camping outfits, with sails and gear, being kept there. On Sundays in particular the wharves and houses are crowded, the boats are off for short cruises up or down the river, or races are sailed between the recognized cracks, handled by old and skillful captains and trained crews.”

It was an egalitarian mix, where doctors sailed alongside labourers.[42]   From 1880 to 1890, the open boat races of the Delaware could attract fleets of up to 100 boats, with spectator crowds to match. In some ways they seem to be the most technologically advanced small boat of their day, but unlike the sandbaggers and the beamier catboats further north, they had little impact outside their home waters.

 

 

 

[1] In The History of American yachting,      ed, Captain RF Coffin noted that The Southern yacht club,

with its head-quarters at New Orleans and

its racing course on Lake Ponchartrain,

was the second club organized, but it was

purely a local organization ; its yachts

were small open boats,

[2] SMh 28 feb 1885 p 10 quotin Satuday Review

[3] American Yachting, WP Stephens p 100

[4] American yachting, WP Stephens p 81

[5] American Yachting p 32-33

[6] The Gaff Rig Handbook, John Leather, p 83-4.

[7] History 73

[8] History 77

[9] History 77

[10] Memories and traditions of American yachting, MotorBoating June 39 p 118

[11] L Francis Herreshoff notes that after some boats developed “ram bows”, the mean of the length waterline and length on deck was adopted.  Golden Age of Yachting, p 75.

[12] Spirit of the Times, 1884 p 773

[13] Traditions and Memories., MotorBoating Sept 39 p 35

[14] For example, it has been claimed that “sandbaggers and skiffs were the first racing yachts to employ movable ballast” (Higher Performance Sailing p 8) but this is clearly incorrect since the use of movable ballast was common in English keel yachts before sandbagger racing formed.

[15] Traditions and Memories, MotorBoating Sept 1939 p34.

[16] Small yacht Racing in 1861 by A Cary Smith, The Rudder (Vol 17) 1906

[17] Normally used instead of sand because it dried out faster. BAG

[18] Traditions and Memories, MotorBoating Sept 1939 p34.

[19] BAG Fuller.  The North River sloops had carried square topsails, ringtails, water sails and studding sails in light winds (Rudder 1890 Nov p 6) so the sandbagger sailors would have been obviously aware of them.

[20] Traditions and Memories of American Yachting, MotorBoating September 1939 p 34.

[21] How Sails are Made and Handled, Charles G David, Rudder publishing, p 24

[22] See for example A Cary Smith “Small yacht racing in 1861” The Rudder vol 17 1906 and How Sails are Made and Handled, Charles G David, Rudder publishing Company 1917, p 33.

[23] A New York Times report of the Newburgh regatta 1877, published June 19, refers to sandbaggers like W.R. Brown, Fidget and Freak using “spinigers”.  However,  “The History of Small yacht design part II” by Russell Clark, Wooden Boat July/August 1981 p 30 says that spinnakers were only used from 1879 in the USA.

[25] Small yacht Racing in 1861 by A Cary Smith, The Rudder (Vol 17) 1906.  A very heavy centreboard was fitted in the well-known Dare Devil in 1882  but it did not perform well; see Stephens in Forest and Stream p 433. Another sandbagger was fitted with a bulb keel, before Nat Herreshoff introduced the idea successfully with Dilemma.

[26]  The Rudder of     p 105 mentions that the 35 year old sandbagger Walter F Davids was still working as a fishing boat. The Jan 1906 number of that magazine included a photo of the Pat McGeighan sandbagger Sadie, perhaps the most successful sandbagger of them all, still sailing actively.

[27] Belitz, Kemp and Stephens give slightly different measurements for Parole. The “lighter English cutters” are the Dan Hatcher design shown on p    of Uffa Fox’s and Primrose, whose dimensions are in the 1884 edition of Dixon Kemp.

[28] Kunhardt,  Forest and Stream  Sep 21 1882 p 156

[29] Trad and Mem MotorBoating Sep 1939 p 88

[30] See for example Bethwaite Higher Performance Sailing p 10).

[31] The Sandbaggers by William E Simmons, The Rudder, Vol 17 No 3 (1906)

[32] The Sandbaggers by William E Simmons, The Rudder, Vol 17 No 3 (1906).  Other “establishment” sandbagger sailors include charter members of the Larchmont YC and Frank Bowne Jones, who WP Stephens credits as the main organiser of US Sailing  (latter May 44 MotorBoating p 109)

[33]

[34] Spirit of the Times April 29 1876

“Match sailing has latterly become such a business with a certain class of vessels and owners, and the tonnage of the yachts themselves is so great, that an owner who used to steer and handle his own craft now shrinks from the responsibility…owners have got more and more into the habit of trusting every thing to their skippers, and even often to the builders, who are thus made much more the real proprietors of the vessels than the men who pay for them….like passengers on board.”^[34]

[35] “Barnegat Bay Sneak Boxes” by Edwin B Schoettle, “Sailing Craft” p 607.

[36] Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 18 Dec 1872 p 4 and 25 Nov 1888 p 6.

[37] Golden years of yachting p 75. From the description, it was probably Iselin who ended an argument about who had won a sandbagger race by grabbing the winnings and swimming away with them, as described by WP Stephens. Sandbagger sailor A Cary Smith and Thomas Day of The Rudder also confirmed that cheating, such as using pie tins to paddle in calms, was common in the sandbagger fleets; see for instance Smith’s first hand account of building and racing his sandbagger Comet in “Small yachting racing in 1861”, The Rudder Oct 1906 p 592.

[38] Spirit of the Times 1884 p 773

[39]

[40] Forest and Stream,   1878 p 49

[41] The sail area was controlled by limiting the circumference to 48’. “The Delaware Ducker” by BAG Fuller, Wooden Boat Sept/Oct 1982 p 83

[42] Information from Ben Fuller and Traditionalsmallcraft.com.

Pt 1.2: “Truly as fast as the wind”: Catboats and skimming dishes

 

While Peggy slept in her boatshed and Margaret rotted by the lake, the next ancestor of the modern racing dinghy started to evolve across the Atlantic.  Some time before 1850, when the waters of north-eastern USA developed the beamy, shallow type that was to become the catboat and the sandbagger.

The ancestry of the catboat is a mystery.  The Dutch, the developers of the fore-and-aft rig and the first European settlers around the New York area, had used similar short and beamy boats with a mast stepped well forward for many years, and some of that tradition may have remained in the small boats using for fishing, oystering and other work around the north-eastern USA.  But even to authorities like Howard Chappelle and William Picard Stephens, the greatest of all racing sailboat historians, exactly when and where the breed developed remained unknown.[1]

One of the earliest descriptions of the type that for some unknown reason became labelled the catboat can be found in the recollections of the legendary yacht designer Nat Herreshoff, who sailed the “Point Boats” that had evolved around the point of Newport Rhode Island by the mid 1800s.  “Most boats in those days were roughly the type of the old Julia” he wrote to his son Francis, referring to a long-keeled boat approximately 23’ long that was built by Nat’s father Charles around 1833.[2]   “They were nearly all cat rigged with high narrow sails.  In their regattas there were no restrictions as to req. ballast, so it was the custom to take out part of the standing ballast and replace it with sand bags and men.”[3]

A Newport Rhode Island “Point Boat” from the 1830s. This sketch, reproduced in Traditions and Memories of American Yachting, shows a boat 23’6″ overall, 7’9″ in beam, and with a draft of 4’9″.  The Herreshoff’s Julia was generally similar, at least in profile.

Craft like the “Point Boats” remained popular in the deep waters around Boston and Newport, but in the mid 1800s a different style started to develop around Cape Cod and in the shallower waters around Long Island, New York, New Jersey and Barnegat Bay.  As Nat Herreshoff recalled, about 1853 or 1854, “the cat boats were changing to centreboard and greater beam, and their rig not so high & narrow.” [5]

The style that is now the archetypal catboat didn’t evolve until about 1850, when the Crosby family of Cape Cod launched the first of the 3500 “Cape Cod cats” they have built.  The Crosby cats were heavy centreboarders, with the mast stepped right in the eyes of the boat, a hull almost half as wide as it was long, and a huge transom. [6]  Although the Cape Cod Cat is seen as the classic catboat today, in the 1800s many localities developed local breeds. They all used the catboat trademarks of wide, shoal-draft hull and low aspect rig, but tailored the style for their own conditions and use.

Catboats ranged from the elegance of a Gil Smith South Bay racer to the power of a sloop-rigged Crosby Cape Cod cat. Pics from Wooden Boat Magazine (top) and catboatforsaleblogspot.com.au

No matter what local breed they were, the 19th century catboats often carried a bowsprit and jib, especially for racing or the light winds of summer. A sloop-rigged catboat seems a contradiction in terms today, but they used words differently in the 1800s.  Words like “catboat” or “cutter”, which we used to describe a type of rig, were then used as the label for a general type of hull. As Nat Herreshoff’s brother Lewis wrote, “the cat-boat in the usual acceptation means something more than its simple rig; it stands for a shallow, wide boat, with one mast crowded into the extreme bow, and a boom reaching far over the stern.” In typical sailing fashion, just to confuse the uninitiated the sailors of the time also used the term “cat rigged” to refer to boats that only hoisted a mainsail.

This evolution towards a broad, shallow centreboarder was common around many parts of the USA. At the start of the 19th century, the waters around New York had been populated with wide and beamy centreboarders like the big North River sloops, 75 to 100 feet long, that worked freight and passengers up and down the Hudson.   Fastest of them all was the giant racing sloop Maria, which had a full 26’6” beam on a waterline length of 92’ and a draft of just over 5 feet with her seven ton centreboard up. She was built in 1846 for John C Stevens, founder of the New York Yacht Club, and easily defeated the yacht America in trials before the famous schooner went to England and won what would become the America’s Cup.  About half the  big yachts of New York followed the same beamy centreboard theme as Magic.

To British yachtsmen, the shallow, beamy American centreboarders were to become known as “skimming dishes” or “surface sailing” boats, because they were thought to skim over the surface of the water, rather than knife through it like the deep British craft or the pilot schooner types like America herself.  By the time of the first America’s Cup challenge in 1870, the beamy centreboard “skimming dish” hull was established as the American national type, from the smallest catboat to the largest schooner.

Like many of the big yachts, the small catboats were normally designed and built by self-taught men, not by trained shipwrights or designers. “Phil” Elsworth was an oysterman, Jake Schmidt a hatter and saloonkeeper.  They designed by carving models in pine, and then cutting them apart to use as the pattern for the full-size boat. Their experience and innate ability allowed them to create boats that for many years equalled those of the trained designers.[7]  [8]

One of the greatest of these “modellers” was Bob Fish. Born into a distinguished family, he had been forced to support his family and siblings when his father died early.  “He was a man of no technical education, but a born boat sailor, an original thinker, and a very clever mechanic” wrote WP Stephens.  Lewis Herreshoff, brother of the famous Nat, rated Fish as second only to Steers (designer of the schooner America) in his time. Another who ranked Fish highly was A Cary Smith, who served an apprenticeship in his Pamrope boatshed before becoming famous for designing America’s Cup winners. [9]

Robert Fish – creator of two of the world’s most influential centreboarders.

It was two of Bob Fish’s creations that made the catboat and the sandbagger famous around the sailing world, even before they were fully developed in their own home waters. Although the tale of these two little boats seems to be a diversion from the development of the catboat type in its American home, it is a tale worth telling because the sensation they made in England makes them the first well-documented examples of their type, and also provides an illustration of their strengths and weaknesses.

In 1852, Robert Minturn Grinnell ordered a jib-and-main boat from Fish.  The two men were linked by their families, which had been partners in the prosperous shipping firm that had just launched Flying Cloud, one of the greatest of the clipper ships.  Although he was a member of the New York Yacht Club, Grinnell was about to leave his home town to take up business in Liverpool. In 1852, little Truant, about 20’/6m overall and 7’/2.1m in beam was delivered to Liverpool, then the world’s busiest port.

Robert Minturn Grinnell; the first and most successful skipper of Truant.

While the Americans had been developing the beamy centreboarder, British yachting had developed the narrow deep keel cutter.  Just as the word “catboat” then referred more to a hull shape than a rig, in 1850 the term “cutter” did not simply mean a single-masted boat with more than one headsail, as it does today.  To sailors of the 19^th century, it meant a boat with a deep slender hull (a product of harbour taxation laws, rating rules and the belief that a narrow boat performed better in choppy English seas) and a complex rig with a large topsail and several headsails set from a reefing (retractable) bowsprit.  Even small fishing craft, skiffs and dinghies under 20 feet tended to have complicated rigs with lugsails or spritsails, jibs and even mizzens. Such rigs may seem clumsy to our eyes, but they were comparatively easy to reef or douse in the changeable and often blustery British winds.

The men who sailed the English cutters were far from the modern cliché of the conservative Victorian-era British yachtsman. Sailboat racing as an organised sport was young – little older than the 505 class is today – and it was proud to call itself the most progressive and scientific pastime of the era. Even an “establishment” club like the Royal Yacht Squadron was led by a man (C.R.M. Talbot) who earned his fortune in the new industries of steel and steam and counted among its members like Robert Stephenson, creator of the famous ‘Rocket’ steam engine and one of the new breed of engineers who was transforming the entire world with railways. Other members included the great Radical journalist Albany Fonblanque and Joseph Weld, who had created an entire lake on his estate as a giant test tank. [10]   Even those who had the most conservative political and social views were fascinated by new yacht designs; the Marquis of Coyningham, pilloried by The Times as one of the worst of the landlords who lorded over the oppressed Irish in the leadup to the Famine, was one of those who tried to buy the schooner America. Men like this and their professional skippers and crews sailed hard, gambled hard on their races, and were not above fighting with marlinspikes or using cutlasses and axes to cut a rival’s rigging after collisions.[11]   At least that was a fair contest; [1]  other “sportsmen” of the era got their kicks by watching their greyhounds tear live hares apart, or shooting hundreds of captive pigeons in a single match.

The big boat sailors of the time believed that they had a duty to use some of their wealth improve the breed of sailing craft.  Sailing was not just a sport; it was the usual method of transportation for amateur and professional fishermen, daytripping tourists, and merchant and naval seaman.[12] Until the more economical compound steam engine was developed in the 1870s, even the most modern ironclad warships relied on sail power for long passages. As one newspaper noted “the celebrated tea clippers, which used to make such wonderful passages to England from the China ports, were the fruits of theory and practice combined and developed in yacht building.”[13]  Oyster fishermen of the Chesapeake later improved their boats after reading magazine updates on yacht design, and at least one yachtsman used to sell his old boats to the local fishermen each year to improve their fleet. [14]

Truant crossed the Atlantic while British yachting was still in shock from the victory of the schooner America the year before.  [15] “The first effect of the visit of the America was visible in 1851 in the remodelling of the entire British yacht fleet” wrote WP Stephens. [16] The big cutters and giant schooners were being cut down and re-shaped; their bows extended and made finer.  Their full sails were being replaced by flat ones, laced to the boom. “The ‘America’ was truly the harbinger of a mania for clipper-yachts” said one writer.  “Every yacht and boat-builder immediately had their hands full….Such was the complete revolution in yacht-building created by the performance of that vessel, that more than half the whole fleet of yachts were altered at the bows….so great was the rage to excel and to possess a clipper yacht, that experiment upon experiment was made.”[17]

Grinnell couldn’t have arrived at a better place and time. The sailors of the River Mersey cities of Liverpool and Birkenhead were just as keen on development as those who sailed the giant schooners and cutters of the Thames estuary and the Solent. They included men like members of the famous Laird shipbuilding family, who had recently launched the world’s first iron warship, complete with “sliding keels”. Shortly before America and Truant crossed the Atlantic, yachtsmen of the Mersey established the Birkenhead Model Yacht Club as “a school of marine architecture” with the aim of “scientific experiment and practical deduction” to improve boat design.  To the BMYC members, the word “model” had three meanings. As well as the obvious meaning of scale model, it was also a common term for the physical shape of a yacht’s hull at the time. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was the connotation of “an example to follow or imitate”, as in the term “model of perfection.”

The men who formed the BMYC, once called “the mother of small yacht clubs”, ranged from titled big-boat owners to immigrant students, but they were united by a desire for a “progressive and scientific yacht club” that would improve boat design by testing models.[18]  “5000 persons assembled to witness the match. I will never forget the sight as long as I live” remembered one witness to one of their model yacht races in the docks near Liverpool “up to nearly their waists in the water stood some 15 gentlemen, including…a well known medico….and one of the young Lairds, who then owned a yacht of some 35 tons.”[19]

Some BMYC members quickly found out that the choppy water of the dock and the effects of scale meant that their tests were misleading, and decided to continue their experiments with full size boats. “Owing to the dissatisfaction of several of the more progressive spirits at the results of our model experiments, craft of from 4,5,6,7 and 8 tons were at once built” foundation member H.R. Murray recalled years later. “And no sooner did they spread their white wings over the Mersey than (a ship) brought over a queer-looking centreboard craft” wrote Murray. [19b]

 

Birkenhead’s “Great Float” dock, dressed for its official opening. Titled and wealthy men with a passion for boat design used to race model yachts in this unlikely industrial setting.

The “queer craft” was Truant. The little American boat caused a sensation. She was “another America; dissimilar in some respects, but greater as developing a great novelty” raved one paper. “Her peculiarity consists not only in her rig, but in her hull” which was “about as flat as a butchers tray, sharp in front but full behind. She has a shifting keel by which she can either draw about eight inches of water only when running, or about 4’6” when beating, at which time only her keel is put down like an ordinary boat’s. Of her rig next.  She has her mainsail flat as a board and laced; and carried forward what is known to yachtsmen by the appellation of a “bumpkin” foresail, also laced to the boom.  These, with a small topsail, constitute her suit: and a smarter suit it would be difficult to find….[1]

The “strange-looking little foreigner…has her mast stepped in her very eyes- has a long easy entrance – full withal, and not a hollow line about her – carries her body all aft – does not draw much more water than about a foot in ballast trim – sails with a small centre board” noted another fascinated reporter. “She is about twenty feet over all, and seven feet beam.”

Unlike the British cutters, Truant could sail well under mainsail alone, although she did sometimes set a topsail.  When racing she appears to have normally carried a jib set on a boom which (like the rig of a modern model yacht) pivoted on a point aft of the tack.

Truant – a detail from a lithograph by Dutton. Hunts, the world’s first yachting magazine, advised its readers to go out and buy a copy of this accurate illustration of the famous little centreboarder.

Even before her first race, Truant’s performance on the narrow Mersey River amazed the locals. “Truly she is as fast as the wind – staying, wearing, running and reaching under the single sail with amazing velocity” one journalist reported.  [19]  In her first race the little boat, rated at 3 ½ tons, “shot away”[20] to finish 16 minutes ahead of the fleet. “Although the Yankee has, on this occasion, again ‘whipped all creation’ the best feeling was manifested; and Grinnell was highly complimented by the commodore in awarding to him the cup.” [21]

Liverpool docks in 1850, when sail still ruled the world’s busiest port, and improving hull designs saved lives and money.

By July, Grinnell had shipped Truant across the Irish Sea, and “the Yankee cockleshell” was amazing the Irish regatta circuit. [22] She could “go about in the most extraordinary manner, in fact exactly like a top” exclaimed the Cork Examiner, and “gaining ground on every tack”, she “shot off rapidly” to win.[23]  The “extraordinary little yacht” was “now as famous in Dublin Bay as she had previously become at Liverpool.”[24] 

Truant gained her most noted success after she was shipped down to the Thames, site of the world’s first organised yacht racing club.  The unbeatable American was already so famous that before the race, Bells Sporting Life was warning spectators to book early for the spectator ferry.[26]  In the race she showed herself to be “infinitely superior” upwind, winning by a quarter of an hour from larger boats before being “greeted with loud cheers, which were taken up by several of the yachtsmen afloat in their own craft.” [27] Truant’s triumphs were not just local news; they were reported as far afield as New York and Australia.

“The performances of this little vessel in beating to windward and scudding before the wind were astonishing” wrote contemporary sailor Henry Folkard in his enormously popular book Sailing Boats. “No English boat her size could sail so close to the wind, nor run so swiftly before the wind; and the result was, that the Truant completely vanquished on the river (as her larger sister the America had done on the sea) every boat that competed with her. [28]

The New Sporting Magazine compared Truant’s impact to the that of the schooner America. “No English boat of her size could compete with her; and thus a second revolution was brought about; and boat-builders puzzled their brains over this new discovery which now dawned upon them, as the astonishing performance of this little clipper were from time to time witnessed in every match she sailed.”[25]

One of the boatbuilders who puzzled over Truant was  H.R. Murray of the BMYC. Years later, he was to use the term “surface sailing” to contrast the American centreboarders with the deep British boats. “The hull should skim over the surface of the water, while the immersed blade increases the lateral resistance, and enables them then in ordinary weather to hold a wind with their deep-keeled rivals.” It was a description that echoed Schank’s words of the 1700s, and that Murray would take across the world. [11

Late in 2015, the auction house Christies was advertising the builder’s presentation model for Truant, apparently the genuine item. This low-quality image from the catalogue shows her deep skeg aft, her extensive decks, and her narrow beam compared to the sandbaggers of two decades later.

Although there were some who jeered and even some who cursed, the available evidence indicates that the overall reaction of the Victorian yachtsmen to Truant was positive.  As early as November 1852, Grinnell noted that builders from all parts of the UK were copying her model, and as soon after Truant returned from the Thames to her home waters at Liverpool, she started facing competition from other boats built along the lines of the American centreboard sloop. [29]   The Mersey fleet soon included the centreboarder Breeze built along American lines, the 10 ton Stranger, a keelboat built to the centreboard sloop concept by Bob Fish himself and carrying up to 12 crew as live ballast, and another Fish export, the little 2 ½ ton Buffalo Gal that was later sailed by Grinnell. [30],[31]

Probably the keenest of all the Mersey centreboarder fans was the cotton  merchant Alfred Bower.[32]  In his obituary is was noted that Bower “to his last was a firm believer that, for speed, the centre-board would beat the deep keel craft hands down.”[33]  For several years he had a new 8 ton centreboard sloop type built every year; first Presto, then Challenge, Charm, Spray, each with 670lb/300kg) of movable ballast mounted on “tramlines” that ran across the cockpit – an idea that the legendary Herreshoffs only adopted about a decade later.[34]

Presto, Challenge and Spray were each built by local boatbuilder Philip Kelly.  And here we come to an intriguing note – for the only boatbuilder of that name I can identify in the area at the time was in his late 60s, but still healthy enough to woo and marry his third wife a few years later.  The marriage records show that the ageing Philip Kelly had been born in Douglas to a shipwright named Thomas Kelly in Douglas on the isle of Man in 1786.  Was this the same Thomas Kelly who was listed in George Quayle’s accounts for the construction of Peggy?  Was the young Philip Kelly the first ever boy to be fascinated by a champion centreboarder, and to decide to devote his life to building boats?  Did he chuckle when the ‘new fangled’ centreboard, similar to the ones he may have worked on 50 years before, arrived at his Liverpool home when he was an old man?  It’s hard not to think that the Philip Kelly who built Bower’s boats must have grown up on the Isle of Man, watching his father build Peggy under George Quayle’s direction, and perhaps lending a hand on her modifications in those days when children started their apprenticeships early.

But despite the enthusiasm for the American centreboard sloop, within a few years the type seems to have died out.  Race reports become once again a contest of deep, narrow cutter against deep, narrow cutter. So why did the American centreboard sloop fade out in Britain?  In part, it was due to the fact that the rating systems of the day favoured the traditional deep and narrow cutter.  Truant, 20’ long overall, only had a handicap of a minute per race over Julia, the runner-up in the race on the Thames, which was more than 30’ overall.[35]  But the rating system itself could not have killed the centreboard sloop; they could still win races, and other types that rated poorly (like the Itchen Ferry Punts) did not die out.

The centreboard itself attracted some criticism.  Some said that it was “a dodge” that allowed her to sail into shallow waters and escape unfavourable tides. [36]  Years later one “establishment” owner was to comment that “for many years there was a curious dislike and distrust of (centreboards) among British boat-sailers and builders. They were excluded altogether from most regattas; and not one in twenty of the boats that would have been vastly improved by them were ever fitted with them. They were regarded, for some mysterious reason, as unseaworthy, unsportsmanlike, and unfair.”[37];  Others said that the movable centreboards should be banned because they were a return to the curse of shifting ballast that had blighted British yachting for years. [38] Still others spoke of leaking centreboard cases, while Francis Herreshoff noted years later that stones from the British shingle beaches often jammed ‘boards.

Although it is often said that centreboards were banned from British yachting, in Truant’s day there was no national body to enforce such a ban, and the two major small-yacht clubs, Birkenhead and the Prince of Wales, either permitted them or, following the standard practice of grouping boats of similar type into specific classes, ran separate classes for centreboarders.  Some years later, other regatta organisers and clubs did ban centreboards, and they were specifically banned from the bigger yachts, but at this distance it is hard to find any evidence that prejudice or blind conservatism was the reason.

There were those who criticised Truant and similar centreboarders as nothing more than “sailing machines”. “We may just as well call her a yacht as term a match-cart (i.e. a horse-racing sulky) a comfortable family carriage” said one writer after Truant’s victory in the Thames. [39]  “A shallow skimming dish should hardly be allowed to sail in matches, in which vessels possessing the usual accommodation were competitors, and almost certain to be distanced.”[40]

It was, in truth, a fair point. The boat that ran second to Truant on the Thames was Julia, described as “a very peculiar model” of boat, built in iron to a design by her owner. [42]  Rated at 7 tons, she had a waterline of 26’6” LWL, a beam of 7’11” beam, and was about 30 feet long.  She was a much larger boat than Truant, but she also had a 10’ long  saloon with standing headroom that would seat half a dozen in comfort. [41] The Ida, which placed third that day, was only 22’6” long but had completed a 20 day cruise to France.[43]  Truant, in contrast, was an open day-sailing racer that was carried from race to race aboard ships.[44] Even in larger sizes, the centreboarders had their accommodation cut up by the centreboard case and the deck obstructed by the large deckhouse required for headroom.[45]  Putting a boat like Truant up against these seaworthy cruiser/racers was like putting a skiff in a sportsboat race.

But in the end, the Mersey centreboarders may be an early example of the fact that weather, society and geography dictate design.  The beamy centreboard sloop often performed brilliantly on the Mersey, Thames and Dublin Bay, but it may not have suited other British conditions.  As the celebrated yachting writer William Cooper (writing as Vanderdecken) noted, in flat water, downwind or in steady conditions the American sloop type was “admirably adapted, and of wonderful speed” but they were inferior in typical English conditions of blustery  winds and choppy seas, cut up by tides and overfalls. “They are not calculated for our seas” was his conclusion[46].

Cooper‘s criticism could perhaps be dismissed as bias or conservatism, if it was not borne out by so many race results and reports that spoke of the centreboard sloops retiring or lagging behind deep-keel cutters in strong and gusty winds and choppy seas.  [47] [48] Sir William Forwood’s story demonstrates that “establishment” figures like him were not scared of the new style of centreboarder, or ignorant of its problems.  He had sailed on several of the centreboarders owned by his uncle Alfred Bower. In 1866 he bought Truant “which had greatly distinguished herself for speed, and taking her up to Windermere” he wrote. “She was not, however, of much use on that expansive but treacherous sheet of water. The heavy squalls were too much for her huge sail plan.” [49]

The cutter Coralie (left) takes the winner’s gun in a Royal Mersey Yacht Club race in 1847, five years before Truant arrived in Liverpool. The big cutter’s owner was one of the BMYC members who used model yachts to test new designs. Coralie was to become one of the rivals of the bigger Bob Fish and Philip Kelly designs such as Challenge and Stranger in a series of interesting battles between the deep British cutter and the shallow American centreboard sloop. This copy of the Henry Melling painting comes from the RMYC site.

Many years another writer who had learned to sail on the Liverpool sloops wrote of their “alluring excitement” but claimed that sailors were turned off by their dangerous and uncomfortable performance in the choppy, windy and cold British conditions.  An Australian yachting writer claimed years later that the Liverpool sailors laughed “when they recall to memory their folly, and the risk they used to run in the useless and unseaworthy boats, which they looked upon at the time as not to be beaten by anything afloat” [50]  Even Truant herself, sailed by the experienced Grinnell, capsized twice on the Mersey.[51]  Anyone who looks at the Mersey could wonder how they would right and empty a big 19th century centreboarder among those chilly tide-ripped waters and steep riverbanks.

Truant’s career shows a trend that extends to the present day.  The fact that some people disliked the type is seen by some modern commentators as unfair bias by a blind establishment.  In fact, judging from the press accounts, those who cursed Truant were greatly outnumbered by those who cheered her.[52]  Some reports of her performance exaggerated her record, rather than diminished it. [53]   In the end, it seems that the American centreboard sloop died out in Britain not because of establishment bias (although the rating rule was harsh on them) but because they were unsuitable for cruising and inconsistent and uncomfortable for racing in English conditions.[54]  It might be significant that when the Mersey developed another local centreboard class in the 1880s, the class rules created a slender (5’8” to 6’ beam) 18 footer with a moderate sized 280ft2 rig rather than a beamy American sloop type.[55]  But true to his beliefs, Arthur Bower kept his last centreboarder, Enigma, laid up for 20 years, and to the end of his life he occasionally brought her out to “show them how a race should be sailed”.

And what of Grinnell? After selling Truant, he also occasionally raced his big schooner on the Mersey.  When the American Civil War began, this member of the New York establishment took up arms against his own side by joining the southern Confederate forces.  Remarkably, after the south lost the war he appears to have returned to New York, but unlike the rest of his family he dropped out of sailing.

But even as the craze for the American centreboard sloop started to fade, the model started to spread further afield.  Men and boats inspired by Truant ended up taking the “surface sailing” model across to the far side of the world. Bob Fish himself started to export centreboard sloops to Germany, especially to the tiny ornamental lake Alster in Hamburg. Was Fish’s export drive spurred by the fact that one skippers entered against Truant in the famous race on the Thames was a Herr Westphal from Hamburg?  But that is another story, and first we must look at the next Bob Fish boat to cause a sensation overseas….

[1] See “Fore & Aft Craft and their story”, E Keble Chatterton, p 261 and 305.

[2] Capt. Nat Herreshoff, the Wizard of Bristol by L Francis Herreshoff, p39

[3] This information comes from Nat Herreshoff’s recollections of his grandfather’s tales of early sailing, as described to his son L Francis Herreshoff in a letter of 10 Feb 1926.  Reference: Mystic Seaport Museum.

[4] The pivoting centreboard, as distinct from the daggerboard-type “sliding keel” of Peggy and Schank, was designed by another Royal Navy officer, Captain Molyneux Shuldam,  when he was a prisoner during the Napoleonic Wars.  A parallel but slightly later development was awarded a patent in the US.  Shuldham , described by an Admiral as “a very clever officer”, designed a “revolving rig” similar to that of the current superyacht Maltese Falcon, as well as a “harpoon rudder” that seems to have been the first spade rudder; Transactions of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, Vol 9 1868 p 273.

A correspondent in the New York Clipper paper New York Clipper of November 11, 1854 claimed that “as far back as 1810,” he had “a beautiful little schooner-rigged centreboard sail boat, with which….he used to go forth and outsail everything of her size that floated: and about the same time, Fountain and Hatfield, of Whitehall, rigged centreboards to their piraguss, which so improved their working and sailing qualities that nothing could sail with them.”[4]

[5] Letter of Nat Herreshoff, Mystic Seaport Museum, Feb 10 1926

[6] Francis Herreshoff believes that the Crosby Cape Cod type was merely one example of the catboat’s spread up and down the coast, but that “they came into vogue around on Cape Cod where the centreboard cats were so popular that many people speak of them as Cape Code cats.” The Compleat Cruiser, p 299

[7] See for instance “Traditions and Memories of American yachting” MotorBoating August 1944 p 49.

[8] “The history of small yacht design Part II” by Russell Clark p 29, Wooden Boat July/August 1981 has information on some of the odd thoughts of the “Rule of thumb” school.

[9] Fish also built boats for the Duke of Wellington and worked for Stevens, founder of the NYYC and the syndicate that built the schooner America, and as the modeller for the NYYC (Brooklyn Daily Eagle 27 June 1889 p 6). As expert skipper as well as a builder, like other catboat sailors he seems to have turned to a career as a professional racing skipper in big boats later in life.

[10] Talbot was vice commodore; the commodore was the Prince of Wales?

[11] The Times of 23 July 1795 reported a collision between Mercury and Vixen, in which the captain of Vixen dismantled his rival’s rigging with a cutlass.  See also The New Sporting Magazine, Volume 11 p 181.  In the Town Cup at Cowes in 1826 a Sir James Jordan allegedly floored a crewmember of Weld’s Arrow who had tried to bash him over the head with a marlinspike after a collision. Rudder v 21 1909 p 11

[12] There was some justification for this belief; in both England and the UK , and the brig-rigged yacht Waterwitch beat naval ships so often that the Royal navy bought her for a trial horse.

[13] The Australasian, 9 July 1881 p3

[14] Chappelle

[15] America’s victory was not won against the best yachts in England.  As WP Stephens, the leading authority in yachting history of the time wrote in his                      .  One of the best British yachts lost her    and another of the top boats went to her aid.  The      cutter                  , was only     behind the     ton American schooner at the finish and would have won under any reasonable rating or handicap system.  America’s only other win was against Robert Stephenson’s Titania, a schooner of half America’s rated size.

[16] American yachting p 71

[17] “Yachting and yacht racing”, New Sporting Magazine, July 1866 p 21.

“”a school of marine architecture”; Hunts Universal Yacht List, 1852, p 63.

[18] The Australian Town and Country Journal, 5 May 1888 p 39; Ballarat Courier 7 Sep 1877

[19a] Ballarat Courier, 30 Aug 1877

19B Ballarat Courier, 7 Sep 1877

[1] The Era, May 22 1853

[19] Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, June 20, 1852.  The report says that she was normally cat rigged, but it appears that when racing she normally carried a jib.

[20] Manchester Times, June 30 1852.  Truant often raced with Birkenhead Model Yacht Club on the Mersey River at Liverpool.  Birkenhead, like its London counterpart, used the term “model” to mean an ideal full-sized boat, not just a “toy” or miniature one.  As noted in Bell’s Life of December 19 1852, the club “was formed expressly and entirely with a view to the improvement of model”, and so raced full-sized craft of up to 8 tons.  The early fleet was made up of “old boats” converted into yachts, such as Alfred Bowyer’s Mosquito, but custom-built yachts soon arrived.

[21] The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 14 Aug 1852, p 1

[22] Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, July 21 1852

[23] The Cork Examiner, July 28 1852 p 3

[24] Hunts Yachting Magazine, September 1852, p 105

[25] Yachts and yacht-racing”, New Sporting Magazine, July 1866,  p 22

[26] Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronmicle, 1 May 1853, p 6

[27] The Era, May 22, 1853

[28] Folkard p 94

[29] Irish Examiner, 22 November p 2.  It is interesting to see that this comment came in an advertisement for the boat, although Grinnell himself continued to race his larger schooner around Liverpool.

[30] Hunts Yachting Magazine, December 1852, p 291.  Grinnell raced one of the imported Fish products, the little Buffalo Gal, to second in a race at Windemere in spite of being by far the smallest boat and facing a “hurricane” of a headwind; Hunts 1859 v 8 p 516.

[31] Bells June 12 1853 p 5

[32] Bowyer’s earlier boat, possibly one of the converted open boats that the BMYC started with, had capsized and instantly sunk in the Mersey in 1852; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser (Manchester, England), Saturday, September 11, 1852; pg. 7

[33] Australian Town and Country Journal 5 May 1888 p 39

[34]  The information about the movable ballast in the Bower boats comes from classified ads when the boats were put up for sale in the early to mid 1850s.  L Francis Herreshoff says that the second Julia was fitted with a similar device in 1864.  She had 550 lb of iron ballast mounted on a slide that ran on railway tracks across the cockpit Traditions etc, MBing Sept 1942 p 52 clled the movable ballast “unwieldy and dangerous” but Francis quotes Nat (p 41) as saying that there were no problems with it and it made Julia (2), not a new boat, the fastest of her type in the district.

[35] Even traditional British types suffered the same way; the Little Mosquito, apparently built to the Itchen Ferry’s length restriction, was “beating everything in turning to windward” but was noted to be “built to sail by length, not by tonnage’ so rated one ton higher (a minute per race) than a boat like Julia which was several foot longer, and carrying, at least, a fifth more sail.”  – Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (London, England), Sunday, July 29, 1855; pg. 8.

[36] One writer, referring to larger boats, referred to the centreboarder’s ability to ‘cheat’ tides and said that if all courses were in deep water, like Kingstown in Ireland, centreboards would be allowed – but as most racing was done in tidal rivers, they had too much of an advantage; Hunts Vol 19, 1870 p 554  . A BMYC owner who had refused to race his keelboat against the centreboarders on the Mersey because he felt they had an unfair advantage in tidal waters later bought Truant and raced her with success in Kingstown.

[37] Yacht’s Sailing Boats, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, Yachting vol 1, Badminton library p

[38] Until a few years before, even the larger British boats had carried tons of lead shot in bags, which was dragged or tossed to windward each tack.  It was a dirty, exhausting and unpleasant operation that cost owners dear, both to have their yacht’s accommodation modified and cleared out before each race, and for extra paid crew to replace the amateurs who rebelled against spending their leisure hours throwing metal around a tossing hole.  At least one sailor died when the ballast they were moving fell to leeward and the boat sank with him trapped in the cabin; The Sporting Review, Review of the yachting Season of 1857 p 248. Around the time of Truant, individual clubs and regatta organisers restricted shifting ballast, which was eventually banned by the RYA (then the yacht Racing Association) in 1875. There were apparently rumours that Truant carried movable ballast, and Bower’s boats certainly did.

[39] Hunts Yachting Magazine, Vol 2, 1853, p 151

[40] Hunts Yachting Magazine (?) p 105

[41] Hunts Yachting Magazine, Vol 3, 1854, Vol p 506

[42] Hunts Yachting Magazine,   1857,  p 422

[43] Hunts Yachting Magazine and WP Stevens provide information on the cruise, while Stevens provided information on Ida’s dimensions.

[44] See for example, Irish Examiner August 2 1852

[45] After an early win in Ireland in July 1852 some objected to the fact that Truant had boomed out her headsail (as America had been allowed to do) and “a sailor, who had been in the second boat, came up and formally cursed her for the loss of the victory – a duty which he performed with entire simplicity and sincerity of feeling.”[45]

[46] In the Gaff Rig Handbook, John Leather refers to Truant as “a poor seaboat” that probably won because of her rig, but he gives no source or evidence for these remarks.  Cooper believed that Grinnell was the only man who could really sail the sloop properly, but in fact she won her race on the Thames under a guest skipper, and after some bad luck early on she also won in Ireland with another hand at the helm.  She also returned to Grinnell’s control by 1856 for at least one race.

[47] Among them, Hunts 1858 p 260-1; 1858 v 7 p 224; note in this race 3 of the 4 entries were centreboarders; the event was won by a 33’ cutter.

[48] For example, Hunts 1870 p 552

[49] “Recollections of a busy life”, Sir William B Forwood, 1910, Chapter xix.  Forwood went on to commercial and political success and was one of the founders of the Royal Yachting Association, which appears to demonstrate that the centreboarders had support from the “establishment”, who were not always against innovative types. Grinnell was also a powerful man; he was not just rich but also had strong support from the press, who reminded readers that his father had paid for Polar expeditions in search of the lost Royal Navy ships Erebus and Terror.

[50] Australian Town and Country Journal, 1 April 1882 p 32.  It should be noted that the un-named writer did not provide any evidence for his claims.

[51] Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle , November 25, 1855, p.5.

[52] See for instance Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle , July 25, 1852, p.5    , which spoke of the “wonderful little craft…beautifully handled by her open hearted and spirited owner.”

[53]

[54] The fact that Truant’s owner Forwood was one of the founders of the RYA indicates that “the establishment” had much more experience of the American centreboard sloop than later critics.

“But true to his beliefs, Arthur Bower kept his last centreboarder”: – Australian Town and Country Journal, 5 May 1888 p 39.

[55]   A century later, the gaff rig expert John Leather noted that one of these 18 Footers, Zinnia, was similar to a sandbagger or catboat and mused whether her designer had seen such plans in Dixon Kemp’s earlier editions.  It is more likely that he was aware of the Mersey centreboarders that were inspired by Truant.  Kemp edition p 354

SailCraft Pt 1.2: Catboats and skimming dishes

 

While Peggy slept in her boatshed and Margaret rotted by the lake, the next ancestor of the modern racing dinghy started to evolve across the Atlantic.  Some time before 1850, when the waters of north-eastern USA developed the beamy, shallow type that was to become the catboat and the sandbagger.

The ancestry of the catboat is a mystery.  The Dutch, the developers of the fore-and-aft rig and the first European settlers around the New York area, had used similar short and beamy boats with a mast stepped well forward for many years, and some of that tradition may have remained in the small boats using for fishing, oystering and other work around the north-eastern USA.  But even to authorities like Howard Chappelle and William Picard Stephens, the greatest of all racing sailboat historians, exactly when and where the breed developed remained unknown.[1]

One of the earliest descriptions of the type that for some unknown reason became labelled the catboat can be found in the recollections of the legendary yacht designer Nat Herreshoff, who sailed the “Point Boats” that had evolved around the point of Newport Rhode Island by the mid 1800s.  “Most boats in those days were roughly the type of the old Julia” he wrote to his son Francis, referring to a long-keeled boat approximately 23’ long that was built by Nat’s father Charles around 1833.[2]   “They were nearly all cat rigged with high narrow sails.  In their regattas there were no restrictions as to req. ballast, so it was the custom to take out part of the standing ballast and replace it with sand bags and men.”[3]

A Newport Rhode Island “Point Boat” from the 1830s. This sketch, reproduced in Traditions and Memories of American Yachting, shows a boat 23’6″ overall, 7’9″ in beam, and with a draft of 4’9″.  The Herreshoff’s Julia was generally similar.

 

Craft like the “Point Boats” remained popular in the deep waters around Boston and Newport, but in the mid 1800s a different style started to develop around Cape Cod and in the shallower waters around Long Island, New York, New Jersey and Barnegat Bay.  As Nat Herreshoff recalled, about 1853 or 1854, “the cat boats were changing to centreboard and greater beam, and their rig not so high & narrow.” [5]

The style that is now the archetypal catboat didn’t evolve until about 1850, when the Crosby family of Cape Cod launched the first of the 3500 “Cape Cod cats” they have built.  The Crosby cats were heavy centreboarders, with the mast stepped right in the eyes of the boat, a hull almost half as wide as it was long, and a huge transom. [6]  Although the Cape Cod Cat is seen as the classic catboat today, in the 1800s many localities developed local breeds. They all used the catboat trademarks of wide, shoal-draft hull and low aspect rig, but tailored the style for their own conditions and use.

Catboats ranged from the elegance of a Gil Smith South Bay racer to the power of a sloop-rigged Crosby Cape Cod cat. Pics from Wooden Boat Magazine (top) and catboatforsaleblogspot.com.au

No matter what local breed they were, the 19th century catboats often carried a bowsprit and jib, especially for racing or the light winds of summer. A sloop-rigged catboat seems a contradiction in terms today, but they used words differently in the 1800s.  Words like “catboat” or “cutter”, which we used to describe a type of rig, were then used as the label for a general type of hull. As Nat Herreshoff’s brother Lewis wrote, “the cat-boat in the usual acceptation means something more than its simple rig; it stands for a shallow, wide boat, with one mast crowded into the extreme bow, and a boom reaching far over the stern.” In typical sailing fashion, just to confuse the uninitiated the sailors of the time also used the term “cat rigged” to refer to boats that only hoisted a mainsail.

This evolution towards a broad, shallow centreboarder was common around many parts of the USA. At the start of the 19th century, the waters around New York had been populated with wide and beamy centreboarders like the big North River sloops, 75 to 100 feet long, that worked freight and passengers up and down the Hudson.   Fastest of them all was the giant racing sloop Maria, which had a full 26’6” beam on a waterline length of 92’ and a draft of just over 5 feet with her seven ton centreboard up. She was built in 1846 for John C Stevens, founder of the New York Yacht Club, and easily defeated the yacht America in trials before the famous schooner went to England and won what would become the America’s Cup.  About half the  big yachts of New York followed the same beamy centreboard theme as Magic.

To British yachtsmen, the shallow, beamy American centreboarders were to become known as “skimming dishes” or “surface sailing” boats, because they were thought to skim over the surface of the water, rather than knife through it like the deep British craft or pilot schooner types like America herself.  By the time of the first America’s Cup challenge in 1870, the beamy centreboard “skimming dish” hull was established as the American national type, from the smallest catboat to the largest schooner.

Like many of the big yachts, the small catboats were normally designed and built by self-taught men, not by trained shipwrights or designers. “Phil” Elsworth was an oysterman, Jake Schmidt a hatter and saloonkeeper.  They designed by carving models in pine, and then cutting them apart to use as the pattern for the full-size boat. Their experience and innate ability allowed them to create boats that for many years equalled those of the trained designers.[7]  [8]

One of the greatest of these “modellers” was Bob Fish. Born into a distinguished family, he had been forced to support his family and siblings when his father died early.  “He was a man of no technical education, but a born boat sailor, an original thinker, and a very clever mechanic” wrote WP Stephens.  Lewis Herreshoff, brother of the famous Nat, rated Fish as second only to Steers (designer of the schooner America) in his time. Another who ranked Fish highly was A Cary Smith, who served an apprenticeship in his Pamrope boatshed before becoming famous for designing America’s Cup winners. [9]

Robert Fish – creator of two of the world’s most influential centreboarders.

It was two of Bob Fish’s creations that made the catboat and the sandbagger famous around the sailing world, even before they were fully developed in their own home waters. Although the tale of these two little boats seems to be a diversion from the development of the catboat type in its American home, it is a tale worth telling because the sensation they made in England makes them the first well-documented examples of their type, and also provides an illustration of their strengths and weaknesses.

In 1852, Robert Minturn Grinnell ordered a jib-and-main boat from Fish.  The two men were linked by their families, which had been partners in the prosperous shipping firm that had just launched Flying Cloud, one of the greatest of the clipper ships.  Although he was a member of the New York Yacht Club, Grinnell was about to leave his home town to take up business in Liverpool. In 1852, little Truant, about 20’/6m overall and 7’/2.1m in beam was delivered to Liverpool, then the world’s busiest port.

Robert Minturn Grinnell; the first and most successful skipper of Truant.

While the Americans had been developing the beamy centreboarder, British yachting had developed the narrow deep keel cutter.  Just as the word “catboat” then referred more to a hull shape than a rig, in 1850 the term “cutter” did not simply mean a single-masted boat with more than one headsail, as it does today.  To sailors of the 19^th century, it meant a boat with a deep slender hull (a product of harbour taxation laws, rating rules and the belief that a narrow boat performed better in choppy English seas) and a complex rig with a large topsail and several headsails set from a reefing (retractable) bowsprit.  Even small fishing craft, skiffs and dinghies under 20 feet tended to have complicated rigs with lugsails or spritsails, jibs and even mizzens. Such rigs may seem clumsy to our eyes, but the sails were easy to reef or douse in the changeable and often blustery British winds.

The men who sailed the English cutters were far from the modern cliché of the conservative Victorian-era British yachtsman. Sailboat racing as an organised sport was little older than the 505 class is today, and it was proud to call itself the most progressive and scientific pastime of the era. Even an “establishment” club like the Royal Yacht Squadron was led by a man (C.R.M. Talbot) who earned his fortune in the new industries of steel and steam and counted among its members like Robert Stephenson, creator of the famous ‘Rocket’ steam engine and one of the new breed of engineers who was transforming the entire world with railways. Other members included the great Radical journalist Albany Fonblanque and Joseph Weld, who had created an entire lake on his estate as a giant test tank. [10]   Even those who had the most conservative political and social views were fascinated by new yacht designs; the Marquis of Coyningham, pilloried by The Times as one of the worst of the landlords who lorded over the oppressed Irish in the leadup to the Famine, was one of those who tried to buy the schooner America. Men like this and their professional skippers and crews sailed hard, gambled hard on their races, and were not above fighting with marlinspikes or using cutlasses and axes to cut a rival’s rigging after collisions.[11]   At least that was a fair contest; [1]  other “sportsmen” of the era got their kicks by watching their greyhounds tear live hares apart, or shooting hundreds of captive pigeons in a single match.

The big boat sailors of the time believed that they had a duty to use some of their wealth improve the breed of sailing craft.  Sailing was not just a sport; it was the usual method of transportation for amateur and professional fishermen, daytripping tourists, and merchant and naval seaman.[12] Until the more economical compound steam engine was developed in the 1870s, even the most modern ironclad warships relied on sail power for long passages. As one newspaper noted “the celebrated tea clippers, which used to make such wonderful passages to England from the China ports, were the fruits of theory and practice combined and developed in yacht building.”[13]  Oyster fishermen of the Chesapeake later improved their boats after reading magazine updates on yacht design, and at least one yachtsman used to sell his old boats to the local fishermen each year to improve their fleet. [14]

Truant crossed the Atlantic while British yachting was still in shock from the victory of the schooner America the year before.  [15] “The first effect of the visit of the America was visible in 1851 in the remodelling of the entire British yacht fleet” wrote WP Stephens. [16] The big cutters and giant schooners were being cut down and re-shaped; their bows extended and made finer.  Their full sails were being replaced by flat ones, laced to the boom. “The ‘America’ was truly the harbinger of a mania for clipper-yachts” said one writer.  “Every yacht and boat-builder immediately had their hands full….Such was the complete revolution in yacht-building created by the performance of that vessel, that more than half the whole fleet of yachts were altered at the bows….so great was the rage to excel and to possess a clipper yacht, that experiment upon experiment was made.”[17]

Grinnell couldn’t have arrived at a better place and time. The sailors of the River Mersey cities of Liverpool and Birkenhead were just as keen on development as those who sailed the giant schooners and cutters of the Thames estuary and the Solent. Shortly before America and Truant crossed the Atlantic,they established the Birkenhead Model Yacht Club with the aim of “scientific experiment and practical deduction” to improve boat design.  To the BMYC members, the word “model” had three meanings. As well as the obvious meaning of scale model, it was also a common term for the physical shape of a yacht’s hull at the time. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was the connotation of “an example to follow or imitate”, as in the term “model of perfection.”

The men who formed the BMYC, once called “the mother of small yacht clubs”, ranged from titled big-boat owners to immigrant students, but they were united by a desire for a “progressive and scientific yacht club” that would improve boat design by testing models.[18]  “5000 persons assembled to witness the match. I will never forget the sight as long as I live” remembered one witness to one of their model yacht races in the docks near Liverpool “up to nearly their waists in the water stood some 15 gentlemen, including…a well known medico….and one of the young Lairds, who then owned a yacht of some 35 tons.”[19]

Some BMYC members quickly found out that the choppy water of the dock and the effects of scale meant that their tests were misleading, and decided to continue their experiments with full size boats. “Owing to the dissatisfaction of several of the more progressive spirits at the results of our model experiments, craft of from 4,5,6,7 and 8 tons were at once built” foundation member H.R. Murray recalled years later. “And no sooner did they spread their white wings over the Mersey than (a ship) brought over a queer-looking centreboard craft” wrote Murray. [19b]

 

Birkenhead’s “Great Float” dock. Titled and wealthy men with a passion for boat design used to race model yachts in this unlikely industrial setting.

The “queer craft” was Truant. The little American boat caused a sensation. She was “another America; dissimilar in some respects, but greater as developing a great novelty” raved one paper. “Her peculiarity consists not only in her rig, but in her hull” which was “about as flat as a butchers tray, sharp in front but full behind. She has a shifting keel by which she can either draw about eight inches of water only when running, or about 4’6” when beating, at which time only her keel is put down like an ordinary boat’s. Of her rig next.  She has her mainsail flat as a board and laced; and carried forward what is known to yachtsmen by the appellation of a “bumpkin” foresail, also laced to the boom.  These, with a small topsail, constitute her suit: and a smarter suit it would be difficult to find….[1]

The “strange-looking little foreigner…has her mast stepped in her very eyes- has a long easy entrance – full withal, and not a hollow line about her – carries her body all aft – does not draw much more water than about a foot in ballast trim – sails with a small centre board” noted another fascinated reporter. “She is about twenty feet over all, and seven feet beam.”

Unlike the British cutters, Truant could sail well under mainsail alone, although she did sometimes set a topsail.  When racing she appears to have normally carried a jib set on a boom which (like the rig of a modern model yacht) pivoted on a point aft of the tack.

Truant – a detail from a lithograph by Dutton. Hunts, the world’s first yachting magazine, advised its readers to go out and buy a copy of this accurate illustration of the famous little centreboarder.

Even before her first race, Truant’s performance on the narrow Mersey River amazed the locals. “Truly she is as fast as the wind – staying, wearing, running and reaching under the single sail with amazing velocity” one journalist reported.  [19]  In her first race the little boat, rated at 3 ½ tons, “shot away”[20] to finish 16 minutes ahead of the fleet. “Although the Yankee has, on this occasion, again ‘whipped all creation’ the best feeling was manifested; and Grinnell was highly complimented by the commodore in awarding to him the cup.” [21]

Liverpool docks in 1850, when sail still ruled the world’s busiest port, and improving hull designs saved lives and money.

By July, Grinnell had shipped Truant across the Irish Sea, and “the Yankee cockleshell” was amazing the Irish regatta circuit. [22] She could “go about in the most extraordinary manner, in fact exactly like a top” exclaimed the Cork Examiner, and “gaining ground on every tack”, she “shot off rapidly” to win.[23]  The “extraordinary little yacht” was “now as famous in Dublin Bay as she had previously become at Liverpool.”[24] 

Truant gained her most noted success after she was shipped down to the Thames, site of the world’s first organised yacht racing club.  The unbeatable American was already so famous that before the race, Bells Sporting Life was warning spectators to book early for the spectator ferry.[26]  In the race she showed herself to be “infinitely superior” upwind, winning by a quarter of an hour from larger boats before being “greeted with loud cheers, which were taken up by several of the yachtsmen afloat in their own craft.” [27] Truant’s triumphs were not just local news; they were reported as far afield as New York and Australia.

“The performances of this little vessel in beating to windward and scudding before the wind were astonishing” wrote contemporary sailor Henry Folkard in his enormously popular book Sailing Boats. “No English boat her size could sail so close to the wind, nor run so swiftly before the wind; and the result was, that the Truant completely vanquished on the river (as her larger sister the America had done on the sea) every boat that competed with her. [28]

The New Sporting Magazine compared Truant’s impact to the that of the schooner America. “No English boat of her size could compete with her; and thus a second revolution was brought about; and boat-builders puzzled their brains over this new discovery which now dawned upon them, as the astonishing performance of this little clipper were from time to time witnessed in every match she sailed.”[25]

One of the boatbuilders who puzzled over Truant was  H.R. Murray of the BMYC. Years later, he was to use the term “surface sailing” to contrast the American centreboarders with the deep British boats. “The hull should skim over the surface of the water, while the immersed blade increases the lateral resistance, and enables them then in ordinary weather to hold a wind with their deep-keeled rivals.” It was a description that echoed Schank’s words of the 1700s, and that Murray would take across the world. [11

Late in 2015, the auction house Christies was advertising the builder’s presentation model for Truant, apparently the genuine item. This low-quality image from the catalogue shows her deep skeg aft, her extensive decks, and her narrow beam compared to the sandbaggers of two decades later.

Although there were some who jeered and even some who cursed, the available evidence indicates that the overall reaction of the Victorian yachtsmen to Truant was positive.  As early as November 1852, Grinnell noted that builders from all parts of the UK were copying her model, and as soon after Truant returned from the Thames to her home waters at Liverpool, she started facing competition from other boats built along the lines of the American centreboard sloop. [29]   The Mersey fleet soon included the centreboarder Breeze built along American lines, the 10 ton Stranger, a keelboat built to the centreboard sloop concept by Bob Fish himself and carrying up to 12 crew as live ballast, and another Fish export, the little 2 ½ ton Buffalo Gal that was later sailed by Grinnell. [30],[31]

Probably the keenest of all the Mersey centreboarder fans was the cotton  merchant Alfred Bower.[32]  Many years later his nephew William Forwood, who sailed on several of Bower’s centreboard sloops, noted that Bower “to his last was a firm believer that, for speed, the centre-board would beat the deep keel craft hands down.”[33]  From 1853 to 1855 he had a new 8 ton centreboard sloop type built every year; first Presto, then Challenge and Spray, each with 670lb/300kg) of movable ballast mounted on “tramlines” that ran across the cockpit – an idea that the legendary Herreshoffs only adopted about a decade later.[34]

Presto, Challenge and Spray were each built by local boatbuilder Philip Kelly.  And here we come to an intriguing note – for the only boatbuilder of that name I can identify in the area at the time was in his late 60s, but still healthy enough to woo and marry his third wife a few years later.  The marriage records show that the ageing Philip Kelly had been born in Douglas to a shipwright named Thomas Kelly in Douglas on the isle of Man in 1786.  Was this the same Thomas Kelly who was listed in George Quayle’s accounts for the construction of Peggy?  Was the young Philip Kelly the first ever boy to be fascinated by a champion centreboarder, and to decide to devote his life to building boats?  Did he chuckle when the ‘new fangled’ centreboard, similar to the ones he may have worked on 50 years before, arrived at his Liverpool home when he was an old man?  It’s hard not to think that the Philip Kelly who built Bower’s boats must have grown up on the Isle of Man, watching his father modify Peggy under George Quayle’s direction, and perhaps lending a hand on her modifications in those days when children started their apprenticeships early.

But despite the enthusiasm for the American centreboard sloop, within a few years the type seems to have died out.  Race reports become once again a contest of deep, narrow cutter against deep, narrow cutter. So why did the American centreboard sloop fade out in Britain?  In part, it was due to the fact that the rating systems of the day favoured the traditional deep and narrow cutter.  Truant, 20’ long overall, only had a handicap of a minute per race over Julia, the runner-up in the race on the Thames, which was more than 30’ overall.[35]  But the rating system itself could not have killed the centreboard sloop; they could still win races, and other types that rated poorly (like the Itchen Ferry Punts) did not die out.

The centreboard itself attracted some criticism.  Some said that it was “a dodge” that allowed her to sail into shallow waters and escape unfavourable tides. [36]  Years later one “establishment” owner was to comment that “for many years there was a curious dislike and distrust of (centreboards) among British boat-sailers and builders. They were excluded altogether from most regattas; and not one in twenty of the boats that would have been vastly improved by them were ever fitted with them. They were regarded, for some mysterious reason, as unseaworthy, unsportsmanlike, and unfair.”[37];  Others said that the movable centreboards should be banned because they were a return to the curse of shifting ballast that had blighted British yachting for years. [38] Still others spoke of leaking centreboard cases, while Francis Herreshoff noted years later that stones from the British shingle beaches often jammed ‘boards.

Although it is often said that centreboards were banned from British yachting, in Truant’s day there was no national body to enforce such a ban, and the two major small-yacht clubs, Birkenhead and the Prince of Wales, either permitted them or, following the standard practice of grouping boats of similar type into specific classes, ran separate classes for centreboarders.  Some years later, other regatta organisers and clubs did ban centreboards, and they were specifically banned from the bigger yachts, but at this distance it is hard to find any evidence that prejudice or blind conservatism was the reason.

There were those who criticised Truant and similar centreboarders as nothing more than “sailing machines”. “We may just as well call her a yacht as term a match-cart (i.e. a horse-racing sulky) a comfortable family carriage” said one writer after Truant’s victory in the Thames. [39]  “A shallow skimming dish should hardly be allowed to sail in matches, in which vessels possessing the usual accommodation were competitors, and almost certain to be distanced.”[40]

It was, in truth, a fair point. The boat that ran second to Truant on the Thames was Julia, described as “a very peculiar model” of boat, built in iron to a design by her owner. [42]  Rated at 7 tons, she had a waterline of 26’6” LWL, a beam of 7’11” beam, and was about 30 feet long.  She was a much larger boat than Truant, but she also had a 10’ long  saloon with standing headroom that would seat half a dozen in comfort. [41] The Ida, which placed third that day, was only 22’6” long but had completed a 20 day cruise to France.[43]  Truant, in contrast, was an open day-sailing racer that was carried from race to race aboard ships.[44] Even in larger sizes, the centreboarders had their accommodation cut up by the centreboard case and the deck obstructed by the large deckhouse required for headroom.[45]  Putting a boat like Truant up against these seaworthy cruiser/racers was like putting a skiff in a sportsboat race.

But in the end, the Mersey centreboarders may be an early example of the fact that weather, society and geography dictate design.  The beamy centreboard sloop often performed brilliantly on the Mersey, Thames and Dublin Bay, but it may not have suited other British conditions.  As the celebrated yachting writer William Cooper (writing as Vanderdecken) noted, in flat water, downwind or in steady conditions the American sloop type was “admirably adapted, and of wonderful speed” but they were inferior in typical English conditions of blustery  winds and choppy seas, cut up by tides and overfalls. “They are not calculated for our seas” was his conclusion[46].

Cooper‘s criticism could perhaps be dismissed as bias or conservatism, if it was not borne out by so many race results and reports that spoke of the centreboard sloops retiring or lagging behind deep-keel cutters in strong and gusty winds and choppy seas.  [47] [48]  William Forwood’s story demonstrates that establishment figures like him were not scared of the new style of centreboarder, or ignorant of its problems.  In 1866 he bought Truant “which had greatly distinguished herself for speed, and taking her up to Windermere” he wrote. “She was not, however, of much use on that expansive but treacherous sheet of water. The heavy squalls were too much for her huge sail plan.” [49]

The cutter Coralie (left) takes the winner’s gun in a Royal Mersey Yacht Club race in 1847, five years before Truant arrived in Liverpool. The big cutter’s owner was one of the BMYC members who used model yachts to test new designs. Coralie was to become one of the rivals of the bigger Bob Fish and Philip Kelly designs such as Challenge and Stranger in a series of interesting battles between the deep British cutter and the shallow American centreboard sloop. This copy of the Henry Melling painting comes from the RMYC site.

Many years another writer who had learned to sail on the Liverpool sloops wrote of their “alluring excitement” but claimed that sailors were turned off by their dangerous and uncomfortable performance in the choppy, windy and cold British conditions.  An Australian yachting writer claimed years later that the Liverpool sailors laughed “when they recall to memory their folly, and the risk they used to run in the useless and unseaworthy boats, which they looked upon at the time as not to be beaten by anything afloat” [50]  Even Truant herself, sailed by the experienced Grinnell, capsized twice on the Mersey.[51]  Anyone who looks at the Mersey could wonder how they would right and empty a big 19th century centreboarder among those chilly tide-ripped waters and steep riverbanks.

Truant’s career shows a trend that extends to the present day.  The fact that some people disliked the type is seen by some modern commentators as unfair bias by a blind establishment.  In fact, judging from the press accounts, those who cursed Truant were greatly outnumbered by those who cheered her.[52]  Some reports of her performance exaggerated her record, rather than diminished it. [53]   In the end, it seems that the American centreboard sloop died out in Britain not because of establishment bias (although the rating rule was harsh on them) but because they were unsuitable for cruising and inconsistent and uncomfortable for racing in English conditions.[54]  It might be significant that when the Mersey developed another local centreboard class in the 1880s, the class rules created a slender (5’8” to 6’ beam) 18 footer with a moderate sized 280ft2 rig rather than a beamy American sloop type.[55]

And what of Grinnell? After selling Truant, he also occasionally raced his big schooner on the Mersey.  When the American Civil War began, this member of the New York establishment took up arms against his own side by joining the southern Confederate forces.  Remarkably, after the south lost the war he appears to have returned to New York, but unlike the rest of his family he dropped out of sailing.

But even as the craze for the American centreboard sloop started to fade, the model started to spread further afield.  Men and boats inspired by Truant ended up taking the “surface sailing” model across to the far side of the world. Bob Fish himself started to export sloops to Germany, especially to the tiny ornamental lake Alster in Hamburg. Was Fish’s export drive spurred by the fact that one skippers entered against Truant in the famous race on the Thames was a Herr Westphal from Hamburg?  But that is another story, and first we must look at the next Bob Fish boat to cause a sensation overseas….

[1] See “Fore & Aft Craft and their story”, E Keble Chatterton, p 261 and 305.

[2] Capt. Nat Herreshoff, the Wizard of Bristol by L Francis Herreshoff, p39

[3] This information comes from Nat Herreshoff’s recollections of his grandfather’s tales of early sailing, as described to his son L Francis Herreshoff in a letter of 10 Feb 1926.  Reference: Mystic Seaport Museum.

[4] The pivoting centreboard, as distinct from the daggerboard-type “sliding keel” of Peggy and Schank, was designed by another Royal Navy officer, Captain Molyneux Shuldam, in    when he was a prisoner during the Napoleonic Wars.  A parallel but slightly later development was awarded a patent in the US.  Shuldham , described by an Admiral as “a very clever officer”, designed a “revolving rig” similar to that of the current superyacht Maltese Falcon, as well as a “harpoon rudder” that seems to have been the first spade rudder; Transactions of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, Vol 9 1868 p 273.

A correspondent in the New York Clipper paper New York Clipper of November 11, 1854 claimed that “as far back as 1810,” he had “a beautiful little schooner-rigged centreboard sail boat, with which….he used to go forth and outsail everything of her size that floated: and about the same time, Fountain and Hatfield, of Whitehall, rigged centreboards to their piraguss, which so improved their working and sailing qualities that nothing could sail with them.”[4]

[5] Letter of Nat Herreshoff, Feb 10 1926

[6] Francis Herreshoff believes that the Crosby Cape Cod type was merely one example of the catboat’s spread up and down the coast, but that “they came into vogue around on Cape Cod where the centreboard cats were so popular that many people speak of them as Cape Code cats.” The Compleat Cruiser, p 299

[7] See for instance “Traditions and Memories of American yachting” MotorBoating August 1944 p 49.

[8] “The history of small yacht design Part II” by Russell Clark p 29, Wooden Boat July/August 1981 has information on some of the odd thoughts of the “Rule of thumb” school.

[9] Fish also built boats for the Duke of Wellington and worked for Stevens, founder of the NYYC and the syndicate that built the schooner America, and as the modeller for the NYYC (Brooklyn Daily Eagle 27 June 1889 p 6). As expert skipper as well as a builder, like other catboat sailors he seems to have turned to a career as a professional racing skipper in big boats later in life.

[10] Talbot was vice commodore; the commodore was the Prince of Wales?

[11] The Times of 23 July 1795 reported a collision between Mercury and Vixen, in which the captain of Vixen dismantled his rival’s rigging with a cutlass.  See also The New Sporting Magazine, Volume 11 p 181.  In the Town Cup at Cowes in 1826 a Sir James Jordan allegedly floored a crewmember of Weld’s Arrow who had tried to bash him over the head with a marlinspike after a collision. Rudder v 21 1909 p 11

[12] There was some justification for this belief; in both England and the UK , and the brig-rigged yacht Waterwitch beat naval ships so often that the Royal navy bought her for a trial horse.

[13] The Australasian, 9 July 1881 p3

[14] Chappelle

[15] America’s victory was not won against the best yachts in England.  As WP Stephens, the leading authority in yachting history of the time wrote in his                      .  One of the best British yachts lost her    and another of the top boats went to her aid.  The      cutter                  , was only     behind the     ton American schooner at the finish and would have won under any reasonable rating or handicap system.  America’s only other win was against Robert Stephenson’s Titania, a schooner of half America’s rated size.

[16] American yachting p 71

[17] “Yachting and yacht racing”, New Sporting Magazine, July 1866 p 21.

[18] The Australian Town and Country Journal, 5 May 1888 p 39; Ballarat Courier 7 Sep 1877

[19a] Ballarat Courier, 30 Aug 1877

19B Ballarat Courier, 7 Sep 1877

[1] The Era, May 22 1853

[19] Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, June 20, 1852.  The report says that she was normally cat rigged, but it appears that when racing she normally carried a jib.

[20] Manchester Times, June 30 1852.  Truant often raced with Birkenhead Model Yacht Club on the Mersey River at Liverpool.  Birkenhead, like its London counterpart, used the term “model” to mean an ideal full-sized boat, not just a “toy” or miniature one.  As noted in Bell’s Life of December 19 1852, the club “was formed expressly and entirely with a view to the improvement of model”, and so raced full-sized craft of up to 8 tons.  The early fleet was made up of “old boats” converted into yachts, such as Alfred Bowyer’s Mosquito, but custom-built yachts soon arrived.

[21] The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 14 Aug 1852, p 1

[22] Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, July 21 1852

[23] The Cork Examiner, July 28 1852 p 3

[24] Hunts Yachting Magazine, September 1852, p 105

[25] Yachts and yacht-racing”, New Sporting Magazine, July 1866,  p 22

[26] Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronmicle, 1 May 1853, p 6

[27] The Era, May 22, 1853

[28] Folkard p 94

[29] Irish Examiner, 22 November p 2.  It is interesting to see that this comment came in an advertisement for the boat, although Grinnell himself continued to race his larger schooner around Liverpool.

[30] Hunts Yachting Magazine, December 1852, p 291.  Grinnell raced one of the imported Fish products, the little Buffalo Gal, to second in a race at Windemere in spite of being by far the smallest boat and facing a “hurricane” of a headwind; Hunts 1859 v 8 p 516.

[31] Bells June 12 1853 p 5

[32] Bowyer’s earlier boat, possibly one of the converted open boats that the BMYC started with, had capsized and instantly sunk in the Mersey in 1852; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser (Manchester, England), Saturday, September 11, 1852; pg. 7

[33] Australian Town and Country Journal 5 May 1888 p 39

[34]  The information about the movable ballast in the Bower boats comes from classified ads when the boats were put up for sale in the early to mid 1850s.  L Francis Herreshoff says that the second Julia was fitted with a similar device in 1864.  She had 550 lb of iron ballast mounted on a slide that ran on railway tracks across the cockpit Traditions etc, MBing Sept 1942 p 52 clled the movable ballast “unwieldy and dangerous” but Francis quotes Nat (p 41) as saying that there were no problems with it and it made Julia (2), not a new boat, the fastest of her type in the district.

[35] Even traditional British types suffered the same way; the Little Mosquito, apparently built to the Itchen Ferry’s length restriction, was “beating everything in turning to windward” but was noted to be “built to sail by length, not by tonnage’ so rated one ton higher (a minute per race) than a boat like Julia which was several foot longer, and carrying, at least, a fifth more sail.”  – Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (London, England), Sunday, July 29, 1855; pg. 8.

[36] One writer, referring to larger boats, referred to the centreboarder’s ability to ‘cheat’ tides and said that if all courses were in deep water, like Kingstown in Ireland, centreboards would be allowed – but as most racing was done in tidal rivers, they had too much of an advantage; Hunts Vol 19, 1870 p 554  . A BMYC owner who had refused to race his keelboat against the centreboarders on the Mersey because he felt they had an unfair advantage in tidal waters later bought Truant and raced her with success in Kingstown.

[37] Yacht’s Sailing Boats, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, Yachting vol 1, Badminton library p

[38] Until a few years before, even the larger British boats had carried tons of lead shot in bags, which was dragged or tossed to windward each tack.  It was a dirty, exhausting and unpleasant operation that cost owners dear, both to have their yacht’s accommodation modified and cleared out before each race, and for extra paid crew to replace the amateurs who rebelled against spending their leisure hours throwing metal around a tossing hole.  At least one sailor died when the ballast they were moving fell to leeward and the boat sank with him trapped in the cabin; The Sporting Review, Review of the yachting Season of 1857 p 248. Around the time of Truant, individual clubs and regatta organisers restricted shifting ballast, which was eventually banned by the RYA (then the yacht Racing Association) in 1875. There were apparently rumours that Truant carried movable ballast, and Bower’s boats certainly did.

[39] Hunts Yachting Magazine, Vol 2, 1853, p 151

[40] Hunts Yachting Magazine (?) p 105

[41] Hunts Yachting Magazine, Vol 3, 1854, Vol p 506

[42] Hunts Yachting Magazine,   1857,  p 422

[43] Hunts Yachting Magazine and WP Stevens provide information on the cruise, while Stevens provided information on Ida’s dimensions.

[44] See for example, Irish Examiner August 2 1852

[45] After an early win in Ireland in July 1852 some objected to the fact that Truant had boomed out her headsail (as America had been allowed to do) and “a sailor, who had been in the second boat, came up and formally cursed her for the loss of the victory – a duty which he performed with entire simplicity and sincerity of feeling.”[45]

[46] In the Gaff Rig Handbook, John Leather refers to Truant as “a poor seaboat” that probably won because of her rig, but he gives no source or evidence for these remarks.  Cooper believed that Grinnell was the only man who could really sail the sloop properly, but in fact she won her race on the Thames under a guest skipper, and after some bad luck early on she also won in Ireland with another hand at the helm.  She also returned to Grinnell’s control by 1856 for at least one race.

[47] Among them, Hunts 1858 p 260-1; 1858 v 7 p 224; note in this race 3 of the 4 entries were centreboarders; the event was won by a 33’ cutter.

[48] For example, Hunts 1870 p 552

[49] “Recollections of a busy life”, Sir William B Forwood, 1910, Chapter xix.  Forwood went on to commercial and political success and was one of the founders of the Royal Yachting Association, which appears to demonstrate that the centreboarders had support from the “establishment”, who were not always against innovative types. Grinnell was also a powerful man; he was not just rich but also had strong support from the press, who reminded readers that his father had paid for Polar expeditions in search of the lost Royal Navy ships Erebus and Terror.

[50] Australian Town and Country Journal, 1 April 1882 p 32.  It should be noted that the un-named writer did not provide any evidence for his claims.

[51] Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle , November 25, 1855, p.5.

[52] See for instance Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle , July 25, 1852, p.5    , which spoke of the “wonderful little craft…beautifully handled by her open hearted and spirited owner.”

[53]

[54] The fact that Truant’s owner Forwood was one of the founders of the RYA indicates that “the establishment” had much more experience of the American centreboard sloop than later critics.

[55]   A century later, the gaff rig expert John Leather noted that one of these 18 Footers, Zinnia, was similar to a sandbagger or catboat and mused whether her designer had seen such plans in Dixon Kemp’s earlier editions.  It is more likely that he was aware of the Mersey centreboarders.  Kemp edition p 354

Pt 1.1 -“The sliding keels that took advantage”; the dawn of the racing centreboarder

A model of Peggy of Castletown – the victor in the first known race involving open centreboard boats.

Like all good sea stories, the history of the racing dinghy starts with smugglers, a fortune, a struggle for the hand of a maiden, cannons, islands, and a mutiny. The man who brought them all together was John Christian of the Isle of Man and England’s Lake District – the man who organised what seems to have been the first race for small centreboard boats.

John Christian was a political and social reformer, an agricultural innovator, and it was said, father to half the children in his town. As you’d expect from a powerful and passionate man in that part of the world, John Christian was also a sailor. In 1780, he had the 25’6″/7.77m long Margaret built in nearby port of Whitehaven. With her open cockpit, long, shallow keel and small lug rig, Margaret looks generally similar to other small boats of her era; heavily built, canoe sterned and rather slow.

Two years after he launched Margaret, John Christian married his cousin and ward, Isabelle Curwen.  The marriage didn’t just give John Christian Curwen (as he became known) a new name and an apparently happy marriage; it also gave him Isabelle’s inheritance. John Christian Curwen spent some of that fortune in the best possible way – by buying a waterfront estate on England’s famously beautiful Lake Windermere (including the famous Belle Isle, named after his bride) and establishing the first Windermere regatta.[2]

And what of Curwen’s cousin Fletcher, the man who may have been his rival for Isabelle’s affections? It’s said that he went away to sea to ease his broken heart, and on April 28 1789, the unhappy Fletcher Christian sparked one of history’s greatest small-boat voyages when he led the mutiny against his commander, Captain William Bligh of the HMS Bounty, and set him adrift in the ship’s launch – a boat that, save for her transom stern, looks to be similar in style to Margaret.

George Quayle (left) and John Christian Curwen (right); two brilliant men and rivals in the world’s first known race with open centreboarders.

John Christian Curwen never achieved Fletcher’s fame, but he settled down to a distinguished life of radical politics, social and agricultural reform, field sports and sailing. In 1796, he entered into a challenge with his relative George Quayle, a merchant, inventor, ship-owner, banker, and politician from Douglas on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. Seven years earlier, Quayle had launched the 26’5″/7.77m long open schooner Peggy.  Peggy was used for transportation and as a workboat for Quayle’s business (with perhaps some smuggling on the side) but Quayle’s letters show that she was also a pleasure boat and a joy to him.

 

One of the Castletown One Designs sails down the tiny Castletown Harbour, past Quayle’s ‘Bridge House’ – the large grey building in the centre. The white sign on the right-hand end of the house marks the boatshed where Peggy was kept. Photo from Isle of Man Film

As the noted Irish yachting journalist W M Nixon noted in an excellent article in Wooden Boat magazine, Quayle’s Peggy seems to be a much more advanced design than Curwen’s craft.[3]  A rakish-looking boat with fine lines by the standards of the time, she carried a powerful schooner rig.  She was constructed with clinker or lapstrake planking, which is normally lighter than the normal carvel hull used by boats like Margaret.

Peggy is, of course, much bigger than a modern dinghy, but so were many of the boats that played a part in the early development of the dinghy. These days most developments trickle up from dinghies to big boats, but in the early days of dinghy sailing, when rigs and boats were heavy and stuck in the rut of displacement speeds, small dinghies were all but ignored. At the dawn of centreboarder sailing, developments trickled down from bigger boats.

“Peggy is, of course, much bigger than a modern dinghy, but so were many of the boats that played a part in the early development of the dinghy….at the dawn of centreboarder sailing, developments trickled down from bigger boats.”

Quayle kept on tinkering with Peggy long after her launch. By 1796 he had fitted her with two or three examples of the new invention that was to become the signature of the dinghy – the “sliding keel” or, as we know it, the centreboard.[1]

Like so much other technology, the “sliding keel” had been developed by the military. Captain Schank of the Royal Navy had come up with the idea in 1774, when he was in charge of building the fleet of small warships that won the Battle of Lake Champlain during the War of Independence. Schank’s “sliding keel” was merely one component of a theory of hull design that formed a striking contrast to the concepts behind the normal deep-hulled sailing vessel of the day. Schank and his patron Lord Percy realised that if vessels “were built much flatter, so as to go on the surface and not draw much water, they would sail faster, and might still be enabled to carry as much sail, and keep up to the wind, by having their keels descend a greater depth; and that the flat side of the keel, when presented to the water would make them able to spread more canvas, and hold the wind better, than in a construction whereby they present only the circular surface to the water”. The theme of “surface sailing”, instead of cutting through the water, was to become a hallmark of the centeboarder in the next century, and to be endlessly re-interpreted as boats became lighter and lighter.

Although Schank gave Percy the credit for the “surface sailing” concept, it was Schank who conceived of a keel “that was made movable, and to be screwed upwards into a trunk, or well formed within the vessel” so that the shallow-hulled deep-keeled craft he and Percy envisaged could still enter shallow waters. The experimental boat that Schank built for Percy in Boston in 1774 was the first known “centreboarder.”

Above: the first “centreboarder”, Schank’s “sliding keel” boat of 1775. The long single “keel” was replaced by three keels in the next experimental craft (below), which allowed the boat’s helm to be balanced for different points of sail. Peggy was fitted with a similar arrangement some time after her construction. Drawings from Dixon Kemp’s Manual of Yacht and Boat Sailing.

The Royal Navy, although understandably distracted by wars with the USA and France, launched three experimental ships by 1796, and later followed her up with several classes of “sliding keel” brigs. The Navy’s enthusiasm for sliding keels seems to have faded when experience with vessels like the brig HMS Lady Nelson proved that 18th century technology was not up to the task of making a large centreboard that would not break, and that a ship with a broken “sliding keel” was even slower upwind than a normal square rigger. It was a classic demonstration of the fact that innovation in design is inextricably linked with material technology.

Like most craft of her time, Peggy had a full bow and narrow stern – the so-called “cod’s head and mackeral’s tail” shape. Boatbuilders of the time placed great emphasis on having fine lines at the stern to reduce drag. The full and very buoyant bows were used to allow the heavy boats of the day to lift their bows over the steep and choppy waves around England. As warship designer and historian DK Brown notes, craft of the day also had poor longitudinal structural stiffness, so heavy weights (like anchors in the bow) had to be supported by flotation directly underneath, to stop the hull from bending. Compared to many other boats of her day, though, Peggy’s lines seem narrow by the standards of her day. Although her bows are bluff at gunwale level, they are quite fine down at water level. Note the tiny cannon that Peggy carried to ward of privateers (and perhaps other smugglers). That’s one way to ensure you get buoy room!

Quayle had no such problems with his little schooner, which had centreboards of iron plate. After receiving the challenge from Curwen, Quayle mounted the tiny swivel cannons that a gentleman’s toy needed to survive in an Irish Sea where French privateers were still active, and headed across the Irish Sea with two other Manx boats.  They sailed up the River Crake and were placed on carriages for the five mile overland trip to Windermere.

With her centreboards and her big rig, Peggy swept the opposition off the lake.  “The Long Bolsprit & Sliding Keels has already produced strong Symptoms of Seizure among the Devotees of Fresh Water sailing” he wrote proudly home.  One of the other Manx boats, he noted, was “the Second Best in the Lake. Modesty prevents my saying who bears the Bill.” [5]  Peggy kept on racing and winning on Windermere until September had set in. Even on the stormy trip home, Peggy’s iron sliding keels allowed her to beat home through a gale higher and faster than other Manx boats. “It can only be imputed to the sliding keels that took advantage” wrote Quayle.

There had, of course, been other small-boat races before the clash on Windermere, and the boats of Quayle and Curwen were not what we would call a dinghy today.  But the Windermere race of  1796  remains significant – not only is it the earliest small-boat event that we have significant information about, but it may have been the first race for an open centreboard craft.

A small schooner sails past Belle Isle in the late 1700s. The boat pictured in “Belle isle Windermere in a calm” by Philip James de Loutherbourg could almost have been Peggy, but this picture was painted in 1786, ten years too early.  The painting was bought by John Christian Curwen, who seems to been a patron of the arts as well as having all the other marks of a Renaissance man. Photo from the Lakeland Arts Trust.

Curwen kept on running regattas on Windermere after Quayle and Peggy left; the poet Robert Southey’s complaint about the food he arranged one year is probably the earliest known whinge about regatta catering. One of Curwen’s neighbours, the famous journalist and professor John Wilson, became a fanatical sailor and owner of a fleet of racing boats, run by an old sailor called Billy. Like Curwen’s biography and Quayle’s letters, Wilson’s writing under the name of Christopher North gives us another glimpse of men whose daily concerns were archaic, but whose love for the sport sounds modern; “seldom rose we…till, about twelve o’clock, we heard the south breeze come pushing up from the sea” he wrote. “Then Billy used to tap at our door, with his tarry paw, and whisper, ‘Master, Peggs is ready. I have brailed up the foresail; her jigger sits as straight as the Knave of Clubs, and we have ballasted with sand-bags. We’se beat the Liverpoolean to-day, Master,’ Then I rose.” He also writes of the pain of being out-pointed “in our old schooner, one day when the Victory, on the same tack, shot by us to windward like a salmon.”

He won the regatta of 1813 with a boat that had the first iron keel on the lake; earlier boats commonly used stones for ballast.[6]Quayle, too, kept on sailing and developing Peggy.  After the rough trip back to the Isle of Man (when one of the other Manx skippers was reduced to bailing with his wig box) he raised her topsides.[7]  Like dinghy sailors of today, he seems to have fretted when work kept him from sailing; on 26 June 1803 he wrote to his brother “ ‘I have had no Time to get the Boat down yet but have been kept as busy a [Trap Wive] in the B [ank]’.  Millions of dinghy sailors have echoed his complaint since that day.  He kept up his interest in centreboards, meeting and corresponding with Schank and rejoicing when the inventor praised his understanding of the concept.[9]

The ever-inventive Quayle kept Peggy in a custom-made boathouse, full of his inventions, in the tiny harbour of Douglas. He seems to have been forever tinkering with the boathouse; as his brother wrote to him in 1791, “I hope you left room enough for the little one to lay comfortable”.  Towards the end of his life, Quayle entombed Peggy inside her custom-made boatshed in the tiny harbour of Douglas. Over time, the boathouse was walled up and the tiny dock outside was filled in. There the “little one” was to “lay comfortable” for decades. In 1820, Curwen got sick of losing races to his new neighbour, and he left Margaret to rot.

But that was not the end of the story for Peggy and Margaret.  In 1935, the walls around Peggy’s little berth were torn down to reveal that Peggy and her gear still stood there, complete down to drinking cups made of coconuts and in astonishingly good condition. Even the bills for her construction remain in the Manx National Archives, complete down to details such as the cost of “halliards”, tar brushes and the weekly pay sheets, topped by “Thomas Kelly” and a boy.

Peggy, damp but snug inside the boathouse where the stayed for over two centuries.

Remarkably, Peggy was not the sole survivor of the Winderemere regatta of 1796.  In 1952, G.H. Pattison of the Windermere Steamboat Museum found the boat that is believed to be Margaret being used as a chicken shed in the town of Southport. And so, amazingly, the two leading ladies of the very first recorded centreboarder regatta can still be seen today.

The hull that is believed to be John Christian Curwen’s Margaret, built in nearby Whitehaven in 1780. Photograph from https://www.lakelandarts.org.uk

Peggy’s construction looks lighter and more efficient than that of Curwen’s Margaret and other boats of her day. The red painted timber around the gunwales appear to be the extra planks that were fitted to raise her freeboard after the rough return from racing on Windermere. Pic from the Peggy of Castletown blogspot.

Margaret is little more than a bare shell [10] but Peggy is almost complete; still bearing her 18th century paint and fittings. Today, Peggy is in the middle of a painstaking long-term restoration project.  After six years of planning and preparation, in 2015 she was gently lifted out of the boatshed in which she spent two centuries and taken to a preservation facility. The slow story of Peggy’s meticulous restoration can be seen at http://peggy-of-castletown.blogspot.com.au/

After over 200 years, Peggy is inched out of her boatshed. Pic from the Peggy of Castletown blogspot.

But the race on Windermere seems to have been a false dawn as far as open centreboarders went. The racing sailors of the era stayed with faithful to long fixed keels and fully decked yachts. One or two centreboarders raced with the Thames’ Cumberland fleet in this period, but they were fully-decked yachts, complete with full decks and cabins – nothing like a dinghy.[11]  The open centreboard racing boat seems to have been buried for half a century with Peggy. When it was revived, it was an ocean away.

The men who kickstarted centreboarder racing around 1850 probably never heard of Peggy. But even after she had been entombed in her boathouse for four decades, the little schooner’s influence may have played a part in taking the centreboarder all the way to the other side of the world. And that’s another story, for another post.

 

 

 

[1] Much of this information on Peggy is from the site of the Castletown municipal site; see   http://www.castletown.org.im/heritage/nm_peggy.html

[1a]

[2] “The Worthies of Cumberland” Vol 1, Henry Lonsdale MD, 1867, p 66.

[3] “Meetings with Mature Ladies”:- Wooden Boat May/June 1986, p 17.

[4]  A letter written by Quayle from London in August 1795 (MS 02414 C in the Manx National Archives) indicates that there was at least one other boat with three sliding keels under construction in the area. One of these may have been the centreboard yachts owned by the Commodore of the Cumberland Fleet, the first modern sailing club.

“Berkshire island is fair”:- The Recreations of Christopher North, p 99.

 [6] The Worthies of Cumberland” Vol 1, Henry Lonsdale MD, 1867.

[7] Details from Nixon, p 20, and the Friends of the Manx National Heritage website.

[9] Manx National Archives, reference MS 02415 C. Further references to meetings with Schank are in MS 02421 C.

“It can only be imputed to the sliding keels that took advantage”:- Manx National Archives, reference MS 00940/5 C. In this passage Quayle referred to the sliding keels’ assisting Peggy against a tide, which is rather confusing.

“I hope left room enough for the little one to lay comfortable”:- Manx National Archives, reference MS 00940/3 C.

[10] Details of Margaret were taken from WM Nixon’s article “Meetings with Mature Ladies”, Wooden Boat, May/June 1986, p 21.

[11] These seem to have included the fourth boat christened Cumberland and owned by the Commodore of the Cumberland Fleet, the first sailboat racing club. So far I have been unable to track down a date for her launch, but it appears that she was launched after Peggy’s race on Windermere.

SailCraft Pt 1.1 – The dawn of the racing centreboarder

Peggy of Castletown – the world’s first racing centreboard ‘dinghy’?

Like all good sea stories, the history of the racing dinghy starts with smugglers, a fortune, a struggle for the hand of a maiden, cannons, islands, and a mutiny. The man who brought them all together was John Christian of the Isle of Man and England’s Lake District – the man who organised what seems to have been the first race for small centreboard boats.

John Christian was a political and social reformer, an agricultural innovator, and it was said, father to half the children in his town. As you’d expect from a powerful and passionate man in that part of the world, John Christian was also a sailor. In 1780, he had the 25’6″/7.77m long Margaret built in nearby port of Whitehaven. With her open cockpit, long, shallow keel and small lug rig, Margaret looks generally similar to other small boats of her era; heavily built, canoe sterned and rather slow.

Two years after he launched Margaret, John Christian married his cousin and ward, Isabelle Curwen.  The marriage didn’t just give John Christian Curwen (as he became known) a new name and an apparently happy marriage; it also gave him Isabelle’s inheritance. John Christian Curwen spent some of that fortune in the best possible way – buying a waterfront estate on England’s famously beautiful Lake Windermere (including the famous Belle Isle, named after his bride) and and establishing the first Windermere regatta.[2]

And what of Curwen’s cousin Fletcher, the man that some say was his rival for Isabelle’s affections? It’s said he went away to sea to ease his broken heart, and on April 28 1789, the unhappy Fletcher Christian sparked one of history’s greatest small-boat voyages of all when he led the mutiny against his commander, Captain William Bligh of the HMS Bounty, and set him adrift in the ship’s launch – a boat that, save for her transom stern, looks to be similar in style to Margaret.

George Quayle (right) and John Christian Curwen (left); two brilliant men and rivals in the world’s first race with open centreboarders.

John Christian Curwen never achieved Fletcher’s fame, but he settled down to a life of radical politics, social reform and sailing. In 1796, he entered into a challenge with his relative George Quayle, a merchant, inventor, ship-owner, banker, and politician from Douglas on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. Seven years earlier, Quayle had launched the 26’5″/7/77m long open schooner Peggy.  Peggy was used for transportation and as a workboat for Quayle’s business (with perhaps some smuggling on the side) but Quayle’s letters show that she was also a pleasure boat and a joy to him.

As the noted Irish yachting journalist W M Nixon noted in an excellent article in Wooden Boat magazine, Quayle’s Peggy seems to be a much more advanced design than Curwen’s craft.[3]  A rakish-looking boat with fine lines by the standards of the time, she carried a powerful schooner rig.  She was constructed with clinker or lapstrake planking, which is normally lighter than the normal carvel hull used by boats like Margaret.

Quayle kept on tinkering with Peggy long after her launch. By 1796 he had fitted her with two or three examples of the new invention that was to become the signature of the dinghy – the “sliding keel” or, as we know it, the centreboard.[1]  Like so much other technology, the “sliding keel” had been developed by the military. Captain Schank of the Royal Navy had come up with the idea in 1774, when he was in charge of building the fleet of small warships that won the Battle of Lake Champlain during the War of Independence.

Schank’s concept did not centre on the “sliding keel”. That device was merely a part of a rough theory of hull design that formed a striking contrast to the normal deep-hulled sailing vessel of the day. Schank and his patron Lord Percy realised that if vessels “were built much flatter, so as to go on the surface and not draw much water, they would sail faster, and might still be enabled to carry as much sail, and keep up to the wind, by having their keels descend a greater depth; and that the flat side of the keel, when presented to the water would make them able to spread more canvas, and hold the wind better, than in a construction whereby they present only the circular surface to the water”. Schank conceived of a keel “that was made movable, and to be screwed upwards into a trunk, or well formed within the vessel” so that the shallow-hulled deep-keeled craft he and errcy envisaged could still enter shallow waters.

The experimental boat that Schank built for Percy in Boston in 1774 was the first known centreboarder. The Royal Navy, distracted by wars with the USA and France, launched three experimental ships by 1796, including the 120 ton Trial, and later followed her up with several classes of “sliding keel” brigs. The Navy’s enthusiasm for sliding keels seems to have faded when experience with vessels like the gun brig HMS Lady Nelson proved that 18th century technology was not up to the task of making a large centreboard that would not break, and that a ship with a broken “sliding keel” was even slower upwind than a normal square rigger. It was a classic demonstration of the fact that innovation in design is inextricably linked with material technology.

Plans of Peggy, showing her fine entrance (by the standards of her day) and one of the eight tiny swivel cannons she carried to ward off privateers. That’s one way to enforce starboard tack rights!

Quayle had no such problems with his little schooner, which had centreboards of iron plate. After receiving the challenge from Curwen, Quayle mounted the tiny swivel cannons that a gentleman’s toy needed to survive in an Irish Sea where French privateers were still active, and headed across the Irish Sea with two other Manx boats.  They sailed up the River Crake and were placed on carriages for the five mile overland trip to Windermere.

With her centreboards and her big rig, Peggy swept the opposition off the lake.  “The Long Bolsprit & Sliding Keels has already produced strong Symptoms of Seizure among the Devotees of Fresh Water sailing” he wrote proudly home.  One of the other Manx boats, he noted, was “the Second Best in the Lake. Modesty prevents my saying who bears the Bill.” [5]  Peggy kept on racing and winning on Windermere until September had set in.

There had, of course, been other small-boat races before the clash on Windermere, and the boats of Quayle and Curwen were not what we would call a dinghy today.  But the Windermere race of  1796  remains significant – not only is it the earliest small-boat event that we have significant information about, but it may have been the first race for an open centreboard craft.

Curwen kept on running regattas on Windermere; the poet Robert Southey’s complaint about the food he arranged one year is probably the earliest known whinge about regatta catering.  He won the regatta of 1813 with a boat that had the first iron keel on the lake; earlier boats commonly used stones for ballast.[6]

Quayle, too, kept on sailing and developing Peggy.  After the rough trip back to the Isle of Man (when one of the other Manx skippers was reduced to bailing with his wig box) he raised her topsides.[7]  Like dinghy sailors of today, he seems to have fretted when work kept him from sailing; on 26 June 1803 he wrote to his brother “ ‘I have had no Time to get the Boat down yet but have been kept as busy a [Trap Wive] in the B [ank]’.  Millions of dinghy sailors have echoed his complaint since that day.  He kept up his interest in centreboards, meeting and corresponding with Schank and rejoicing when the inventor praised his understanding of the concept.[9]

Towards the end of his life, Quayle entombed Peggy inside her custom-made boatshed in the tiny harbour of Douglas. Over time, the boathouse was walled up and the tiny dock outside filled in. In 1820, Curwen got sick of losing races to his new neighbour, and he left Margaret to rot.

But that was not the end of the story for Peggy and Margaret.  In 1935, the walls around Peggy’s little berth were torn down to reveal that Peggy and her gear still stood there, complete down to drinking cups made of coconuts and in astonishingly good condition. Even the bills for her construction remain in the Manx National Archives, complete down to details such as the cost of “halliards”, tar brushes and the weekly pay sheets, topped by “Thomas Kelly” and a boy.

Peggy, damp but snug inside the boathouse where the stayed for over two centuries.

Remarkably, Peggy was not the sole survivor of the Winderemere regatta of 1796.  In 1952, G.H. Pattison of the Windermere Steamboat found the boat that is believed to be Margaret being used as a chicken shed in the town of Southport. And so, amazingly, the two leading ladies of the very first recorded centreboarder regatta can still be seen today.

The hull that is believed to be John Christian Curwen’s Margaret, built in nearby Whitehaven in 1780. Photograph from https://www.lakelandarts.org.uk

Peggy’s construction looks lighter and more efficient than that of Curwen’s Margaret and other boats of her day. The red painted timber around the gunwales appear to be the extra planks that was fitted to raise her freeboard after the rough return from racing on Windermere. Pic from the Peggy of Castletown blogspot.

Margaret is little more than a bare shell [10] but Peggy is almost complete; still bearing her 18th century paint and fittings. Today, Peggy is in the middle of a painstaking long-term restoration project.  After six years of planning and preparation, in 2015 she was gently lifted out of the boatshed in which she spent two centuries and taken to a preservation facility. The slow story of Peggy’s meticulous restoration can be seen at http://peggy-of-castletown.blogspot.com.au/

After over 200 years, Peggy is inched out of her boatshed. Pic from the Peggy of Castletown blogspot.

But the race on Windermere seems to have been a false dawn as far as open centreboarders went. The racing sailors of the era stayed with faithful to long fixed keels and yachts. The centreboarders that raced on the Thames’ Cumberland fleet in this period seem to have been fully-decked yachts, complete with full decks and cabins – nothing like a dinghy.[11]  The open centreboard racing boat seems to have been buried for half a century with Peggy. When it was revived, it was an ocean away.

The men who kickstarted centreboarder racing around 1850 probably never heard of Peggy. But even after she had been entombed in her boathouse for four decades, the little schooner’s influence may have played a part in taking the centreboarder all the way to the other side of the world. And that’s another story, for another post.

[1] Much of this information on Peggy is from the site of the Castletown municipal site; see   http://www.castletown.org.im/heritage/nm_peggy.html

[1a]

[2] “The Worthies of Cumberland” Vol 1, Henry Lonsdale MD, 1867, p 66.

[3] “Meetings with Mature Ladies”, Wooden Boat May/June 1986, p 17.

[4]  A letter written by Quayle from London in August 1795 (MS 02414 C in the Manx National Archives) indicates that there was at least one other boat with three sliding keels under construction in the area. This may have been the Columbus, owned by the Commodore of the Cumberland Fleet, the first modern sailing club.

 [6] The Worthies of Cumberland” Vol 1, Henry Lonsdale MD, 1867.

[7] Details from Nixon, p 20, and the Friends of the Manx National Heritage website.

[9] Manx National Archives, reference MS 02415 C. Further references to meetings with Schank are in MS 02421 C.

[10] Details of Margaret were taken from WM Nixon’s article, p 21.

[11] This seems to have been the fourth boat christened Cumberland and owned by the Commodore of the Cumberland Fleet, the first sailboat racing club. So far I have been unable to track down a date for her launch.

The real story of Amaryllis and the first racing catamarans

An enlarged “replica” of Amaryllis was made in 1933 for a president of the vast Chrysler Corporation. It was later placed on display in the Herreshoff museum.

There aren’t many myths in sailing that are better known than the fictional tale of the ban of Nat Herreshoff’s famous catamaran Amaryllis in 1876.  The most common version of the fairytale says that Amaryllis swept the fleet in a New York Yacht Club race, causing the stuffy big-boat establishment to ban catamarans from racing and setting the cause of multis back for decades. The reality is very different.

Herreshoff’s brilliant invention broke onto a regional sailing scene that was bursting with more innovation than sailing has ever seen before or since.  The sailors of north-eastern USA had introduced international racing in the early 1850s with the schooner America and the little centreboarders Truant and Una.  They pioneered ocean racing when the New York schooners Vesta, Henrietta and Fleetwing raced across the Atlantic in 1866. They had popularised the centreboarder and developed beamy, lightweight “skimming dishes” that carried vast rigs. By 1876 the indigenous New York centreboarder had reached its extreme with the vast schooner Mohawk, which spread her sails 235 feet from bowsprit to mizzen end but had a hull only 6’6” deep and capsized in New York harbour, killing five people including her owner and his wife.  In the same year, a sailor from America’s north-east (Alfred Johnson) became the first person to singlehand across the Atlantic in the tiny 20’ dory Centennial.  A little over a decade later, sailors of the region were to pioneer the lightweight racing sailing canoe, complete with fully-battened roachy rig, hiking plank and hollow masts.  They had even experimented with catamarans decades before – John C Stevens, the lion of the New York sailing establishment, creator of the New York Yacht Club and head of the syndicate that owned the schooner America, had spent thousands of dollars on the unsuccessful sailing cat “Double Trouble” in the first half of the century.

When Amaryllis was launched, New York’s small-boat racing scene was dominated by the sandbaggers. Ranging from about 20 to 30 feet in length, the sandbaggers were developed from the beamy centreboard oyster-fishing boats that were worked and moored on the shallows of New York Harbour.  Over the previous two decades the sandbaggers had evolved to carry vast rigs that stretched fore-and-aft over twice the length of the hull, and were balanced by paid crews who dragged movable ballast sandbags full of gravel to windward each tack.

Although they were the crack racers of their day, in many ways the sandbaggers remained true to their workboat roots.  As government studies of the time and modern museum curators both noted, many of the racing sandbaggers had been built as workboats, and some were to return to oyster dredging when their racing days were over. The sandbaggers were, in effect, like supercharged monster trucks.

The close racing and big prizes attracted both working watermen and rich amateurs.  This was a scene where bluebloods of high society like Adrian Iselin raced hard against professional gamblers and immigrant working men, where vast sums were gambled on match races and knives and guns were used to settle protests. Nothing could be further from the myth of a conservative sailing scene ruled by reactionaries than New York small-boat racing of the 1870s.

The famous race that Amaryllis won in 1876 was not held by the New York Yacht Club, or any other club. It was held under the auspices of the United States Centennial Commission, and run by a special committee of members from clubs other than the NYYC.[1] The cash prizes that were normal at the time were absent (as were many of the big boats) but the event stirred so much enthusiasm that several new sandbaggers were launched specifically for the regatta.

Amaryllis raced on the second day of the regatta. The events that day was restricted to boats rating 15 tons and under according to the NYYC rating rule – a rule that was could not measure a catamaran fairly.[2] Sailboat racing was still young, but sailors had already realised that they only way to get good and fair competition was to break the entries into separate classes based on size and type.  Even among the smaller classes, where many boats could be rigged as either a catboat (mainsail only) or as “jib and main” sloops, the two rigs were normally raced in separate classes. “All-in” events, where widely separate designs raced all together, seem to have been basically unknown in those days.

Amaryllis’ fleet was broken into a class for small cabin yachts; a class for boats under small “working sails”; and two classes full of sandbaggers. The bigger sandbaggers included legendary racers like the 28 foot Suzie S.  The 25 foot long Amaryllis was in the smaller class where she faced the champion Pluck and Luck, sailed by Jake Schmidt. Although the four classes raced over the same course, there were two separate starts and no overall prize.

There were no class rules in Amaryllis’ day. It wasn’t just that they hadn’t been invented yet; there wasn’t really much need.  Decades of development had stereotyped the sandbaggers into the 19^th century equivalent of a tight restricted or box rule class. As authorities like sailing historian Howard Chappele noted, they all followed the same style of vertical bow and stern, massive beam, slack bilges, deep vee sections and a huge low-aspect rig.  There was also no one to create class rules; there was no inter-club association, no national body, and no class associations.  In the informal racing scene of the time, regattas were normally held according to the individual rules of each organising club or committee.

As one of the few out-of-town entries, Herreshoff’s cat was an outsider in more ways than one.  Some of the racers were already aware of her speed, but according to the contemporary yachting writer and authority Captain Coffin, many in the fleet laughed at the odd-looking “double boat”. The cynics must have felt justified in the early part of the race. Back in 1876 boats were not timed from the sound of the starting gun, but from the time they actually crossed the start line. Amaryllis was one of the last to start, and in the light winds and flukes of the first few legs she showed little pace. By the first mark she had lost three minutes on the class leader, Pluck and Luck.  She lost even more time on the beat back when she had to tack and “being slow in stays” (to quote both Coffin and Herreshoff himself) lost five minutes more.  One little puff then sent her flying past about a dozen boats, but even two marks later she was still slower than Pluck and Luck and the big boats.

It was only in the second half of the race when the wind picked up that Amaryllis showed her true paces. While the sandbaggers struggled to stay upright, “the Amaryllis began to develop the wonderful speed that she possesses, and she fairly flew along the Long Island shore, passing yacht after yacht as if they were anchored..”  In the words of the enormously experienced Captain Coffin, Amaryllis could “justly claim to be the fastest thing of her inches under canvas that floats, and it is doubtful if there are any steamers of her size that could out-speed her in a straight reach with the wind abeam.”

Despite her slow start Amaryllis came home in 3h 19m 32s, seven minutes ahead of the next boat, the famous 27’ sandbagger Sophie S, and a massive 20m in front of Pluck and Luck which has lost almost 10 minutes with broken gear.  As Amaryllis crossed the line, she was “saluted by guns from the yachts that were lying at anchor, and the excursion steamers screeched their loudest in honour of her victory”.[3]

It wasn’t only the sirens that screeched.  The captain of the Clara S screeched in protest too, protesting that Amaryllis was “neither a yacht nor a boat.”  The World reported that “it was the general opinion that the protest came too late, and should have been made before the start. Had it been, there is little doubt that the judged would have barred her out.”[4]  The committee ruled Amaryllis out of the event, arranging that instead of the first place diploma Amaryllis would receive “a diploma and a certificate that she had attained the highest speed ever made by a vessel of her length”.[5]

Was the committee wrong to disqualify Amaryllis? It wasn’t the way we’d handle things today, but we have the advantage of 150 years of experience in organising sailing races and still even in the 2000s, classes as innovative as Moths still retrospectively ban boats built to the existing rules.[6]  The Centennial Regatta organisers had no ISAF rulebook, no precedent and no Notice of Race or class rules to guide them. Even at the time Captain Coffin called it a “curious” decision, but just a few years later another committee reacted the same way when an unusual local mono, a sharpie with her cat-ketch rig and long “leaning planks”, was disqualified on similar grounds after winning a similar event – proof that post-races disqualifications were not restricted to cats.

Were the committee the bigoted reactionary snobs they are often painted as? There’s no evidence for that notion, and some against it. When the committee disqualified Amaryllis they took the prize from Herreshoff, the educated descendant of an Imperial courtier, and handed to the immigrant hatmaker, saloon keeper and boatbuilder Jake Schmidt of Pluck and Luck.  At least one of the race committee was later invited to act as judge in catamaran class races.

These days there’s a tendency to romanticise the lawless side of the sandbagger era; to fantasise that drawing a gun on a race judge or punching the race committee was a healthy alternative to the modern system of formal protests. It seems a tad hypocritical, then, to spend 140 years complaining because one protest in that environment didn’t match up to modern notions of procedural fairness.

One man never seemed to have complained. “It made little difference to Mr. Herreshoff” wrote Captain Coffin.  Captain Nat had made his point, and as the Herreshoff noted later, “some yachtsmen saw the joke was one themselves and cried shame on the protesters.” [7] [8]

Amaryllis was the sensation of the regatta, and the press were loud in their praise for the “fastest craft in the world”. Despite all the publicity, other cats were slow to hit the water.  The delay had me puzzled for years. Perhaps the claims of bias were true, I thought; perhaps there was stubborn resistance to the brilliance of Herreshoff’s design. The truth is very different, and it is revealed by Nat Herreshoff’s own pen. “During the summer of 1876 I had many applications for a description and plan of the Amaryllis, to all of which I turned a deafened ear” he later wrote in the Herald. “I chose to wait until such a time when I could faithfully lay before the public a full account of the Amaryllis and my ideas on double boats generally, ideas which had some practical basis and proved by actual experiment.”

Once Herreshoff had laid his account before the public, he took a few months leave from his day job and settled down to feed the demand for his amazing new invention.  “I got leave of absence from Corliss Steam Engine Co. for 3 months in summer of 1877, and started a trial business of building four, at contract price of $750 apiece” he recalled to his son Francis decades later. “I gave my time and there was no shop rent or overhead, and so came out just even. They should have been $1100 or $1200.” [9]

The rich and influential sailing men were at the front of the queue for Herreshoff’s cut-price speedsters.[10] Keenest of them all was Fred Hughes, Commodore of the New Jersey Yacht Club, who bought a series of cats; first Amaryllis, then Nat’s second cat Tarantella, Jessie and Cyclone.[11]

Duplex, built by Herreshoff for the treasurer of England’s Corinthian Yacht Club – one of many influential men who bought a cat. Thanks to poster Blackburn from BoatDesignForum.

It didn’t take long for Herreshoff to stake the cats’ place on the racing scene. “We double-boat fellows must have a club and an annual regatta” he wrote.[12]  As his son Francis wrote years later, all that he wanted for cats was their own events; even the creator of the racing cat didn’t believe that they should race against the monos. Nat himself stated clearly that he did not believe that cats would take over the sailing world, writing that he “did not mean, however, to infer that the catamaran will displace our ordinary style of yachts; it is an addition only to our resources.”[13]

As it turned out, the cat owners didn’t need their own club – far from being against cats, the clubs and regatta committees tried hard to attract them to their races. In July 1877 it was announced that the catamaran racing era would start when Newburgh Bay YC offered the fledgling cat fleet a class in their annual regatta on August 1.  The cats would, of course, race in a separate class to the sandbaggers; just as today the cats, windsurfers and kitefoils very rarely race together. As the cat fan Captain Coffin wrote, “it is clearly unfair to race boats of radically different models, and built for entirely different purposes, against each other.” [14]

In typical fashion, the NBYC divided the monos into Open and Cabin yacht classes and restricted sails or boom length, but started all the classes together. [15] Herreshoff’s new cat Tarantella was soon so far ahead that she could not be timed around the mark. In front of a crowd of 15,000 on docks and steamboats she finished in a shade under two and a half hours, half an hour ahead of the fastest sandbagger.[16] Hughes’ Amaryllis came in behind three monos; the third cat did not finish. [17]

The Newburgh Bay event was just one of a long string of events run for cats over the next few years.  The Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Long Island, Atlantic, and Empire yacht clubs all ran catamaran classes in their races.   Far from being shunned, the catamarans received special encouragement; the Brooklyn YC allowed cats free entry into its 1878 regatta.[18] In 1880 the first regatta for the fledgling and short-lived National Yachting Association of the US put on special efforts to attract the cats, although only three turned up.[19]

Three catamarans in New York harbour, 1878.

The cats also spread further south, to New Orleans, where a small class raced for several years. Out at the Great Salt Lake, a separate breed of cats had been springing up independently at the same time as Amaryllis.[20]

A roll call of the names of catamaran owners shows that they were not an underclass or rejects. They included affluent businessmen and the leaders of at least three powerful clubs. These were not men who would have meekly agreed to any ban.

And how did the New York Yacht Club, the oldest and most powerful club in America, react to the cats? Did they lead a ban as the myth claims? The answer is clearly and simply, no.  When one member, Anson Stokes, announced that he was building a cruising catamaran and intended to race it in NYYC events some members objected, partly on the eminently logical grounds that the NYYC rating rule of the day didn’t allow for cats and gave them such a low rating that they would be invincible. When the matter came to a vote under club rules, some members noted that the NYYC’s revered founder of the club had been a cat pioneer himself. Old members advised that “double hull boats were no new thing in its history”. Stokes and other members, like innovative designer Robert Center, said that they would be happy if Stokes’ cat Nereid was put in its own class.  After a tied vote, the committee decided that catamarans were legal in the NYYC. Nereid raced for a time without success under a modified rating system until her structural problems led her to be abandoned on a beach. Her career is further proof that the claim that cats were banned is a complete myth.

The evidence is clear.  Cats were not banned; in fact they were encouraged to race as a separate class, just as Captain Nat himself wanted. The cats appear to have been received more warmly than the other radical boats of the day such as the British deep-keel cutters that caused a furious controversy, or the sailing canoes which appeared on New York harbour to the jeers of other sailors and ended up creating their own clubs and regattas.

For the next few years cats formed a regular part of new York racing.  Herreshoff and the New York cat sailors, including other boatbuilders like Thomas Fearon and “Buckshot” Roahr, settled down to prove that the cat was faster, drier and safer than any small mono of the day. They may also have exaggerated a bit; “tip her over you cannot” wrote Herreshoff in 1876, but tip them over they did. [21] In 1877 Hughes drove Amaryllis over in a pitchpole, and as early as September 1878 a cat of unknown build had sprung a leak and capsized, her crew of five luckily being saved when they were losing hope.[22]  But the cat sailors spent most of their time racing and challenging anything they could.  When Hughes bought Tarantella he offered to match any steam yacht’s time over a ten miles course.[23]  In July 1883, Hughes and his latest cat Jessie challenged a cyclist and a horseman to a race from New York to Stony Creek.  The cyclist didn’t turn up; the cat won by miles; the rider lost by miles and was charged with cruelty to his horse.

But their numbers were always small.  The biggest race, in 1884, seems to have had only half a dozen entries. [24] Coffin, the dean of yachting journalists and a convinced cat fan, could not understand why they had not become more popular. “Ten years have passed since the Amaryllis came and conquered, and yet there are comparatively few catamarans, not above a score, I think, in the whole of the United States.”[25]

So why did the New York cats fade out? Partly it was down to Herreshoff’s business moving into other areas. “I joined my brother John at beginning of 1878 and was too busy building steamers – large and small, to bother with the catamarans” he explained to his son Francis many years later. [26] “Feuron (sic) continued building for a few years”. [27]  Another report assumed that it was because the cost of a cat was 50% higher than an ordinary boat. [28] As Francis recounted years later, Nat thought that it was impossible to build a small and cheap cat with 1800s technology; “his opinion was that a catamaran less than 30’ long was not very practical because the hulls have to be so long and narrow of a high speed length ratio is to be achieved.”[29]   Nat’s other son, Sidney DeW. Herreshoff, designed some cats himself but believed that they were “far too expensive for the average person to build.”[30] Lewis Herreshoff, Nat’s brother, later wrote that “this aquatic marvel was not destined to become popular; the boats required special skill in their management, and were best calculated for an afternoon’s sail in smooth, sheltered water.”  Another multi fan who watched the New Jersey fleet noted that they were very slow when tacking.

In at least two other places, cats raced for a while and then faded away. A history of the Southern Yacht Club says that the cats of New Orleans were “undoubtably very fast, but were very unwieldy and soon dropped out of favour” partly because of their lack of cruising accommodation.[31]  Down in Australia, where a cat created by Henry Murray had shown some potential on a tiny lake in the goldrush city of Ballarat as early as 1870, some small and crude cats started racing on tiny Albert Park Lake in the city of Melbourne in 1887. It quickly became obvious that they could not race properly against monos, and soon half a dozen cats formed their own class. Once again, the class faded away within a year or two, apparently because their slow and uncertain tacking meant they could not sail properly on the tiny lake, and their construction was probably not up to the rough waters of the nearby Port Phillip Bay.  Over in San Francisco, cats imported from the east and locally built versions raced for a while, and once again they soon vanished. The French magazine Le Yacht had published plans of a Herreshoff catamaran in 1879; “this kind of craft should ‘take’ on the waters of the Seine” noted Forest and Stream magazine’s with approval.[31]  Like the British cats of the time, they failed to take off. The Christchurch Yacht Club in New Zealand, raced mainly “proas” for a while before switching to scow-type monos.

Perhaps the real problem the cats faced was the same one that killed their old rivals, the sandbaggers. By the late 1800s, the day of the expert professional racer and complicated racing machines was almost over.  The new ethos was encouraging cheaper, simpler, slower boats that amateurs could handle.  Boats like the over-rigged “skimming dishes”, extreme sailing canoes, sandbaggers, Raters and other racing machines was fading away.  Sailors were moving into one-designs, cruiser/racers and ‘knockabouts’ with snug rigs, and the lovers of high speed, trends and leading edge technology were turning to steam launches, naptha launches, automobiles and bicycles.  Decades later, Nat Herreshoff himself was to write that the era of the fast sailboat was over; those who wanted speed would find it in automobiles, bicycles and outboard powerboats.  Even Nat turned away from cats; although in 1877 he had written that he was  “sure that half a day’s sail in the Amaryllis would spoil any one for the old fashioned sailing”, within a couple of years he had returned to monos, and continued sailing them even after he had retired.

Sadly, when the New York cats died, the truth about their success died with them. Instead there grew a myth that denigrated everyone. Today many who claim that cats were banned use a single sentence by L Francis Herreshoff as their evidence.  Francis wasn’t a witness to the end of the cats; he wasn’t even born until 1890. He gives no reference for his claim. The documentary evidence is clear that he is wrong; the cats got their own class in the major events, just like every other type of boat did.

There are some who have clung so long to the myth of a ban that they refuse to look a at the documentary evidence, and refuse to believe that Francis was capable of making an error.  But Francis also wrote that a cat’s “average speed is not as great as some single hulled boats with less wetted surface for their sail area and more useful room” and that that an “all-round improved catamaran that is dry and safe seems to be very expensive indeed.”  People can’t have it both ways – either Francis was capable of making errors, or cats are slow. The evidence all points one way – Francis made a simple minor error when he wrote that the cats were banned from all the major events, and in the days before newspapers were digitised and put on the web, his readers could not easily find out the truth.

An unidentified catamaran.  Judging by the design it’s clearly not a Herreshoff and not like the only Fearon boats I’ve seen. Nathaniel L. Stebbins photographic collection from Historic New England

The myth that has grown up around Amaryllis denigrated the sailors and clubs of New York, by falsely labelling them as luddites instead of the innovators they were. It denigrated the cat sailors, by assuming that if there had been an attempt to ban them they would have buckled, instead of having the initiative to create their own races like the ocean racers, the canoe sailors, the sharpie sailors and others did. And it denigrated the rest of the world, by implying that a ban in one city would have stopped cats from developing in Cowes, Sydney, Auckland, Hamburg and other sailing centres.

The truth is clear and much happier. The brilliant early catamarans were not banned. They were not discriminated against.  They were a great design that attracted support from many of the established sailors of the day. But the technology of the day meant that they were too wet, twitchy and expensive to attract many people and to achieve critical mass. And in the end, not many sailors are attracted by pure speed; just like most sailors today sail Lasers, yachts, F18s, Darts and Hobies instead of foiling kites, the sailors of the late 1800s preferred cruiser/racers and knockabouts.  There was no conspiracy, no powerplay; it was just that fun on the water is not measured by knots alone

 

 

[1] The committee was John M. Sawyer of the Brooklyn YC, which ran cat races the next season; O.E. Cromwell and M Roosevelt Schuyler of the Seawanhaka YC; and Sidney W. Knowles of the Atlantic Yacht Club, which also offered cat racing the next season.

[2] The New York Herald., June 24, 1876, Page 6.

[3]  “A Yachting Wonder. Sudden Development of the Fastest Craft in the World. The Reveille, Susie B., Amaryllis and Victoria Win the Second Centennial Regatta.” The World, June 24, 1876, p. 2.

[4] “A Yachting Wonder. Sudden Development of the Fastest Craft in the World. The Reveille, Susie B., Amaryllis and Victoria Win the Second Centennial Regatta.” The World, June 24, 1876,Sudden

[5] New York Herald, June 25 1876 p 7

[6] The Moths banned the Burvill tri-foiler, the first practical foiling Moth, judging it to be a multihull.  It contined a long tradition; in the 1970s they banned windsurfers after at least one board had been built and raced as a Moth, and before that they had banned catamarans and sliding planks. The fact that such an innovative class bans boats after they have been built to existing rules illustrates that Amaryllis’ disqualification from one race is not significantly different from modern practise.

[7] http://library.mysticseaport.org/manuscripts/CPageImage.cfm?PageNum=23&BibID=35258&Box=16&Folder=12

[8]Outing, Oct Vol 9, p 17.

[9] Letter of Nat Herreshoff to Francis Herreshoff, May 7 1929    http://library.mysticseaport.org/manuscripts/CPageImage.cfm?PageNum=109&BibID=35258&Box=17&Folder=5

[10] Autobiographical note “from the life of Nathanial Greene Herreshoff”, Mystic Seaport Museum Library. http://library.mysticseaport.org/manuscripts/CPageImage.cfm?PageNum=25&BibID=35258&Box=16&Folder=12

[11] Spirit of The Times; Oct 20 p 356  1883.  The article shows how highly Captain Coffin, the Spirit’s influential sailing writer, praised the cats.

[12] Herald article by Nat

[13] 1877 article

[14] The World, June 24 1876, p 4 .  Captain Coffin, a true cat fan, was the yachting reporter for The World and one assumes he either wrote the editorial or had some influence on it.

See also Jan 14 1892 for another explanation about why a later set of sailors realised that racing dissimilar boats was useless.

[15] New York Herald, July 30 1877 p 7

[16] The next season she finished the important New York Bay regatta half an hour ahead of the top sandbagger, which took four hours.

[17] NYH Aug 2 1877 p 8. . FN  The three cats were not eligible for the overall corrected time prize, which the 46 monos entries fought for under a time-for-length rule. We still can’t create an equitable rating rule to score multis against monos and at the time there was so little experience in cats that there would have been even less chance. It can also be noted that the world’s biggest cat race, the Round Texel, has recently allowed windsurfers to race – but even when the windsurfers beat all the cats home as in      , the boards were not counted in the main event for line honours or handicap rankings. The cat sailors of 2016 are therefore behaving in the same manner as the mono sailors of 1877. Sadly, although the NBYC had started the world’s first cat race, no boats turned up for the cat class that was offered at the club’s next annual regatta.

[18] The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 12 Mar 1878 p 3

[19] The NY Times of August 10 noted that the organisers specifically tried to encourage cats and gave them lower entry fees and more prize money (in in comparison to their fleet size).

[20] See for example Outing, Vol 29

[21] New York Heraldn, April 16, 1877 p 5. Another paper (The Sun, Sep 26 1882 ) reported that they could not capsize.

[22] NY Herald Sep 15 1878 p 11

[23] NY Herald Sep 5 1878 p 8

[24] SoTT 1884 p 283  reporting on Sep 18 race

[25] Outing 1886 Nov Vol IX p

[26] Letter of May 9 1926.

[27] http://library.mysticseaport.org/manuscripts/CPageImage.cfm?PageNum=9&BibID=35258&Box=17&Folder=1

[28] (The 1884 1884 p 283

[29] Letter of March 7 1947     http://library.mysticseaport.org/manuscripts/CPageImage.cfm?PageNum=75&BibID=35258&Box=3&Folder=1    Note that there is a reference to French planing hull catamarans.

Although Francis designed one catamaran, he was not generally a fan; “The cats of the 1800s may have been fatally handicapped by the materials of the day.  “They certainly are capable of high speed at times” wrote Francis years later. “However, it is my impression that“They certainly are capable of high speed at times” wrote Francis years later. “However, it is my impression that their average speed is not as great as some single hulled boats with less wetted surface for their sail area and more useful room.”  To make an “all-round improved catamaran that is dry and safe seems to be very expensive indeed on account of the many special fittings that are required, and their great width rather interferes with their usefulness around harbours where many yachts are anchored.” (ibid)”  To make an “all-round improved catamaran that is dry and safe seems to be very expensive indeed on account of the many special fittings that are required, and their great width rather interferes with their usefulness around harbours where many yachts are anchored.” (ibid)

[30] Letter to of Francis Herreshoff to Paul R Fenner , Jan 8 1947, ibrary.mysticseaport.org/manuscripts/CPageImage.cfm?PageNum=10&BibID=35258&Box=3&Folder=1

30b – “Yachting in America”, Lewis Herreshoff, in “Yachting, Vol II”, Badminton Library, London, 1894

30c – Forest and Stream Feb 3 1887

[31] Outing vol 31 p 557

Forest and Stream, 1879, p 274

Cyclopedia of New Zealand, 1903

SailCraft Pt 1.8: “Skidding over the water” – Enter the planing hull

After their defeat by the slim American canoes in 1886 the British quickly followed the Americans in dumping their heavy centreboards and ballast, moving out of the cockpit, and starting to hike. Although at least one modern writer has claimed that the British resisted the change to the “deck position”, that was probably just one more example of someone falling for the myth of the conservative sailor. There is no real evidence of any such factor.  Once they got over the inevitable teething issues, the British canoe racers found that sailing from on deck was a revelation in performance and, more importantly, enjoyment and immersion in sailing. “For genuine exhilaration….there is no sailing in the world to equal the deck position of a 30-inch canoe” enthused one English sailor. “Every pulsation of the craft, every flutter of the sail, every streak of wind simply means that the body must act in response and unison; it means, in short, that the hand, the eye, and every pound of the body shall work with the wind in propelling the boat….in this position a man cannot help feeling that he is a part of the machine which moves at his will, but by the force of the wind…..We can carry more sail, therefore, go faster, and enjoy sailing more on deck than before…out of fifteen or sixteen canoes we have recently been sailing with at Hendon, at least fourteen have adopted the deck position, and the unanimous opinion is much in accord with what we have expressed here.”[1]

Although this picture of “cruising canoes” racing on the Royal Canoe Club’s course at Teddington was taken in 1923, it shows how impractical the slender American-style sliding seat canoes would have been on the narrow confines of the upper Thames near London.

In 1887, Stewart underlined the change in style by winning the Royal Canoe Club’s premiser prize, the Challenge Cup, in what was called a “Pescowic style” canoe, Charm.  [2] [3]  Although they were happy to use the deck position, the British did institute class rules to maintain the portability that had always been central to the canoe’s appeal;  “our American cousins taught us the power gainable by sitting out to windward, we saw the danger that that position would invoke huge sails and deep wedge bodies and lead or heavy plates” wrote Baden Powell “so we limited sail area….with sail area limited and length limited, beam, centerplate and keel limits are of very minor importance, and could with advantage be simplified in the rules so as to give greater freedom of model.”[4]

Charm

While the Brits took up the deck position with relish, it was a different story when they tried to take the next step and adopt the sliding seat. The first British canoe to adopt a sliding seat had an easy win in a race in 1892. But the sliding seat was (and still is) almost impossible to use in the gusts and lulls of the Royal Canoe Club’s home waters at Teddington, where the River Thames is only about 75m/yards wide and lined by trees.  The changeable English winds meant that the other American innovation of the day, the un-reefable “standing rig”, was also unsuited to the British racing courses. Dixon Kemp felt that even on “Hendon Lake” (now known as Welsh Harp reservoir) nearby it would only be “a peculiar day” when the wind was steady enough for the “unreefable” American standing rig.[5]  Reports of the early canoe races are full of mentions of calms interspersed by squalls strong enough to lay boats flat. The evidence indicates that the sliding seat canoe was not widely adopted because it was simply impractical in the places the British were sailing at the time, not because the British were opposed to development.

Snake – one of the first two documented “planing sailboats”. Pic from Forest and Stream, Sept 28 1895. Note that this is labelled Snake II, but the text description of that boat indicates that Snake II had a transom stern and this pic and the plans below show a canoe stern.

The Royal Canoe Club responded by taking a different path. The club created the “A” and “B” classes, also known as the “cruising canoes”, which banned the sliding seat and instead relied on heavy centerboards and the skipper hiking from a 3’6” wide hull to balance 150ft2 of sail.[6]  “The sliding seat canoes, after nearly killing canoe sailing owing to the tricky acrobatic nature of their sailing, have been replaced by the RCC’s A and B class canoes” wrote the designer Linton Hope, a man who was no stranger to pushing the limits but also recognised where they lay.[7] “The Royal Canoe Club cruising canoe is very tightly restricted as to type and dimensions, so that it is impossible to degenerate into a useless eggshell type of a racing machine, such as those which have killed canoe sailing in America, and nearly killed it here before the advent of the present type.”[8]  The cruisers, wrote Linton Hope, revived the sport “when it was almost killed by the sliding-seat racing machine….A few of the racing-machine type of canoe are still in existence, but they have a very poor chance against the more modern cruiser when racing, whilst there is no comparison when it comes to pleasure sailing.”[9]

The creation of the “cruising canoes” and the RCC’s ban on the sliding seat may have led the way to one of the biggest leaps in small sailboat racing.  Because they could not rely on the sliding seat for sail-carrying power, the British canoe designers could not follow the Americans down the path of the ultra-slender hull that sliced through the water.  Instead they went down a different path, creating what may have been the first ancestors of the modern planing boat.

Tracing the development of the planing sailboat is a complicated business.  The concept is simple; a boat is “planing” when the movement of the hull pushes water down and in an opposite and equal reaction the hull is lifted up (a phenomenon known as “dynamic lift”) and effectively lifts the boat out of much of the drag created by its own bow and stern wave.  It gets harder to tie it down more closely.  The classic definition by the guru of planing hull dynamics, Dr Daniel Savitsky, is centred around powerboats and doesn’t seem to allow for any round-bilge hull to plane at all. Perhaps the first planing hull to be demonstrated (at least in model form) dates to the early 1870s, but the rocket-powered model was clearly not a useful inspiration for a sailing boat.

American scientist Dr Daniel Davitsky played a major role in unlocking the science of planing hulls. These diagrams of a planing surface show the dynamics at work. The spike in the pressure distribution near the ‘stagnation point’ at the front of the planing surface is significant, because it shows that most of the lifting force is generated near the bows of a planing hull, not near the stern as often thought.

Some naval architects classify a “planing hull” as one in which dynamic lift causes the hull’s centre of gravity to rise above its static point, but that’s impossible to measure in the real world.[10]  Many of the rules of thumb that sailors use, such as whether the boat is exceeding hull speed, are misleading – very narrow hulls like those of naval destroyers and classic catamarans, which dance to a different set of physical laws, can exceed hull speed without planing.  Whether the wake runs “cleanly” off the transom is also not a reliable measure; some heavy powerboats have a messy wake even at speed, and some craft have a clean wake even when moving slowly.

Even if we could arrive at a definition of “planing” that we could easily measure while sailing, the exact definition of “planing boat” remains murky. How often does any particular craft have to plane before we label it a “planing boat”?  If a boat can only plane in expert hands when running dead downwind before a gale under full sail, is it really a “planing boat”?  A boat that may routinely plane in a famously windy city like Wellington in New Zealand may not plane for months on a light-wind lake.  Even among planing craft there is a wide difference in feel and performance – long windsurfers, short windsurfers, 18 Foot Skiffs, Flying Dutchmen and International Canoes each have very different styles of planing. Before the Moths grew hydrofoils, even amongst the top designers and sailors there was a difference of opinion about whether they planed at all.

The proverbial mists of time and tyranny of distance make the search harder. Adding to the confusion is the language barrier.  We can search English language records, but maybe some long-lost Scandinavian or Arab designer created the planing boat centuries ago.  Certainly there are one or two detailed accounts of what seem to have been planing hulls in action in Asia and Australasia as early as the 1870s.  But neither of these types left their mark on history.  One certainly planed and the other may have, but both vanished without leaving a trace, and without influencing later generations.  As far as their effect on the development of the dinghy goes, they may as well never have existed.

But around the early 1890s, a small group near the the upper reaches of the Thames started to specifically design boats that were not just intended to plane, but also played a part in bringing the concept to the attention of the sailing world.  In the Victorian era the waters that run through the ancient university town of Oxford were home to a small community of sailors, apparently rather isolated from the hotbed of dinghy sailing that was developing further downstream near London.  In the 1880s “sailing-boats, whose wild career used to be a terror in former days to the throngs of rowers” had been banned around the rowing boathouse area near the centre of the ancient town and its famed spires, because of the risk of collisions with punts and rowing boats.[11]  The sailors of Oxford moved even further upstream where the river, traditionally known in this area as the Isis, flows past the ancient riverfront common of Port Meadow.  In this stretch the river is just 70m or yards wide, but the flat surrounding land and scanty tree cover would allow a fair breeze. It was here where Oxford don Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carrol, dreamed up the tale of Alice in Wonderland on a rowboat, and where “any day during term-time small centre-board boats may be seen making their way up past Godshow and on to Eynsham, while an occasional variation is afforded by a sail over Port Meadow when the floods are out.” [12]

The home of the planing sailboat? Above, “Oxford, Port Meadow from Medley Fields” by James Aumonier, 1880. Below, British Moths (a 1930s one design that fits into the International Moth rules) racing in 2012 at Port Meadow. With its tall rig, short hull and even shorter waterline, the British Moth is an exceptionally nimble boat that out-performs many bigger boats in the shifty and light winds of small inland waterways. From an outsider’s perspective, the fact that the British sail so enthusiastically on tiny waterways like this, and design boats that work in such narrow waters, seems like a combination of cause and effect. The fact that they love the sport so much causes them to sail anywhere; the fact that they design boats that they can sail anywhere (like the British Moth) means that sailing is so convenient that it’s easy to love. Lower pic from the Medley SC website.

The Oxford University Sailing Club was an unusual outfit for its time.  Unlike the other clubs of its day, it raced over winter and even through snow, sailing a course that had  a Z shape so that it could be squeezed into the river’s confines.  It was an unlikely club and location for a breakthrough in boat design, but from 1888 a family of boatbuilders started developing “sharpie-style” flat-bottomed hard chine canoes.  By 1890, reports in the sailing press made it clear that they were creating something new.  The report claimed that the sailing canoe Snake possessed “the extraordinary power of rushing over the water at ten or twelve miles an hour, probably more, without any wave-making apparently; only a wide smooth wake is seen astern. Yet at five or six miles an hour she makes waves like any other boat.”[13] Here is a description of a small planing hull in action, in a race, and a time that proves she was no one-way flyer. Another account of contemporary British canoes describes how water passing under a canoe’s fore sections “at high speed acts on them like a wedge, tending to lift the bows”. These passages leave little doubt that as early as 1890, the British had developed a boat that would plane.

Above, the Theo Smith “canoe yawl” Snake. Along with Shadow (below) she may the first planing sailboat in the Western hemisphere. Her deep Vee bow fades into very rounded mid and stern sections, which would have allowed her to develop planing lift even when heeled. These sections look like those of a 1960s Moth; in fact I had to edit this chapter because I mistook Snake’s sections for a Duflos or Mistral Moth!  John Hayward, writing in his book  Canoeing with Sail and Paddle (downloaded from the wonderful Dragonfly canoe site), noted that Snake had “flaring sides and broad side-decks, which makes her initial stability considerable, especially with two or three men sitting on the side-deck”.  He also noted that the Smith canoe yawls used only their mainsails when racing, probably to keep their sail area under the rating limits. NOTE – Forest and Stream labels the same plan and pics as “Snake II” in its September 28 1895 issue, although the information in the text indicates that Snake II had a transom stern. It is likely that they show the first Snake. 

 

The man who created Snake was Theo Smith, one of four boatbuilding brothers.  Unlike many other boatbuilders along the Thames, who relied on hand shaping their boats and left little trace, Theo and his brother Harry designed on paper and left some record of their creations, including a piece in Field and Stream magazines that recorded the development of the type that became known as the “Oxford Canoe Yawl” and the lines of another of his canoes, the hard-chine Shadow.[14]

Theo Smith’s words show that the development of the planing canoe was the product of specific development, rather than being a random accident.  “The Shadow is not, as some may suppose, the result of a “happy hit” in the way of design, but is rather the result of careful; original thought, based upon close observation of the performance of various types of boats of light displacement that have appeared on the river at Oxford” he wrote. “Although the first of the Oxford canoe-yawls she was preceded by several boats of the sharpie type, which were purely experimental, the first of these being the Yankee, followed by the catamaran Domino, the sloops Merlin and Skipjack, and the canoe Iris, boats which have in turn under favorable circumstances shown a remarkable pace. For instance, the Domino might have been seen careering over Port Meadows with about 12in. of water under her at a pace that could not be short of 10 to 15 miles an hour…. instances have been noted when the sharpies have gone apparently three times the pace of other boats in competition. By a peculiar adjustment of the surplus buoyancy and the displacement of the Oxford yawls have the faculty to a greater or less degree of “skidding” over the water, and not “wallowing” in it as most boats do. The same faculty has been attained even in the round-bodied boats, such as Wisp and Torpedo.”[14]

The lines of Snake and Shadow leave little doubt that they could have planed. Their rocker is flat over most of her length , with maximum rocker just 20% aft from the bow, and a long straight run aft – similar to the rocker line that a young designer from Cowes was to make into a trademark decades later. The round bilges of Snake develop a drooping chine at the stern – a feature that could encourage the water to break cleanly away at the stern instead of wrapping around the hull.  This detail appears to have been dropped from canoes for many years, returning only in the mid 20th century.

The Smith canoe yawls had an overhang aft, an extremely unusual feature in canoes, but as John Hayward noted it allowed them to “go about marvellously quickly”, which was a major advantage on the short courses the British canoes often inhabited, and also reduced their rating under the measurement rules of the era.

At around 18ft (5.5m) LOA these were very long canoes for their day, but they weighed a mere 100 to 150lb (45 to 68kg) without fittings and had big rigs and the capacity to take two or three crew to to hike the boat flat. [21] These are the sections and dimensions of a craft that can plane.

 

Snake’s contemporary, Shadow, image digitized by dragonflycanoe.com. The term “canoe yawl” is confusing, because these boats are much smaller than the canoe yawls developed soon afterwards and commonly known by that term. Like Snake, Shadow had the deepest point of her rocker well forward, with a flat run aft towards a stern that was extremely flat for its day. These are perhaps the earliest examples of what has become the classic planing hull rocker line. Notice the overhang at the stern. This reduced their measured waterline and therefore their rating, and also allowed the Oxford canoe yawls to turn very quickly compared to the contemporaries with deep sterns and skegs – a major advantage on the Royal Canoe Club’s confined home waters.

The Oxford canoe yawls proved that they were not just flat-water downwind fliers when Snake went to a British Canoe Association regatta and showed that she was “the fastest boat present” and at her best upwind.   The wide sidedecks and narrow cockpit of the Smith boats meant that they could heel right over and even capsize without taking on water, although (as Hayward notes) they did struggle a bit in breaking waves.[18][15]  [16][17]  Shadow, Spruce and Torpedo, “a thing shaped more like a cigar than anything” even took on the light-displacement Rater class yachts (around 8 to 9m/25 to 30ft LOA) on the Solent and South Coast. The little Torpedo “literally sailed around them (and over them and under them for the matter of that” it was said at the time.

The 18ft Spruce 1 was designed by her owner, Oxford sailor J Arthur Brand, along the lines of the Smith canoe yawls and built by Theo Smith. She was the first of the Oxford Canoe Yawls to race against the Half Rater yachts, proving very fast downwind and normally winning. Brand went on to have a major impact on the Raters. Pic from Sept 28 1895 Forest and Stream

The Smiths continued to develop the Oxford canoe yawl style with boats like Battledore, designed and built by Harry Smith as an “improved Sharpie type” with a “Sharpie middle and after body, and canoe bowed; that is, the angular bilge as it goes forward is rounded so that the angle rounds into a U, which again flattens into a V forward”.  The speed of development was shown when Battledore, sailed by R H Hinckley, won the 1892 Royal Canoe Challenge Cup in “a strong steady breeze”[19] by a full 16 minutes from Vanessa, which had been launched as Nautilus in 1883. [20]

The “improved sharpie” canoe Battledore, winner of the Royal Canoe Club’s Challenge Cup for 1892. Unlike America, the UK had no national canoe association that could set class rules for the whole nation. When she was sailing in events organised by other bodies such as the British Canoe Association, Battledore was sometimes raced with a four foot long sliding seat to add to the stability she gained from a deep 60lb centreboard.

Another test came in 1894, when American canoest W.W. Howard came to race in England. Howard won only one race in his tour of the UK. His slender, flat-rockered canoe Yankee was too hard to keep upright and too slow to tack to be competitive on the Thames, and he withdrew from the RCC’s Challenge Cup on the Thames just 30 minutes before the start, stating that “the conditions were not fit for an international race”[23]  In 1895 the modified Yankee returned to the fray and was notably fast downwind, but still unable to regularly vanquish the beamier British canoes on their home waters.  Although the Brits admitted that on flat and open waters the slim Yankee, with her bigger rig and sliding seat, would probably beat their own craft, she was just not competitive on the UK courses, which tended to be either narrow and fluky or windy and choppy. [24]

But just like the fine-lined American canoes, the Oxford canoe yawl was to fade away. Oxford was too far from the downstream and coastal areas where sailing was growing.  Harry Smith moved to Burnham on the East Coast, where his Burnham Yacht Building Company was noted for “continuous striving for improvement in performance and construction techniques” and he designed yachts like the Royal Corinthian One Design, which is still racing as a class 81 years later.[25] Theo Smith moved to the south coast and then to the Isle of Wight.  He continued to design and build boats and today his living heritage is his redesign of the West Wight Scow; not a flat scow like the American breed, but basically a modified pram yacht tender with a sail.  He never created another breakthrough boat, but his ideas lived on – none other than Uffa Fox described him as “that great master of the canoe yawl”.  Uffa used Smith’s idea of using rollers along the top of the centreboard case to support heavy centreboards instead of a normal pivot pin, and this idea was picked up by Sandy Douglass when he designed the Thistle and Flying Scot. So while Theo Smith’s writings and plans were destroyed after his death, one small part of his design skill survives in two of America’s most popular racing dinghies – and the fact that Uffa knew of his work and drew similar rocker lines makes one wonder how much of the Smith brothers’ pioneering work on planing hulls influenced Uffa’s hull shapes.

Scow sailing, British style. Since Edwardian times these little boats, described as pram dinghies with rounded bows, have been popular for racing and as yacht tenders in England’s yaching heartlands of the Solent and East Coast. Theo Smith’s redesign of the original scow into the West Wight Scow then became the basis for the Lymington and Burnham scow fleets.

Others, such as the brilliant Linton Hope, kept on developing “cruising canoes” after the Smiths left Oxford. They seem to have developed a rather more conservative shape than the Smith’s boats, but one which was at least as fast.  In 1900 Linton Hope wrote that “the modern cruising-class canoe can not only sail as well as the regular up-river racing boats of more than twice her size, but is far more suitable for confined waters, and can go equally well in the open waters of the Solent – where the up-river rater would not live five minutes – and even hold her own in fine weather with the small raters there.  She is also easy to carry on a yacht or to send by rail, as her small size enables two men to lift her, and her sea-going qualities make her suitable for harbor or estuary sailing, as well as for inland waters, and she has room for her owners to sleep aboard, and to carry his kit and stores, if he likes that form of amusement.”[26]

Bubble, one of the later “cruising canoes” created under the Royal Canoe Club rules. The “cruising canoes” were intended to be stable cruiser/racers, able to race on waters like the RCC’s tricky home course. Results and eyewitness accounts of craft like Bubble winning against narrow sliding seat canoes show that the beamier “cruising canoe” could often beat the “racing machines” on the fluky inland waters around London. Pic via the International Canoe class site.

But the number of people who like that form of amusement was dropping.  As early as 1891, “The Yachtsman” magazine had noted that “the popularity of the canoe seems to be on the wane in this country and the reason is not far to seek.  The canoe has departed from the state of beautiful simplicity in which it existed before the introduction of such ingenious, but complicated contrivances as drop rudders, sails with patent reefing gear, and heavy centre-plates; there is now but little to choose between the complexity of gear found in a 1 rater and that in what is called a first-class sailing canoe.”[27]  “Canoe racing is indeed nowadays confined to a small class of experts, who can afford to build mere racing machines, which are of little value for anything else” lamented one paper. Just as in America, only a tiny number of enthusiasts remained faithful to the racing canoe.[28] Cruising canoeists had caught the complication bug too….a cruising canoe competition went to a sailor who crammed a bedstead, wash stand, and tea tray into his canoe. Many ageing British canoe sailors moved into the little fully-decked double-enders that took over the name of “canoe yawl” from the lighter, smaller Smith type. To many sailors they were an ideal miniature yacht. To an old-time canoe sailor like Baden-Powell, they were “heavy, bungling, deep-drafted chungbungoes” that had no more right to the “canoe” label than a battleship, which also had a canoe stern. But even as the British and American racing canoe faded, many of its leading lights moved on to the next type of boat that was to become a pattern for today’s sailing – the Rater.

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References

[1] Quoted in “History of American Canoeing Vol III”, Outing for August, 1887, p 413. Even Baden-Powell, the established leader of British canoe racing, thought that the change to lighter boats, ballasted with crew weight rather than a heavy centreboard and lead shot, would make canoe sailing more popular “if extreme types be guarded against”; Forest and Stream Jan 27 1887.

[2] To quote Vaux in “The American Canoe Association, and its Birthplace”, Outing Vol 12 p 420, “a boat built in England on the American plan, and sailed in American fashion, won the Royal Canoe Club Cup in the spring of 1887—a great triumph for American ideas.”

[3] Outing Vol 10 p 486 Editors OpenWindo

[4] Forest and Stream Nov 27 1890 p 386.  RATING AT THIS TIME L x Sa/6000 =0.5

[5] Yacht and Boat Sailing p 519

Sliding seat – Forest and Stream March 24 1892 p 284

[6] In 1890      the sail area was 112 sq ft; Forest and Stream p 386 Nov 27 1890

[7] The Yachting Monthly, p 245

[8] CANOE SAILING ON THE THAMES. LINTON HOPE.
Country Life Illustrated (London, England), Saturday, October 27, 1900; pg. 538;

[9] CANOE SAILING ON THE THAMES. LINTON HOPE.
Country Life Illustrated (London, England), Saturday, October 27, 1900; pg. 538;

“Perhaps the first planing hull to be demonstrated”: This was the Polyspheric Boat, created by a British . See for example The Pacific School and Home Journal for 1879, page 235

” “at high speed acts on them like a wedge, tending to lift the bows”. The Yachtsman, May 16 1891

[11] AJ Church in “Isis and Thamesis”, quoted in “The golden age of the Thames, Patricia Burstall, London 1981

[12] Outing vol 12 p 400

[13] Cite.  Snake and her near sisters were called “Canoe Yawls”, which is a term normally used for much larger and heavier cabin boats designed for sailors looking for more comfort than a standard canoe.

[14] Thanks to John M Watkins for bringing this passage to my attention in the course of a thread he started about the history of the planing dinghy on the Wooden Boat magazine forum.

[14] Pcge 278-8 Sept 28 1895

[15] The Yachtsman, June 6 1891 p 139

[16] Hayward., Canoeing, p 15

[17] Forest and Stream

[18] The County Gentleman: Sporting Gazette, Agricultural Journal, and “The Man about Town” (London, England), Saturday, August 22, 1891; pg. 1145; Issue 1528.

[19] Hayward, Caneoing p 17 and Southampton Herald , June 25, 1892, Issue 4804, p.8, quoting The Field.

[20] Southampton Herald , June 25, 1892, Issue 4804, p.8, quoting The Field, and Canoeing p 17

[21] Hayward, Canoeing p 20

[22] Hayward, Canoeing p 22

[23] Morning Post , June 20, 1894, Issue 38073, p.3.  The Rudder Oct 1904 Vol15.   p544 mentions that two US canoes also failed to win the RCC Challenge Cup in 1904.

[24] Forest and Stream Aug 31 1895 p 192, and April 6 1895 p 280. Detailed accounts of the one race that Yankee won indicate that none of the top British boats turned up.

[25] Information on Harry Smith from “The Elegant Thames Skiff” by John Leather, Wooden Boat magazine April 1990 p 34.

[26] CANOE SAILING ON THE THAMES. LINTON HOPE.
Country Life Illustrated (London, England), Saturday, October 27, 1900; pg. 538;

[27] The yachtsman, Sept 3 1893 p 458

[28] The County Gentleman: Sporting Gazette, Agricultural Journal, and “The Man about Town” (London, England), Saturday, July 22, 1893 p 921

[29] The Encyclopedia of Sport. Nope, I don’t know what a chunbungoe is either.