The family name Herreshoff was undoubtedly the most resonant internationally in the period 1870 to 1950 as yacht designers. The Scottish Fifes were close, but the Yankee Herreshoffs painted with a much broader brush. They designed everything from fast steam launches, catamarans, iceboats, America’s Cup winners, to gemlike little knockabout cruising keel boats.
The founder of the dynasty was Nathanael (Nat) Greene Herreshoff (1848-1938), a graduate of MIT, who set up the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company in Bristol, Rhode Island in 1878 with his older brother John Brown Herreshoff, a blind boatbuilder. Nat rapidly became one of the prominent American designers of all kinds of racing and recreational craft. Nat kept himself at the top of the game with a series of innovative designs. From 1887 he had taken maximum advantage of the new, rapidly internationally accepted yacht rating rules, the Seawanhaka Rule, finally to produce the 71ft keel yacht Gloriana in 1891. She caused a sensation throughout the world.
This recognisably modern yacht incorporated all the master’s ideas, light displacement (for the time), long graceful ends with sweet lines, replacing the narrow, deep bluff-bowed ‘plank on edge’ cutters of the 1880s, which were designed to cheat the archaic ‘Thames Rule’ which penalised beam.
Gloriana was also highly influential on the Logan brothers in Auckland who designed and built their own 34ft Gloriana, a ‘2½ rater’, launching her in November 1892, a miniature version of Herreshoff’s yacht. She helped spark a renaissance in Auckland keel yacht racing, the so-called ‘Golden Age’ in which the Logan brothers and the Bailey brothers went headto-head, year after year, for nearly 10 straight years, with new and continually refined ‘raters’.
Nat went on to design and build some of the most iconic yachts of the time including the successful America’s Cup defenders Vigilant (1893), Defender (1895), Columbia (1899), Reliance (1903) and Resolute (1920), one after the other.
One of Nat’s sons, Lewis Francis Herreshoff (1890-1972,) gave himself a different brief in life. He was more of a bohemian turn of mind, hated the rigidity of class rules, particularly the various ‘Meter class’ rules that became the fashion in the 1920s and 1930s. He succumbed to a plea to design the 12-meter Mitena in 1935. The yacht was superb, but Herreshoff became terminally disillusioned with the Meter Rule and the mandatory Lloyds’ construction methods that he considered absurd.
He had always been charmed by the small cruising yacht and by the lifestyle that could go with it if there was purity of thought, not only about how the yacht was conceived and built, but also about how it was used. He was a philosopher as well as a yacht designer and went on to write several powerful books on the joys of yachting in which he paralleled the ways of thinking of designers like the Englishmen Albert Strange and Harrison Butler.
Albert Strange (1855 to 1917) designed for the waters of the Humber Estuary in England, mainly lightly built and rigged little yawls and ketches, usually double-ended, that an impecunious yachtsman could own and maintain at little expense. His designs struck a chord with many such people and were built all over the world.
Dr T. Harrison Butler (1871-1945) was an English ophthalmologist and a prominent amateur boat designer from 1909. He became well-known for his ‘metacentric shelf formula’, a concept whose mysteries tend to obscure the wholesomeness of his small keel yacht designs. In essence, Butler realised that he could achieve good balance and handling under sail if he could achieve, by careful design of the sections, equal buoyancy fore and aft as the boat heeled. Devonport yachting legend, Lincoln Wood, who had made a study of Butler’s designs and built his 22ft design Memory in 1930, would wryly say to newcomers on board, “Careful not to bark your shins on the metacentric shelf.”
L. Francis Herreshoff not only had the example of his famous father at Herreshoff Manufacturing Co but had a spell in the US Navy in World War I and worked for like-minded Starling Burgess before setting up on his own as a yacht designer in Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1926. He had little need of influence from the designs of either Strange or Butler but was certainly aware of them through the copious yachting magazine literature of the time, and he designed much the same sort of yachts.
His classic H28 of 1942 is typical of his approach to wholesome, good-looking, uncomplicated yacht design. In 1948 his book The Common Sense of Yacht Design was his manifesto. Taking a literary turn on the same theme, his 1956 book The Compleat Cruiser, The Art, Practice and Enjoyment of Boating, Herreshoff lays out his charming and compelling views on the philosophy of small yacht design, construction and use. There is strong influence from Izaak Walton’s The Complete Angler, or, the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, a treatise on the art and the philosophy of fishing of 1653.
A second theme comes from Miguel de Cervantes’ epic comic novel Don Quixote of 1605-15 in which the hero, deluded from reading books on chivalry, thinks he is a knight and famously ‘tilts at windmills’ which he sees as giants, astride Rozinante, his nag of a horse, accompanied by his squire Sancho Panza on a donkey. It is not hard to see a parallel with Herreshoff and the giants of the Meter Rule and Lloyds of London.
The Compleat Cruiser personifies three yachts and weaves tales of them cruising in company around the coast of New England in a series of parables on wholesome yacht design. Herreshoff’s first two protagonists are the little ketch Viator and the old-time Cape Cod catboat Piscator which are the names of the two storytellers in The Compleat Angler. We Kiwis will see a clear parallel between the centreboard catboat Piscator (‘fisher’ in Latin) and our own indigenous mullet boats, with which we have been blessed in great abundance.
In Manchester, south of Cape Anne, they row across to the canoe-yawl Rozinante at anchor, “although a narrow doubleender painted white, her dinghy was a black pram of liberal beam, named Sancho Panza… the owner of the Rozinante said: ‘Won’t you come aboard, sir? It will be a great honor to have a visit from the crew of the Viator… this is a small ship, sir, but the cockpit is large enough to seat us all comfortably, I hope.’” There follows a discussion amongst the crews of the three yachts concerning the virtues of the single-handed Rozinante. Goddard, the owner of Viator now says this, and I quote it in full because it is the essence of Herreshoff’s message to the reader: “I think Rozinante is a splendid name for a boat whose owner has an appreciation of romance, for I am sorry to say romance is a rare thing today and some people even laugh at it, whereas it used to be the incentive that carried people through fog, calm and tempest. It even seemed to make one enjoy the hardships which occur in cruising. But the modern cruiser has to have a vessel so cluttered up with mechanical gadgets and electrical devices that the cabin no longer is fit to live in and the boat has to be served by a mechanic, whereas a sailorman in the old days could take care of everything if he had a spark of romance in him.”
Weldon, Rozinante’s owner, tells how he got “Old Fussbudgit” (L. Francis Herreshoff, of course) to design her because “he was one of the few left who could design a boat which was a good sailer and still had romance in her looks.” There follows a gentle discussion of the design features of Rozinante and the philosophy behind those features, in the simplest of terms. At the end of it, one longs to get her plans, start construction, and live the minimalist life aboard her, something with which our own mullet boat men and women are totally familiar.
As Rozinante, Piscator and Viator carry on with their cruise south around the New England coast around Cape Cod to Nantucket Sound, Newport, Rhode Island, and finally to New London, Connecticut, Herreshoff describes other boats they encounter and those which populated these waters in times gone by.
I have had a little experience in those waters and with the types of men and women that crewed in Rozinante, Piscator and Viator. I found the waters in summer to be magnificent and the New Englanders magnificent as well, thinking and speaking more like New Zealanders that any others in the world.
But this is a celebration of L. Francis Herreshoff … and of Rozinante.
My copy of The Compleat Cruiser was published by Sheridan House, New York. I think it is still in print. I recommend it to the reader. It could change your life as it has for David Cranwell of Havelock North who has dreamed of building her for nearly 40 years.
His new Rozinante is almost complete. Boating NZ will feature her soon. BNZ