The Sinking of the Mohawk and Bayesian: Notorious Yacht Tragedies

150 years before the sinking of the Bayesian, a super yacht sank at anchor in New York harbor, killing her wealthy owner and his guests

In the department of history-repeating-itself, here is a strange historical coincidence from the realm of current events, maritime history and 19th century American yachting: two super yachts capsize and sink at anchor, only a few hundred yards from shore, killing their wealthy owners, guests, and crew when a summer squall overwhelmed them. The story of the two catastrophes dominated the news for weeks.

This is the story of the Mohawk and the Bayesian: two super yacht tragedies that killed their wealthy owners a century and a half apart.

In which I meet Michael Lynch

The story begins with a personal connection. In the late 1990s, in the Forbes.com newsroom on the corner of 5th Avenue and 16th Street in New York City, I met the founder of a UK company called Autonomy — Michael Lynch — and was introduced for the first time to the obscure work of an 18th century English Presbyterian minister and statistician, Thomas Bayes, who allegedly was interested in probability in order to prove the validity of the biblical miracles. The founder and CEO of Autonomy was Michael Lynch, a computer scientist who had applied Bayses’ Theorem to the nascent data science of search that was emerging at the time with the introduction of DEC’s Alta Vista search engine, and would eventually be dominated by Google.

Lynch and his colleagues were at Forbes.com due to the invitation of Om Malik, then the top tech reporter in the newsroom. I remember very little about the substance of the meeting other than being thoroughly confounded by the math behind Bayes’ Theorem which I won’t attempt to summarize in lay terms here, other than to say it has to do with conditional probabilities and avoiding the “base-rate” fallacy. I remember saying something so mathematically ignorant that I annoyed Lynch and his colleagues, so I shut up and let Om finish his interview. Whatever 18th century logic enlightened Autonomy, evidently Hewlett Packard’s short-stint CEO, Leo Apotheker, was impressed enough to acquire the company in 2011 for $11.7 billion.

The honeymoon was brief as HP promptly wrote off $8.8 billion the following year claiming ut had been duped by “serious accounting improprieties” and “outright misrepresentations.” (I subsequently wrote an opinion piece for GigaOm in 2011 ((Om Malik’s former tech news publication)) in which I compared the behavior of HP’s board of directors to a “shit fight in the monkey cage at the zoo.” )

The years of litigation that followed the HP-Autonomy acquisition rivaled the long-standing law suit at the heart of the plot of Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House that itself was based on a real and infamous 56-year legal battle over a contested will. Lynch was put under house arrest in San Francisco. There were trials in California and trials in London. People went to jail. Civil suits abounded.

In June of 2024, a dozen years after the deal went down, Lynch was found not guilty and released from house arrest.

Naturally the man wanted to celebrate his innocence and freedom, and like any good tycoon worth his salt, Lynch invited his lawyer, his banker, and family to join him on his 56-meter (184 ft.) super yacht — the Bayesian — for a celebratory cruise around Sicily’s Aeolian Islands, a stark and strangely beautiful landscape familiar to fans of the Italian movie L’avventura.

The Aolian Islands in L’avventura

On August 19 the yacht was riding at anchor off the Sicilian port of Porticello, east of Palermo, when shortly before dawn it was struck by a severe squall that knocked it over on its side, causing it to flood and sink in 50 meters (160 feet) of water. Lynch, his daughter, and five others were killed in the catastrophe, suffocated in the cabins of the Baysesian where they were trapped.

As it happened during the slowest news month of the year, the sinking was this summer’s maritime Titanic disaster served with the usual side helping of schadenfreude over a ultra high net worth tragedy with a tinge of nautical superstition. It was as if a vengeful Neptune climbed out of the Mediterranean and unleashed the Kraken on the hapless Bayesian.

The Mohawk-Bayesian Parallels

Both yachts the Mohawk and the Baysesian were designed specifically as luxury yachts and were not converted commercial vessels. Both capsized and quickly sank at anchor, knocked down by a sudden summer squall. The owners and their guests died in both cases. Both yachts were equipped with a retractable keel or centerboard. One yacht had its sails up. The other did not. Both yachts were under the command of a professional captain and crew, and in both cases, the crews and captains were immediately blamed for the catastrophe.

The Bayesian sinking is gradually revealing the facts of the matter as divers examine the wreck on the bottom of the Mediterranean , but the yacht still lies on the bottom, awaiting salvage and an uncertain future. The aftermath of the Mohawk disaster had a lasting impact on naval architecture and the definition of what makes an ocean-going yacht safe and seaworthy. She was salvaged and went on to many years of service under a new name, serving the government in surveying Nantucket Shoals in the 1890s.

The Gilded Age of Yachting

The Civil War enriched the new robber baron class of America with wealth accumulated from munitions, uniforms, boots, railroads, steamships, petroleum, coal, and steel. The last quarter of the 19th century saw the rapid, and ostentatious rise of America’s first super-wealthy class — the original “leisure class”— of Americans who competed in the markets during the week and on the waters of Block Island Sound on the weekends, celebrity tycoons who measured their success by comparing the size of their Newport “cottages,” Manhattan town houses, and sailing yachts.

Yacht racing started before the war when some of the 19th century’s early nautical tycoons who had made their fortunes in shipping, whaling, and the opium trade, touted the speed of their clipper ships, then the fastest, most extreme ships in the world, racing from Boston and New York around Cape Horn to San Francisco. The rivalries between the great clipper ships were avidly followed in the newspapers, interest peaking during the California Gold Rush when clipper ships like the Flying Cloud cut the usual six month voyage in half to ninety days by 1854. The New York Yacht Club was founded in 1844 out of a Hoboken club house or “station,” which soon relocated to Staten Island. The club made a name for itself in 1851 when a syndicate of its members commissioned the schooner-yacht America, which crossed the Atlantic to win the “One Hundred Sovereign Cup” at the annual regatta of the British Royal Yacht Squadron. That cup went on to be renamed the “America’s Cup” and the New York Yacht Club successfully defended it against all challenges until 1983, one of the greatest winning streaks in the history of sport.

Yachting took off after the war as a favorite pastime of the absurdly wealthy. Competitive passions ran as deep as their pockets, and the members of the New York Yacht Club began to commission new yachts that stretched the limits of naval architecture. In 1866 the 21-year old heir to the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett Jr., won the first trans-Atlantic race in the schooner yacht Henrietta. Bennett went on to become vice-commodore of the New York Yacht Club (NYYC).

In 1875, a young textile tycoon named William T. Garner succeeded Bennett as Vice Commodore of the NYYC. Garner commissioned the construction of what the New York Times called “the largest sailing yacht in the world”: the 140-foot long, thirty wide, shallow-draft (seven feet) centerboard schooner yacht Mohawk.

Everything about the Mohawk was grand and extreme. The design was a “skimmer” hull designed for fast performance downwind. The yacht carried 20,000 square yards of sail on two masts with everything flying. Superlatives are a big deal for owners of mega yachts. Keep in mind that nearly 150 years later, news reports erroneously reported the Bayesian was in the Guinness Book of World records for having the tallest mast at 237 feet (it did not, that record is held by the Mirabella V at 295 feet, but the Bayesian did have the tallest aluminum mast).

To stay stable, both yachts were ballasted with iron or lead. They both had retractable “keels.” The Mohawk carried about 50 tons of lead ingots in her bilges and a 30 by 14 foot centerboard that was lowered at sea for upwind stability and traction going to windward. The Bayesian was fitted with a retractable keel that was also lowered when sailing.

The Mohawk was so radical a design that critics were quick to doubt its safety under sail, writing letters to the newspapers and yachting magazines of the day warning that such an extreme design was doomed to fail. One of those critics was Garner’s predecessor as vice-commodore of the NYYC: James Gordon Bennett. “Some remarks which appeared in The Times on Sept. 21, and which seemed to indicate the necessity for a trial of centre-board yachts in rough water, drew forth a quick response from Vice Commodore Garner.”

Putting the Mohawk to the test

Vice Commodore William T. Garner invited four hundred of his closest friends to join him and his wife, Mary Marcellite Thorn Garner, for the launching of the Mohawk at the J.B. and J.D. Van Deusen shipyard at Greenpoint, Brooklyn on June 10, 1875. She was the last ship designed by Joseph B. Van Deusen, boatbuilder to the tycoons of the day, a graduate of William H. Webb’s Shipbuilding Academy, then and now one of the world’s preeminent schools of naval architecture.

The Mohawk was christened by Mary Garner with a bottle of champagne. The New York Times wrote of the occasion: “The yacht was in gala trim, being decked with lines of pennants reaching from the deck to the mastheads. As the new yacht glided off the wave into the river there was a grand salute of steam-whistles from all the steam-craft in the neighborhood, and the spectators on the board and on shore set up round after round of cheering.”

The schooner-yacht Mohawk under sail.

In August 1875 the Mohawk made her debut in the annual summer cruise of the New York Yacht Club, sailing around Newport, Rhode Island to observe the other club members’ yacht competing for the Garner Cup which her owner had sponsored. The following month “some remarks which appeared in The Times on September 21, and which seemed to indicate the necessity for a trial of centre-board yachts in rough water, drew forth a quick response from Vice Conmodore Garner. On the same day he made an offer in writing to sail, during the following month, upon any day when an eight-knot breeze, or upward, was blowing, any yacht, keel or centre-board, twenty miles to windward and back outside of Sandy Hook Lightship.”

Vice Commodore William T. Garner (top) and James Gordon Bennett Jr.

Garner’s challenge drew the interest of James Gordon Bennett Jr., who proposed upping the purse from $1,000 to $5,000 or $10,000 and a race date during the last half of November, a very boisterous and often windy time of year to be match racing in the Atlantic Ocean. Garner and Bennett exchanged letters and finally a date was set for Tuesday, October 26, 1875 for the Mohawk to face Bennett’s Dauntless. The Times wrote, “The day of the race came in black and lowering. The sky was overcast, and there was a strong wind blowing and a rather heavy seaway. After a briskly contested race, the Dauntless came in the victor.”

James Gordon Bennett’s Dauntless crossing the finish line ahead of William Garner’s Mohawk, Oct. 26, 1875

The Capsizing of the Mohawk

On Staten Island, south of the present ferry terminal, is the neighborhood of Stapleton. Garner and his wife lived in a grand mansion on Staten Island, which conveniently was close to the New York Yacht Club’s waterfront clubhouse on the Stapleton shores of New York Harbor, north of the present day Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

The former Garner home

On the afternoon of Thursday, July 20th, 1876, Garner, his wife Mary, and five guests — including Miss Edith May, sister of James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s fiancé Miss Ida May* — boarded the Mohawk as she lay at anchor close to the New York Yacht Club’s Stapleton “station.” The yacht club acquired a dozen seaside “stations” from New York Harbor to Newport to serve its members during their annual summer cruise. There were two such clubhouses on Staten Island, the first was established in 1868, followed by a grander one sometime later in the 19th century.

The New York Yacht Club’s first Staten Island Station, circa 1868

The second Staten Island “station” of the NYYC

Garner and his party went aboard the Mohawk at four in the afternoon with plans for a brief sail around the lower bay. Dinner was brought aboard from the club-house, with plans to dine aboard at 7 p.m. It was a typical late summer day’s afternoon on New York Harbor, with a rising wind blowing from the west-southwest and an ominous band of black clouds gathering over New Jersey, a portent of a predictable late afternoon thunderstorm that is so typical for the region. Other boats that were moored near the Mohawk began to close their hatches and take down their awnings in anticipation for the “sharp squall” coming their way, but the captain of the Mohawk — Oliver P. Rowland — ordered the schooner’s crew to hoist sail and make preparation to weigh anchor.

The New York Times reported the approaching storm was so obvious that onlookers standing on the yacht club dock 500 yards away were concerned to see the Mohawk riding at anchor with sails fully set and luffing. A small boat was dispatched by the yacht Countess of Dufferin (owned by Major Charles Gifford, Vice Commodore of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club) to warn Captain Rowland of the impending squall. The warning came too late. When a few rain drops began to spatter the decks of the Mohawk the guests went below to the salon to seek shelter.

“…before the boat [from the Countess of Dufferin] had reached her she capsized….When the first gust hit her vast broadside of canvas lay at right angles to the wind, and received the full force of it, keeling her ever to leeward, but not with sufficient force to capsize her. A moment later came another and stronger blast, throwing the ill-fated vessel on her beam ends, with all the weight of her superabundant canvass [sic] dragging in the water, and acting as a dead weight against her righting.” The New York Times, July 21, 1876 p.1

Why the Mohawk capsized

The crew of the Mohawk had hoisted her sails while the ship was at anchor just moments before the squall rolled over the hills of Staten Island and across the Stapleton anchorage. Being late in the afternoon in July, temperatures and humidity were probably high and the crew of the yacht had opened hatches, vents, and portholes to try to get some fresh air inside to offset the stagnant smell of the bilge. The crew and spectators all blamed Captain Rowland for setting too much sail. Rowland blamed the crew for not uncleating the sheets, or ropes, that trim the two mainsails and three jibs, and claimed (before fleeing the scene of the disaster) the tail of his coat had jammed into one of the mainsail’s blocks, making it impossible for him to pay out the mainsheet of the Mohawk’s mainsail. The center board — an immense slab of oak, thirty-feet long and fourteen-feet high — was in the raised position inside of its “trunk” when the capsize occurred. Centerboarders generally keep their board up at the mooring to keep the boat from “sailing”, preferring to let it swing freely in the wind so the boat can skate sideways rather than dig in and sail up tight on the anchor chain or line.

What doomed the Mohawk wasn’t the jammed mainsheet so much as the lead ingots in her bilges. Unsecured, hundreds of the heavy lead ingots slid to leeward along with anything not screwed down inside of the cabin. The falling lead shifted the boat’s physics irrevocably to port, and by the time the sheets could be freed the sails were already filling with water.

The Mohawk’s owner, Garner, drowned when he jumped down the companionway from the cockpit to the salon and was blasted inside by a gush of harbor water down the steep stairs. His wife was pinned under a heavy piece of furniture and drowned along with her husband, her brother Frost Thorn Jr., Miss Adele Hunter, 28, two cooks and a cabin boy. Seven people died on the Mohawk in a matter of minutes, as the schooner quickly filled with water and sank below the green water.

The ship the critics deemed too extreme and unsafe to sail was gone before leaving her mooring. Boats immediately put out from the yacht club pier and other yachts moored near the stricken vessel sent their boats to assist, but after ten minutes, all efforts to rescue the trapped souls in the cabin of the Mohawk ceased and the scene turned into a salvage operation. A steam tug was hailed, a line put on the submerged hulk, and the Mohawk was ignominiously dragged around the northeastern point of Staten Island and onto a 20-foot deep shoal off Allen’s Point at the mouth of the Kill Von Kull, where, when the tide ebbed, it was hoped the bodies of the dead could be recovered.

The funeral of Vice Commodore and Mrs. Garner, and her brother Frost Thorn Jr.

The Inquest

Two days after the calamity the front page of the New York Times broke the news that seven, not six people had died aboard the Mohawk. Found in the cabin with the other deceased was Mrs. Garner’s brother Frost Thorn, Jr.

The second sentence in the Times’ story found the captain of the Mohawk guilty: “The Sailing Master, Rowland, was denounced on all sides for incompetency and as a man who was utterly unfit for his position.”

Rowland, unhinged from the catastrophe, compounded his predicament by fleeing the scene. When he was eventually brought before a judge he was exonerated after proving it was the crew’s mishandling of the lines and anchor procedure that caused the ship to founder, a ship the judge agreed was improperly designed, rigged, and ballasted. And with that the trend which began after the Civil War when the sport of yachting began to accelerate through the conversion of working schooners into palatial toys came to a halt. A number of naval architects, including Nathaniel Herreshoff of Bristol, Rhode Island, weighed in on the matter of safety in yacht design, eschewing the trends towards beamier, shallower hulls in favor of deep-keeled cutters typical of the English pilot cutters.

These deep-keeled yachts, personified by the English cutters Madge and Clara, were touted as safe and extremely capable craft by the yachting writers of the late 19th century such as C.P. Kunhardt. Extreme hulls, and immense rigs continued to be popular, especially the extreme catboat designs of C.C. Manley which were raced out of Boston and Quincy up until World War, and the “sandbaggers” of New York Harbor which literally used bags of sand shifted from side to side to stabilize their huge sails against the power of the wind.

A wonderful resource about 19th century yacht design is the SailcraftBlog which goes into great depth about the history of extreme yacht and racing dinghy design.

The Aftermath

The Mohawk tragedy was soon followed by another sailing disaster, the capsize of the Rambler on Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes of upstate New York.

From the Cortland Democrat, August 25:
Ithaca, N.Y. Aug. 21. Yesterday morning a party of gentlemen set out from the village for an excursion upon the Lake, in the Yacht, “Rambler.” There were some twenty-nine persons in the party at the time of starting, the wind was high and strong. After having proceeded down the lake some four or five miles, and seeing the threatening danger of sailing further, the excursionists concluded to put into “Goodwins,” and tacking ship, a flaw struck the craft before she had got headway upon her and in an instant she capsized. Some were under the cuddy at the time, but marvelously escaped from a terrible death by scrambling out and climbing up and out upon the bottom of the vessell as she went over. Of course as is usual in such cases, every man looked after his own safety, and not until the most of them had secured a temporary place of safety upon the bottom of the craft was it known that three of their number had been lost, whose names were, James KING, Patrick GARVEY and Jacob LICK. Several smaller boats set off from the shore and rescued the remainder of the party from their perilous situations. All efforts to recover the bodies of the unfortunate three proved fruitless, while the Yacht was being righted up. The search was continued while the Yacht was being sailed home, with a portion of the excursionists, and the remainder went ashore and took the train. Great excitement prevailed throughout the village during all of yesterday. A large body of persons are busily engaged to-day in dragging for the bodies of the unfortunate men, but little hopes are entertained of their recovery, as the depth of the water where they were supposed to have sunk, is something like four hundred feet.

A decade later, in 1887, the centerboard sloop Mystery ran aground and capsized off of Canarsie, Brooklyn in Jamaica Bay, killing 23 people returning from a chowder party on Ruffle Island.

These maritime disasters were blamed on everything from extreme and unsafe yacht designs, to inept captains, and even the decline of professional sailors aboard yachts during the “Corinthian” movement towards purely amateur racing. Whatever the cause — the sea has always been and always will be capricious and dangerous — the lurid accounts of helpless women and children being trapped inside of flooded cabins contributed to a movement in yacht design away from the extreme limits of naval architecture and physics towards comfort and stability.

As for the modern tragedy of the Bayesian, it is worth noting that immediately following the sinking of the mega-yacht off of Sicily, Giovanni Costantino CEO of The Italian Sea Group, the conglomerate that owns the shipyard that built the yacht — Perini Navi — declared the yacht was unsinkable and placed the blame on the captain and crew, saying in a video statement they should have been alert to the weather conditions and had the craft secured and in a condition to withstand the sudden fury of the sea.

Only time and the courts will tell. The captain has wisely lawyered up and as divers complete their investigation and an inquest is convened, perhaps the cause of the Baysesian’s sinking will be known. Was it the design of the yacht, it’s extraordinarily tall mast, wide beam, and retractable keel that contributed to the sinking? Or just bad luck and a fluke of mother nature?

* As an irresistible aside, it has to be noted that “Gordon Bennett” was a popular Cockney expletive in the late 19th century, a slang exclamation doubtlessly earned when James Gordon Bennett managed to end his engagement to Miss Carolyn May, sister of the Mohawk victim Miss Edith May, after arriving to dinner at her parent’s home inebriated . He urinated in the fireplace in full view of one and all and the wedding was called off.