Sails, Skippers and Sextants E-Book

George Drower

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 273

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

'The inventions, the innovations, the stories, the surprises. A combination of history, reference and entertainment – something for every seafarer and many others too.' - Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. People have been sailing for thousands of years, but we've come some distance from longboats and clippers. How did we arrive here? In fifty tales of inventors and innovations, Sails, Skippers and Sextants looks at the history of one of our most enjoyable pastimes, from the monarch who pioneered English yachting to the engineer who invented sailboards. The stories are sometimes inspiring, usually amusing and often intriguing – so grab your lifejacket, it's going to be quite an adventure.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Foreword by Ben Ainslie CBE

Introduction

1. SAILING PIONEERS

King Charles II, Yacht Racer

John Cox Stevens and the New York Yacht Club

Richard McMullen’s Corinthian Yachting

James Gordon Bennett’s Transatlantic Race

John MacGregor, Boating Celebrity

Joshua Slocum’s Circumnavigation

Eric Tabarly, the Yachting Populariser

2. NAVIGATION AND PILOTAGE

Greenvile Collins’s Coastal Charts

John Campbell’s Lunar Sextant

Edward Massey’s Distance Log

Francis Crow and the Ship’s Compass

William Thomson’s Depth Sounder

Ernst Abbe’s Binoculars

3. WEATHER AND SIGNALS

Luke Howard’s Cloud Classification

Francis Beaufort and the Wind Scale

Frederick Marryat’s Signal Flags

William Evans’s Navigation Sidelights

Philip Columb’s Morse Lamp

Robert FitzRoy, Weather Forecaster

Lee de Forest’s Radio Telephone

4. SAILS AND RIGGING

Nathaniel Butler’s Bermuda Rig

William Gordon’s Spinnaker

Robert Wykeham-Martin’s Furling Jib

Sven Salén’s Genoa

Starling Burgess’s Alloy Mast

Rex Whinfield’s Terylene Sail

Peter Chilvers’s Sailboard

5. KEELS AND HULLS

William Petty’s Catamaran

John Schank’s Dagger-board

Patrick Miller’s Trimaran

Edward Bentall’s Fin Keel

Robin Balfour’s Twin Keel

Uffa Fox’s Planing Dinghy

John Illingworth, Ocean Racer

6. ENGINES, STEERING AND ANCHORS

John Hawkins’s Steering Wheel

Andrew Smith’s Wire Rigging

Francis Smith’s Screw Propeller

Nathaniel Herreshoff and Self-steering

Rudolf Diesel’s Boat Engine

Cameron Waterman’s Outboard Motor

Geoffrey Taylor’s CQR Anchor

7. EMERGENCIES

Lionel Lukin’s Lifeboat

George Manby’s Fire Extinguisher

Peter Halkett’s Inflatable Cloak-boat

Edward Berthon’s Folding Dinghy

John Ward’s Lifejacket and the First Survival Suits

Martha Coston’s Signalling Flare

Guglielmo Marconi’s S-O-S

Daniel Mowrey’s Seasickness Remedy

Further Reading

Copyright

FOREWORD

Nothing is as wonderful as flying along in a sailing boat, whether it has the added frisson of a competitive race or is simply a relaxing Sunday afternoon sail. Having been racing for ten years, I have spent a lot of time ‘messing about in boats’, and winning Olympic gold with the Finn was the most glorious moment of my sailing career. Other races, such as the America’s Cup, show how important small aspects of boat design can be – in some cases, the difference between winning and losing a race. That’s why I was so fascinated to read George Drower’s new book about sailing inventors and innovations. It gave a new insight into the history of my sport, and sailing in general. I was amused to discover that British yacht cruising didn’t take off until 1830 for fear of pirates! And that King Charles II was actually of vital importance to my own sport, as he commissioned the building of the first ever English racing yacht. Signal flares, a vital safety feature of any boat, were developed by American Martha Coston, while inflatable boats were invented over a hundred years before they came into widespread use. George Drower has put together a fun and interesting book which has opened my eyes to the ‘boffins’ who thought of and created the nautical inventions we now take for granted. I hope it will do the same for you.

Ben Ainslie CBE

Yachtsman of the Year 2008

INTRODUCTION

Everyone has heard of the great feats of the world’s circumnavigators, from pioneer Joshua Slocum, who first encircled the globe solo in 1895–8, to Dame Ellen MacArthur, who became the fastest woman to complete the circumnavigation in 2005, and admired the extraordinary technologically rich racing-fit yachts from celebrity designers such as Nathaniel Herreshoff, Charles Nicholson and Olin Stephens. But what of the boating world’s lesser known inventors and innovators? Their seemingly simple contraptions and ideas have been taken for granted, while they themselves have been ignored. Yet these boffins were the real heroes of sailing. Not only did they provide many of the basic components that made possible the creations of famous-for-being-famous designers; their ingenious devices have contributed greatly to the safety and performance of ordinary yachts.

In unearthing these forgotten pioneers, the circumstances that brought about such changes and the improvements their ideas made, this book makes some astonishing revelations. On every boat, no matter how seemingly mundane, there will be at least a handful of the simplest nautical components – from sextants to spinnakers, echo-sounders to steering wheels, signal lamps to anchors – that can provide historical stories as fascinating and rich as any associated with luxury yachts. So who were these unsung heroes? How did their ideas come about?

There was the naval engineer John Schank who, needing to devise various means of moving British warships overland to attack rebel forces in lakes during the American War of Independence, thought of a method of enabling boats to manoeuvre in shallow water by equipping them with dagger-boards! When he returned to England, to serve as Dockyard Commissioner at Deptford in the 1790s, he persuaded the Admiralty to build various centreboard ships. The leaks around those dagger-board contraptions caused him to invent the watertight bulkhead; nevertheless the experimental dagger-board was abandoned in England. Its subsequent popularity in America as the centreboard obscured the fact that its originator was British.

Then there was Edward Bentall, the wealthy Essex agricultural implement maker who in 1880 audaciously applied plough technology to sailing, with a radical yacht called Evolution. She was the world’s first boat with a fin keel, but she proved unsuccessful because Bentall had unwittingly made her design too slender. The idea was taken up and developed in Newport, Rhode Island, by Nathaniel Herreshoff in 1891, and thus the fin keel also came to be seen as an American invention.

Some winning ideas occurred through happenstance. In 1837, for example, an experimental steam launch puffing along a canal near the London Docks accidentally clipped an object in the water, which snapped off part of its propeller. Suddenly the boat went faster! This enabled a sheep farmer called Francis Smith, who was carrying out the trials, to modify the propulsion system and gain worldwide credit for inventing the world’s first viable screw propeller. Then there was the story of a young Boston widow who was desperate to find a means to support her four children. In 1848 she perchanced to find, among her late husband’s papers, plans to invent a signal flare. The enterprising Martha Coston went on to develop and market that safety device, but she rarely receives recognition for it. Rather unjustly the flares became synonymous with the Very pistol, because in 1877 Lieutenant Edward Very USN invented a firing mechanism for the Coston system.

Some ideas were far ahead of their time. In 1842 Peter Halkett of Richmond-upon-Thames devised the ingenious cloak-boat, a rubber dinghy sewn with the lining of a cloak! It ought to have been presented as a life-saving device but Halkett, who had tested it on rivers and at sea, was keener to promote it as an exploration boat for Arctic expeditions. Nevertheless he envisaged how giant versions of the boat could be used as emergency liferafts able to accommodate some thirty shipwreck victims. But the rapid progress of Halkett’s career in the Royal Navy meant he never had another chance to develop such a system and the advantages of inflatable boats did not become widely apparent until some hundred years later. Another futuristic device was the azimuth liquid compass, perfected in 1813 by a Kent silversmith called Francis Crow. Although more stable in a boat – or yacht – than a traditional card compass, Crow’s invention was unfortunately misfiled by the Admiralty as just a device for expeditions of discovery.

To be successful, even the most audacious boating pioneers needed to have an aptitude for drastic ad hoc innovation. Take Starling Burgess for example, the inventor of the alloy mast on the J-class yacht Enterprise, Harold Vanderbilt’s defender of the America’s Cup in 1930. During a selection race in rough seas, Enterprise’s spreaders came adrift and the revolutionary 163ft mast threatened to break. On board, Burgess reacted instantly and ingeniously prevented the collapse by using spinnaker halyards to reinforce the structure – thus enabling Enterprise to be selected and ultimately successful in keeping the Cup for America. The world’s first circumnavigating yachtsman, Joshua Slocum, faced calamity during his epic 1895–8 trip when, crossing the Indian Ocean, the tin alarm clock he used as a chronometer suddenly stopped. He cleverly restarted the timepiece by dunking it in boiling water!

Several of the boating boffins devised more than one invention, and for some the difficulty was that they were just too prolific. Captain George Manby made his name as the inventor of a mortar for firing rescue lines. Unfortunately he did not stop there; instead he bombarded the Admiralty with a wide variety of other schemes, ranging from a device for rescuing persons who had fallen though ice, to a message-kite, an oblong artillery shell and a harpoon gun. So when he offered them his brilliant invention of the fire extinguisher they were too irritated with him to accept it. The Revd Edward Berthon also tested the Admiralty too far with his multiplicity of schemes, which included a hydraulic speedometer (which he called a ‘nautachometer’), a propeller and a clinometer. His response when they initially dismissed his scheme for a folding lifeboat was to destroy all the prototypes and move away from the sea. Only many years later was he persuaded to resume the development of the lifeboat.

Seventeenth-century boating pioneers often struggled to make progress with their schemes because they were unable to test out their ideas in advance. For the brilliant catamaran designer William Petty this meant, astonishingly, that his boats got progressively worse. Initially it all seemed to be going so well: the 20ft prototype he built in Ireland in 1662 sailed superbly well, and was said to have reached phenomenal speeds of nearly 20 knots. But his subsequent catamaran The Experiment perished in a storm off the coast of Spain in 1665, and an even larger multihull he created in 1684 proved unstable. All this meant catamarans were scarcely to be seen in British waters for the next three hundred years.

Meanwhile a hydrographer called Captain Greenvile Collins was also expected to accomplish more than contemporary technology allowed. From 1681 to 1687 he made the first official survey of the entire coast of Britain, equipped with nothing more than a chain and a quadrant, only to find when it was all done that British scientists condemned the primitiveness of his methodology – although mariners for the next hundred years treasured his charts for their robust simplicity.

There were a few boating pioneers whose achievements were even more influential. John Cox Stevens, who in 1844 founded the New York Yacht Club, subsequently owned the yacht America. That vessel’s victory in a race around the Isle of Wight in 1851 laid the foundations of the America’s Cup, still the premier prize in yacht racing. Other giants in the yachting world included the brilliant designer Uffa Fox, famous for his revolutionary planing dinghy and his race-winning helming abilities; and John Illingworth, with his radical yacht Myth of Malham. Eric Tabarly, the renowned ocean racer, led by example and inspired others to make France one of the leading yachting nations. And before them there was the intrepid Victorian adventurer John MacGregor, whose daredevil trips in canoes effectively created the sports of canoeing and canoe sailing in Europe.

Seldom was the archetypal image of an inventor more inappropriate than in the case of these boating pioneers. Such persons were far from characters of dishevelled appearance wearing holey pullovers and laboriously developing their eccentric ideas in a boatshed. In fact of the pioneers covered in the fifty main stories in this book surprisingly few were proper inventors or yacht designers. Many had drawn their ideas from adjacent fields such as agriculture, engineering and especially the Royal Navy (a high proportion were captains, if not admirals). Almost invariably the boating pioneers were astonishingly important people in their own fields, and what they all had in common was a delight in and profound love of sailing.

1

SAILING PIONEERS

King Charles II, Yacht Racer

The monarch who pioneered yachting in England initially found it expedient to have some first-hand knowledge of small boat sailing because of an abrupt change in his constitutional circumstances. The trouncing of his army by Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Worcester in early September 1651 caused Prince Charles (later King Charles II) to become a fugitive, desperate to escape capture by the parliamentary forces. Determined to flee the country, he travelled incognito for six weeks until he reached the Sussex coast at Shoreham. There an unscrupulous skipper called Nicholas Tettersell, who owned a coal brig called Surprise, agreed to sail him over to France for 60 pieces of silver. The 34-ton Surprise being no bigger than a fishing boat, and with a crew of two, it is likely that Charles had to do some of the crewing himself.

On the continent the exiled prince eventually found refuge in the Netherlands, most notably at Woerden Castle near Utrecht. Charles had learnt that in Holland it had become the done thing for wealthy personages to own pleasure boats and he used the stairs leading from his rooms in the castle down to the river (which later became known as the King’s Steps) to enable him to go off sailing. In such a watery country, the so-called jaghts – from a Dutch word meaning hunt or chase – which had evolved from fast fighting ships, offered a superb means of travel. Some of the nimbler ones were used for sport, and during the winter frosts they could even be fitted with runners and used as iceboats!

Although in fact Charles had never sailed in yachts before his exile, he had already acquired some other practical knowledge of sailing. In September 1649, during a visit to Jersey, he had learnt to sail in a frigate. It was said that he would enthusiastically take the helm for a few hours at a time and could only with difficulty be persuaded to relinquish it.

Having been restored to the throne of England in the early summer of 1660, Charles prepared to return home. On the Breda to The Hague section of his ceremonial journey his Dutch hosts supplied an escort of thirteen formal yachts. The magnificently ornate yacht that Charles himself sailed on belonged to the Board of Admiralty at Rotterdam. So impressed was Charles with the boat that he remarked to the Burgomaster of Amsterdam that he might order one of the same style immediately he arrived in England, to use on the Thames. However, the Burgomaster was so mindful of Charles’s new importance that he offered to arrange for his city to acquire and present to the new king a very similar vessel that had only recently been completed in Amsterdam for the Dutch East Indies Company.

In August 1660 the yacht Mary duly arrived in the Thames, and at 5 o’clock in the morning she tied up at Whitehall Palace. Charles eagerly leapt aboard to inspect her. She was virtually a small Dutch warship: 52ft long, with a 19ft beam and a displacement of 100 tons, 8 guns and a crew of thirty; and with her ‘wooden wing’ leeboards raised she had a draught of 5ft. She had been embellished with carved and gilded ornamentation. Even Samuel Pepys assumed Charles had been impressed by these enhancements when noting in his diary the king’s delight at the interior of the yacht: ‘one of the finest things that I ever saw for neatness and room in so small a vessel’. But there was more to Charles than his fun-loving image suggested; he was also shrewd and competitive. According to Pepys, by November the distinguished naval shipbuilder Peter Pett had been instructed by the king ‘to make one to outdo this for the honour of his country’. In so commissioning the building of the first ever English racing yacht, Charles was establishing a precedent of yacht design requiring the attentions of the best marine architects.

At Deptford Pett constructed a yacht remarkably like the Mary, but with one crucial difference. This involved doing away with the bulky and cumbersome leeboards (whose purpose was to resist lateral drift), instead having a deeper, 7ft draught. Called Katherine, in honour of Charles’s bride-to-be Catherine of Braganza, she was launched in the following April. Not long afterwards the Anne, a yacht virtually identical to Katherine and built for Charles’s brother James, Duke of York, took to the water at Woolwich. Trials had showed that Katherine’s fine underwater form meant she was quicker than the leeboarder Mary, and also went closer to windward.

The new yachts provided the royal brothers with an opportunity for some sporting rivalry, and they duly arranged a race for a prize of £100. This historic event in yachting history took place on 1 October 1661 and was chronicled by the diarist John Evelyn (effectively making him the first yachting correspondent). In the first part of the contest, from Greenwich to Gravesend, the winds were contrary and Anne made the best use of the ebb tide to win. It was quite a festive event. Evelyn recorded: ‘There were divers noble persons on board, his Majesty sometimes steering himself.’ In the interval the king’s barge and kitchen-boat were in attendance to supply copious food and drink. Charles did much better on the return section of the race, levelling the series by steering Katherine to win the return to Greenwich. It can be assumed that the Dutch raced yachts in the Netherlands but there is no written evidence for this and thus the 1661 contest on the Thames became the first authentically recorded yacht race.

Charles had a natural aptitude for sailing and according to Pepys, ‘he possessed a transcendent mastery of all maritime knowledge, and two leagues travel at sea was more pleasure to him than twenty on land’. He put this expertise in nautical matters to practical effect: he reballasted Katherine with 4 tons of lead musket shot to improve her performance, and ensured that she and Anne were rigged as cutters with gaff mainsails of a type commonly used in England, rather than with Dutch-style spritsails. An opportunity to test the sea-going qualities of the new yachts offered itself during the summer of 1662 when they were sent on a mission in the English Channel, but they were driven back by a heavy storm in which they proved themselves excellent sea-boats. Pepys recalled: ‘All ends in the honour of the pleasure-boats, which had they not been very good boats could never have endured the sea as they did.’

In 1661 the Dutch presented Charles with yet another yacht, the Bezan. Just 34ft long and of only 35 tons, she had a large mainsail with a short gaff and two headsails, which contributed to her reputation as a fast mover. As with the Mary, Charles ordered Peter Pett to build a boat to surpass her. The king himself helmed the new yacht in a race against the Bezan, skippered by the Duke of York, on the Thames – and lost. Nevertheless all these experiences were eventually put to good use in 1683 with the building of the Fubbs, whose name derived from an old English affectionate term meaning ‘chubby’. It was apparently chosen in honour of the Duchess of Portsmouth, who at the time was Charles’s favourite mistress. Reputedly designed by the king himself, the yacht had a sumptuous state room, richly decorated with carved oak and boasting a great four-poster bed adorned with gold brocade. Although better known for her pleasure activities, Fubbs proved to be the fastest of all Charles’s yachts, partly because of her large sail area, but more especially because of her ketch rig. Charles did not, as has sometimes been claimed, invent the ketch rig, but its use in Fubbs certainly helped to make it respectable.

By the time he died in 1685 Charles II had owned an astonishing twenty-eight yachts, several of which he personally raced and arranged to be handed over to the Royal Navy for general service. A boat for which he retained a particular affection was the Surprise, the chirpy coal brig which had carried him to freedom. After the Restoration the 30-footer was sought out and purchased from her Shoreham owner; then, having been smartened and renamed The Royal Escape, she was kept for occasional trips on the Thames.

Prince Charles’s voyage in the Surprise is commemorated each summer by the Royal Escape Race, from Brighton to Fecamp, organised by the Sussex Yacht Club, www.royalescaperace.co.uk.

John Cox Stevens and the New York Yacht Club

The most influential character in American yachting was himself from a nautical dynasty. Colonel John Stevens III, in expanding his family’s merchant shipping and property development empire, had bought land in New Jersey on which came to be built the city called Hoboken. Working from his mansion at Castle Point, a rocky promontory, overlooking the Hudson River and Manhattan Island, the colonel devoted his time to making experiments and inventions for the common good. He persuaded Congress to protect American inventors, and subsequently legislation was established which became the foundation of American patent law. Assisted by three of his children, in 1804 he built a propeller-driven steamboat to provide a ferry service across the Hudson to New York. Although it was revolutionary, he forfeited the claim of inventing the world’s first workable screw propeller because the system could not be developed as the vessel was underpowered. Inspired by the Hoboken climate of creativity, one son Robert went on to become an engineer and an ingenious naval architect, while another, Edwin, became a railway pioneer. To them is due the credit for the successful use of anthracite coal, the ‘T’-rail now universally used for railways, and the revolving warship turret.

The First Yachting Magazine

Hunt’s Yachting Magazine was the first recreational sailing journal. It was founded in 1852 by a keen yachtsman called the Hon. H.G. Hunt, who, in the year following Britain’s historic defeat in the America’s Cup, saw a need to facilitate discussion within the sport.

John Cox Stevens, the eldest son, was passionate about sport and though especially keen on cricket (it was reputedly he who introduced the game into America) he devoted himself to yachting. With his brothers he would build innovative models of hull forms for testing in a stream near Hoboken. In 1804, when he was just twenty-four years old, he made a 20ft dinghy called Diver in which he raced ferry-boats up and down New York Harbour for bets. Then in 1814 he constructed Trouble, a sailing canoe which was reckoned to be the first sea-going yacht in the United States. Next, in 1820, he built Double Trouble, an experimental but unsuccessful catamaran. In 1832 he produced a 65ft waterline schooner called the Wave, which took part in the first yacht race in the United States. This was an impromptu event that took place in August 1835 when Wave rounded Cape Cod and encountered a schooner called Sylph, which she then raced.

It was on Stevens’s brand new schooner Gimcrack in New York Harbour that nine wealthy yachting enthusiasts held a historic meeting on 30 July 1844. Hitherto, several attempts had been made to establish American sailing clubs, a few of which had already petered out. But the nine who gathered in Gimcrack’s saloon to form the prestigious New York Yacht Club (NYYC), with the keen sportsman John Cox Stevens as its Commodore, were determined to get their club off the ground. There was to be one major race each year. The first clubhouse, a purpose-built wooden structure, was sited on the Stevens’s family property at Hoboken. The formation of the NYYC created an enthusiasm for competitive leisure sailing and many vessels were built. Although Gimcrack had been possibly the least innovative of all Steven’s yachts, for a while she held her own against the newcomers, but when she was defeated Stevens decided to replace her with a new model called Maria, named after his wife.

Designed by his brother Robert L. Stevens, Maria was far ahead of her time. She had the first ever suit of sails cut horizontally, instead of the usual ‘up and down’ style; a streamlined hollow mast and boom; two heavily weighted iron centreboards counterbalanced by powerful spiral springs; and outside ballast in the form of lead sheets fastened to the planking. When her bow was lengthened in a boatyard, at 108 feet on the waterline, she reputedly became one of the longest single-masted vessels at that time. Quickly becoming known as the fastest boat in American inshore waters, she greatly added to the growing prestige of the New York Yacht Club. However, it was an invitation contained in a letter received from England in 1850 that transformed the NYYC into the premier yacht club of the United States.

The letter was opened by a George Schuyler, one of the founders of the NYYC, and ventured to suggest that in 1851, to coincide with the Great Exhibition, a New York pilot boat be sent to Britain as an example of American shipbuilding. Stevens formed a special syndicate which agreed that, as Maria might be unsuitable for an ocean crossing, a new boat should be built, thus giving the best opportunity for the country’s shipbuilding skills to be demonstrated. George Steers, the accomplished creator of the fastest pilot boats, was already known to Stevens as the designer of Gimcrack, and upon his recommendation the syndicate agreed to commission him to design America. Steers put all his expertise into the 90ft-long 170-ton schooner, which he designed with raked masts, a sharp wedge-shaped bow and a long easy form. Launched in May, America initially alarmed the syndicate when she was soundly beaten in trial races by Maria. Nevertheless, she then successfully proved her seaworthiness by crossing the Atlantic – a feat that no American racing yacht had reportedly ever achieved before – and put in at Le Havre, where Stevens and certain other members of the syndicate joined her.

On 31 July 1851 America anchored off Cowes, and Stevens issued a challenge on behalf of the NYYC to the Royal Yacht Squadron to race her against any number of schooners in the United Kingdom. Much to his puzzlement there were no takers. Word had already spread that America was a yacht to be reckoned with: during her voyage from Le Havre she had convincingly out-sailed a reputedly fast British yacht. Nor was there a response when Stevens pledged to stake an astonishing 10,000 guineas on another such event. Desperate for a competition, Stevens decided to enter America in the Royal Yacht Squadron regatta to be held for a ‘Hundred Guinea Trophy’ around the Isle of Wight on 22 August. Although the race was open to all foreign racing yachts, America was the only non-British entrant, competing against a fleet of seven schooners and eight cutters. She made history by being the first to complete the course that year – but only just. She had started slowly, but the fastest British yachts were stood down because of a collision, and the second place yacht at the finish, Aurora, might easily have won had there been a time allowance.

The trophy, which eventually became known as the America’s Cup, became the property of America’s owners, and after her sale it was committed to the custody of Commodore Stevens, who for a while kept it at Hoboken. Some time after John Cox Stevens’s death the Stevens Institute of Technology was founded on the family property at Hoboken, and for many years models of America’s Cup challengers were tested in a towing tank at the institute. America herself changed hands many times, but was finally broken up, having been irreparably damaged in 1942 when the roof of the US Navy shed in Annapolis where she was stored collapsed under the weight of snow.

The Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, www.stevens.edu; New York Yacht Club, www.nyyc.org.

Richard McMullen’s Corinthian Yachting

An influential pioneer of British yacht cruising, Richard McMullen was a stockbroker who lived at Greenhithe in Kent. Having ingeniously measured a revenue cutter he had inspected on the Thames at low water in the autumn of 1849, he ordered a reduced-scale version to be built, so that in 1850 he was able to take delivery of an affordable yacht. Built of pine at the commercial yard of J. Thompson at Rotherhithe, Leo was an 18ft, 3-ton half-decked cutter, fitted out as a miniature seagoing yacht. To her new owner she was the finest little ship in the world. Unfortunately McMullen was so keen to escape the rigours of working in the City of London that he neglected to learn the principles of sailing!

McMullen got off to a disastrous start. Leo sank on the day she was launched because the yard had moored her carelessly. The first time out on the river she nearly sank again when McMullen got her masthead tangled in a brig’s bowsprit. Then there was a fearful accident when a flapping sail caught him in the eye with an unmoused pair of clip hooks and almost lifted him overboard. In spite of it all McMullen pushed on, determined to become a first-rate practical yachtsman. He later wrote: ‘My plan was to persevere by sail by day or night in all weathers. By getting into scrapes and getting out of them, I learnt more of practical sailing in a few months than I should have learnt in several years.’ Becoming more confident as he went along, between 1850 and 1857 he is claimed to have cruised over 8,000 miles in the waters between the Thames and Lands End.

Corinthian boating – the suggestion that wealthy amateur yachtsmen should play an active, hands-on role in sailing their boats – was initially articulated in the United States in the 1820s. Even so, for a long while it was reckoned there that such proletarian dalliances could only be respectably done within the confines of an institution. The New York Yacht Club had been founded with Corinthian ideals in 1844, while the membership of the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club (formed in 1871) was reserved exclusively for owner-sailors. The term spread to Britain in 1872 with the formation of the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club. In practical application it meant that gentlemen might steer during races, although cruising yachts were still assumed to need strong and seasoned professional crews. In Britain, however, cruising was still not commonplace, for few yachts had dared venture far from the coast for dread of pirates lurking in the English Channel. It was not until 1830, when a French fleet destroyed numerous pirates’ vessels while bombarding Algiers into submission, that the threat of the marauders diminished.

The Sail Track

In 1840 Robert L. Stevens of Hoboken invented the sail track and slides, with which he equipped the Onkahye, a racing schooner of his own design. The system was intended to replace the traditional parrel hoops by which sails were retained to a mast, but the mast track did not come into general use until later in the century.

At the time when McMullen was learning by his mistakes in the 3-ton Leo, yachting was regarded as something of a social ceremony at which the presence of spectators was a necessary adjunct. Unimpressed by the shenanigans of ‘Cowes yachting’, McMullen took delight in striving to perform every nautical task, regardless of how trivial, to as high a standard as possible. Although a self-taught amateur, he was uniquely professional in his actions – maintaining his boat to near naval standards of cleanliness and efficiency, and keeping his equipment in good order. He went on to raise the standard of seamanship in amateur sailing to a far higher level than had been reached before by the publication in 1869 of his book Down Channel – a work which effectively established him as Britain’s first cruising Corinthian yachtsman. An endearingly honest account of the daft muddles into which he got himself in his early boating years, Down Channel progressively showed how he had ingeniously used the opportunity of adverse circumstances to evolve new skills, which he could then apply to bigger boats.

In 1858 Leo was replaced with a 32ft cutter called Sirius, which also derived from the original specification he had obtained in 1849. Sometimes he sailed her with a paid hand, and later with his wife, and in all Sirius covered some 12,000 miles, which included trips to the Scilly Isles and Ireland, and a circumnavigation of Great Britain. In 1865 McMullen built an even larger version, the 42ft lugger Orion, which required several hands to crew her. In his writings McMullen disclosed how in Cherbourg he had sacked Orion’s crew for being insolent and smoking too much! Undaunted by the challenges of sailing the 19-ton vessel home alone, he devised techniques to do so. One involved reefing the mainsail before the onset of bad weather; it took him two hours to do, but he accomplished it.

His book and other sage advice, simply based on his years of personal experience, won him several important emulators: literary yachtsmen such as Claud Worth, Frank Cowper, Frank Knight and Francis Cooke (who became so enthusiastic that he later wrote The Corinthian Yachtsman’s Handbook