Category: Uncategorized

Spars, paint, and hardware

Part One described the start of the restoration of the Snafu II, a 78 year-old Cotuit Skiff built by my grandfather, Henry Chatfield Churbuck in 1947 for my father Tony. The first phase focused on removing the old paint from the hull so I could get a good look at the underlying problems; the removal of the coaming that had started to crack at the apex of the forward port curve; and stripping the canvas off of the deck which had torn in several places.

Henry Chatfield Churbuck

When the paint was peeled off with a heat gun it revealed some bad rot in the lower portion of the white oak transom near the lower gudgeon, or hinge point for the rudder. That became the first priority and involved some careful surgery to remove the plank and refit a new piece without compromising the shape of the hull

A new Dynel deck was laid on, followed by the steaming and screwing in place of a new ash coaming. A coat of custom “Churbuck yellow” paint from the George Kirby Jr. Paint Company in New Bedford was applied over a coat of two-part TotalBoat primer, followed by the shaping and installation of new white oak rubrails. As temperatures dropped in late November, work ceased for the winter.

The Worklist

• Coaming: refasten the screws and drill deeper holes so the screw heads may be bunged and varnished; consider cutting down the top edge of the coaming about 1/2”-1” to make it easier on the backs of the crew and skipper’s thighs; install a 6” long piece of bronze half-round into the forward starboard edge of the coaming where the halyards will chafe; shape and merge the bottom edge of the coaming where the fore and aft sections are butted together; finish the coaming with 4 to 6 coats of varnish.
• Rub rails: fit starboard rub rail , bed in Dolfinite and fasten to boat, shape and sand transom pieces, set bungs and vanish 2 coats.
• Deck hardware: install the bow chock, mooring cleat, pad eye for centerboard pennant, order and install new towing cleat on starboard quarterdeck, frame the mast hole with bronze strips
• Centerboard thwarts: remove existing pine seats and replace with cedar or mahogany
• Cockpit: Strip varnish from centerboard trunk, re-finish trunk. Cut and install knees under thwarts and under deck forward of the centerboard trunk.
• Rough out the spars: cut down 9”x8/4×16’ Sitka Spruce limber into two 4” slabs; glue and clamp, then mark with spar gauge (need to make a spar gauge), and build a jig to plan the corners off. Cut down 9”x8/4×14’ Sitka Spruce to make gaff and boom (to be scarfed) into a 17 ½’ length
  • Taper and shape spars, sand, cut tenon into the base of the mast, make white oak spreader and install spar hardware.
• Make the sail track for the mast. I DESPISE gaff jaws and lacing and prefer the old “Senior” track as used on the Wianno Senior and #36 when I raced her. That means cutting a narrow piece of hardwood and routing two grooves along the aft edges to accept bronze sail slides, and placing a 1/8” bronze bar on the upper end of the track where the gaff fitting will be attached and most of the pressure will be focused. The gaff and boom will use standard bronze sail track which is $20 a foot and hard to find.
• Stern seat – drill and bolt lower gudgeon, make shoe-socket for boom crutch from oak and epoxy to keelson; cut rectangle into stern seat to accept boom crutch, reassemble stern seat, finish boom crutch
• Tiller – make new tiller from 8/4 oak or spruce – use original tiller for template; cut out with jig saw, round off and shape with a spokeshave plane.

Materials

I’m a curmudgeon when it comes to wooden boats and hate to see traditional designs trashed by cheap stainless steel fittings and multi-colored synthetic ropes. As one bronze supplier quipped, “It’s like wearing running shoes with a tuxedo.” I tried to use only bronze for this restoration. Alas, the old manufacturers of the great traditional fittings went out of business long ago. Bronze blocks (pulleys), cleats, forestay turnbuckles, sail slides and tracks, mast hoops, goosenecks, and other assorted fussy little parts are nearly impossible to find, and when they can be located are priced at the level of boat jewelry. I have a collection of some bronze hardware scavenged from other boats, and others that were cast by my grandfather when he was building boats after WW II.

Fortunately J.M. Reineck & Son, a Halifax, MA company, has revived the original Herreshoff Manufacturing Company’s bronze designs as well as some of the lamented hardware by the defunct Merriman Company. I ordered a block for the throat halyard from Reineck and will add additional hardware in the years to come as my budget allows.

All lines (ropes) for the halyards, mainsheet, centerboard pennant and outhauls I’ll bought from R&W Rope in New Bedford. I can’t say enough nice things about R&W. Visiting the shop is always an adventure as they stock everything from rock climbing rope to tugboat hawsers. I used double-braided Novabraid XLE in a traditional tan color that mimics the old manila hemp lines the skiff came with when I sailed the boat as a boy.

Wood is a challenge. Marine plywood I can pick up from Plywood Specialties in Hyannis, but boat lumber is all but impossible to find in the local lumberyards which only seem to stock pine, some poplar, and western red cedar. There are some fantastic lumber supply houses: Boulter Plywood in Medford is one option. Condon’s in White Plains, NY is amazing. But the best discovery throughout the entire restoration was Reader’s Hardwood Supply in East Taunton, a mere 45 minute drive over the Bourne Bridge off of Route 25 on Route 44. There I was able to source a 16-foot 8/4 plank of Sitka Spruce for the spars along with some great white oak and clear ash for the coaming.

Spars

My first experience working in a boat shop happened when I was 12 years old and made some spars for Optimist Prams in my grandfather’s shop for friends who broke their masts, booms and sprits in the yacht club’s sailing program. That involved cutting fir banister rails with a handsaw, drilling a hole through the top for the sprit rope, and screwing on the old cleat and bronze pad eyes from the broken mast. I think I charged $5 for the complete mast, varnished of course.

I made one skiff boom years ago — a “T” boom fashioned from two pieces of fir — but never a round mast, gaff or boom. After watching a few how-to videos on YouTube and building a nifty spar gauge based on some plans I found in the archives of WoodenBoat Magazine, I headed to Reader Hardwood Supply and bought an expensive 16-foot plank of Sitka Spruce for the mast and boom, and a ten footer for the gaff. The spar gauge was based off one used by a spar maker at Mystic Seaport, and was designed to precisely scribe two parallel lines to guide the shaping of the spar into an octagon. I could (but won’t) go on and on about the week’s work that went into making the gauge. It was a challenge and involved cutting stainless steel bolts length-wise, drilling them for screws, and resulted in a tool I am inordinately proud of.

Spar gauge

I ripped the 16-foot plank of spuce down into two 4″x2″ pieces and then epoxied the two together in a sandwich to made a 4″x4″ square cross section. The 2″ wide off-cut was saved for the boom.

I ran the spar gauge down the four sides of the mast timber, scribing two parallel lines on all four faces with the tips of two bronze screws (golf pencil tips break off too easily). I clamped the piece to a pair of sawhorses in a crude jig and with a power plane whittled off the four corners, creating a massive pile of shavings that are still blowing all over the back yard and which get stuck between the toes of my bare feet and follow me inside of the house. Mrs. Churbuck is to be praised for never once complaining about such a mess.

The top third of the mast tapers from 4″ to 2″ inches, so with the power plane whining away I whittled the spar down to a rough octagon, finishing the shaping with a reversed 60-grit belt sand belt attached to a roller drum with a handle set into the chuck of a cordless drill. The mast took about six hours of careful planing (both power plane and hand plane). The boom needed to be lengthened to 17 1/2 feet, so I cut a 12-to-1 scarf in the end, and epoxied a second piece to get it to the right length. Skiff booms are over 17 feet long, giving them their distinctively over-sized gaff rig.

Shaping the mast

I overbuilt the gaff in the belief it is the weakest of the three spars. I tapered the throat end down to a wedge shape to accept a bronze gooseneck fitting donated by Conrad Geyser. Given my hatred of gaff-jaws (they chew up the mast by grinding against it) and laced-on sails, I went with the original “Senior track” configuration to attach the gaff and the luff of the sail to the mast and scavenged bronze sail track to attach the head and foot of the sail to the gaff and boom respectively. For the mast track I cut a 1/4″ dado into a seven-foot length of white oak and epoxied it to the aftside of the spar, taking care to make the slots the right size to accept the bronze gooseneck fitting and the five U-shaped bronze sail slides. I made a spreader for the forestay out of white oak, spliced a loop into the end of a 3/16ths length of stainless steel wire rope (splicing wire rope is NOT fun), wormed and parceled the loop, and fashioned the forestay through the uppermost pad-eye for the peak block at the top of the mast. Getting the goosenecks onto the boom and the gaff were an opportunity to learn how to peen 1/4″ bronze rods into “rivets” with smooth heads as opposed to cluttering up the end of the gaff and boom with a series of bolts and nuts.

“Senior-style” bronze gaff gooseneck fitted to the mast track

Bronze turnbuckles are hard to find and the best price I could find for a new one was a staggering $250, so I turned to eBay and discovered the used bronze market has caught onto the shortage of bronze boat fittings with prices far over what they should be. I ordered two turnbuckles, but they were over-sized and will collect cobwebs in the shop for the foreseeable future. In the end I scavenged a bronze forestay turnbuckle off of another spar, along with a lot of old sail track which is priced at an eye-watering $15 a foot new .

The spars all received eight coats of Epifanes varnish. The first coat was thinned 50-50, the second 25-75, the third 15-85 and the last five were all full strength with 400 grit wet sanding and acetone wipe downs in between coats until the spars looked like candy apples.

Hardware

The devastating impact of West Marine on the small marine hardware suppliers can’t be overstated. A trip to the local stores is always an exercise in futility. There is no bronze. The staff knows very little about anything nautical. And the prices are absurd. Taken together with the decline of wooden boat production in the 1960s when soulless fiberglass took over, a lot of traditional parts suppliers have gone out of business, most notably when it comes to bronze hardware. Learning how to cast bronze is on my list of future projects, but until then I’ve resorted to pilfering hardware from old boats and spars to meet my needs.

Stainless steel hardware and the disposable dreck carried by West Marine simply looks terrible on an old wooden sailboat. There are a few mail order/online sources but the prices of bronze are hard to swallow. Davey & Company in the U.K. produces beautiful work, as does JM Reineck & Son in Halifax, Mass.. There are some outstanding foundries that do custom work, notably the Port Townsend Foundry in Washington state. Bronze fasteners used to be readily available on Cape Cod from chandleries at local boat yards, but alas, stainless steel has taken over and my go-to source for bronze screws, nails, bolts, and washers is Fairwind Fasteners in Newport, Rhode Island who make excellent hardware and have outstanding customer service.

Fortunately for my wallet I had a good collection of bronze cleats and the original hardware from the Snafu II to work with.

The final weeks of the project before launching were spent carefully fastening blocks, chocks, and cleats back onto the hull and the new spars. The amount of “fiddly” work involved tried my patience, but I took my time and made multiple orders from Fairwind Fasteners rather than compromise and head to the local hardware store for stainless steel facsimiles.

Over 150 of these little suckers were hand-screwed into the boom and gaff to pin down the sail track. My hand is still cramped from the ordeal.

Paint

I used to hate painting but after getting into half-models and learning a lot from the master of boat painting — Malcolm Crosby, the former head of the paint shop at the Crosby boatyard in Osterville — from his daughter Betsey Crosby Thompson’s excellent series on YouTube, I find painting to be the most zen and rewarding aspect of boat restoration.

After giving the new spars their eight coats of varnish I turned to the hull and used a laser level to strike a line for a new boot top over the waterline. I painted the hull with the custom yellow sourced from George Kirby Jr. Paint (it required four coats to cover all the underlying dark spots, some of which still peek through), the bottom with Petit Vivid antifouling White, and the boot top with green Epifanes waterline paint. The boot top leaves a lot to be desired — I need to invent a parallel masking tape contraption to keep an even spacing between the top and the bottom of the line )assuming someone hasn’t already invented one).

The final steps included rebuilding the stern seat from planks of western red cedar, fitting the boom crutch and the new tiller, and repainting the interior of the boat with Seattle Grey.

Centerboard trunk and keelson stained and varnished, with new (vintage) bronze halyard and centerboard pennant cleats installed.

Rigging

A few days before the Fourth of July I gathered sons and son-in-law and carried the boat out to the yard where I stepped the mast, cut the forestay to the proper length, and rigged the halyards, sheets, outhauls and sail to be sure everything was more or less ready to launch. Bitter lessons from the past have taught me to get everything adjusted before loading the boat onto the trailer and launching it, as working on the beach is a nightmare of tools and parts falling into the water, dying batteries on cordless drills, and many trips up the hill to find a missing shackle or piece of light line in the boat shop.

I mounted the centerboard, easily found the right holes and banged the bolt through with a rubber mallet, backed the fender washers with leather washers slathered with silicone goop, and then turned my attention to the trailer, giving the tires a blast of air before unrigging everything and getting the boat lifted onto the trailer.

I launched on the morning of the 4th of July. In between killing a dozen horseflies taking biopsies of my calves and ignoring the Joe Dirt Jet Ski armada loading up for an afternoon of intoxication at the bird sanctuary, I had the boat on the mooring in time to make the parade. That afternoon I finally found a few minutes to row out to the boat and take her for a sail, the first time I’ve been behind the tiller in more than three decades. Alas, there was very little wind, so I bobbed around looking for a puff to fill the sails so I could see what needed adjusting to get it to set perfectly.

The next morning a very sporty breeze was blowing from the southwest, so I went out again and had a nervous sail that tested the strength of the new spars and revealed a serious crease along the battens that means I must tighten the gaff bridle to get the peak up a few more inches. Other than that, and a little leaking, she looks very pretty. Next up: another one of my grandfather’s skiffs, the old Dolphin owned by my cousin Peter. That can wait until the fall.

What I’m reading

As I finished the second draft of my book about the wreck of the Nantucket whaling bark Phoenix I turned my attention to the proposal for submission to literary agents in hopes of landing one to represent me in selling the book to a publisher. Book proposals are the literary equivalent of a business plan, especially for the narrative non-fiction genre. They are structured documents that can range as long as 50-pages and include a summary of the story, author’s biography, table of contents with a brief description of the chapters, a section describing the author’s “platform” (social media presence, credentials of authority, etc.) and a discussion of recent books that are comparable to the work.

The shipwreck/survival genre is popular, and the recent best-seller status of David Grann’s The Wager is one indicator of a strong market for maritime history. In my comps I focused on relatively recent titles such as: The Wager; Andrea Pitzer’s Icebound (about the 1596 voyage of William Barents to the Arctic Circle in search of a northeastern passage over Russia to China); and Hampton Sides’ Wide Wide Sea (about the Pacific voyage of exploration by Captain James Cook).

Hampton Sides is the author of eight non-fiction books. The first I read by him, Ghost Soldiers, is about the rescue of American POWs from a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines. Hellhound On His Trail is about James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in in Memphis in 1968.

The third Sides’ book I’ve read (and just finished) is In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Voyage of the U.S.S. Jeannette. It was published in 2014 by Doubleday.

Literary agents and publishers tend to prefer recent titles in a proposal’s comp section, but the parallels between my book — The Marginal Sea: Shipwreck and Survival on Siberia’s Sea of Okhotsk — and In the Kingdom of Ice are too close to ignore, so even though the book is nine years old I believe it should be included.

The story begins in 1879 when the U.S.S. Jeanette, a ship named for the sister of its benefactor, New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett (see my previous blog post about the history of the Mohawk disaster and Bennett’s role in that tale), sailed from San Francisco bound for the Bering Straits in search of a sea route to the North Pole. The ship had been rebuilt and reinforced to withstand the rigors of the arctic ice pack, and was under the command of the U.S. Navy officer George Washington DeLong who was accompanied by a crew of 32 men under the auspices of the US Navy.

The Jeanette searched for, and found the rumored Wrangel Island northwest of the straits, but became icebound and drifted with the ice pack for over a year, eventually sinking 300 miles off the coast of Russia in June, 1881 after the ice crushed her hull and left her crew on the ice with a pack of sled dogs, the ship’s small boats, and a stack of provisions.

DeLong led the crew over the torturous ice pack over the brief summer, a miserable slog that Sides brilliantly describes based on his research into the expeditions’ accounts and logs. After hopscotching between the New Siberian Islands they took to the three boats to cross 100 miles of open sea at Semyonvsky Island.

The three boats became separated in a late summer gale. Two made landfall on the delta of the Lena River. The third was lost without a trace. DeLong’s boat landed at the northern extremity of the insanely convoluted and unmapped delta. The second boat to make it to land, commanded by the Jeanette’s engineer, George Melville, came ashore on the southeastern side of the delta.

Then, as the Russians would say, “things got worse.”

I won’t spoil the story, but heartily recommend In the Kingdom of Ice as a classic in maritime survival literature. I first became aware of the Jeanette expedition during my research on the Marginal Sea via George Kennan’s Siberia and the Exile System, and that explorer’s description of being in the Sakha Republic when the Jeanette’s dead were being carried out of the wilderness for eventual interment in New York City.

The writing is superb, the scene setting and descriptions of the various personalities associated with the Jeanette are masterfully executed. All in all I would rank In the Kingdom of Ice up there with Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage as a must-have for any section of a book shelf devoted to Arctic survival.

I had the opportunity this week to talk to David Rose, founder of the Cambridge, MA startup LOOKOUT and chief operating officer Howie Hecht. The company is the inventor of the LOOKOUT, the AI camera system for boaters who could use an extra set of eyes while on the water.

Consisting of three cameras — as 360-degree 4K camera, a forward-facing 4K high-res daylight camera, and a forward-facing low light camera — affixed to the highest point on the vessel, the system uses a $9,995 Nvidia processing unit to identify, in real-time, what’s going on around the boat while underway.

Bell buoys, other vessels, floating logs, lobster pots, jet skis bent on mayhem …. if it’s on the water or near the water, LOOKOUT detects it and flags it on a multi-function screen mounted beside the helm. Add in integration with a digital chart plotter, an AIS (Automatic Identification System) receiver, GPS and night-vision (FIR) cameras and the result is transformational, especially for novice boaters who aren’t familiar with the perils and challenges of operating a boat in a chaotic unforgiving busy harbor.

Rose is an augmented reality expert — he was in charge of AR at eyeglass maker Warby Parker — and a boater. His inspiration was the question — why don’t boaters have the same intelligent displays they’re used to using in their motor vehicles? After all, most every new car comes with a video screen and backup camera that displays what is happening behind the vehicle, and overlays some graphical guidance to stop the driver from backing over junior’s tricycle or heaven forbid junior themselves.

The conversation with Rose and LOOKOUTs chief operating officer took me back to 1992 when I wrote a story for Forbes Magazine, “Smart Charts” about the first digital navigation charts and their integration with the then brand new global positioning satellite (GPS) system. After spending a day on Vineyard Sound with Woods Hole Oceanographic Scientist Arthur Gaines aboard a converted motor yacht with blacked out windows and portholes staring at a high end workstation with one of the first digital charts — a technology known as ECDIS (Electronic Chart Display and Information System) — I came away astonished at the great leap forward yachting was about to take by doing away with the old analog world of paper navigational charts, sextants, bearing compasses, and the crude art of dead reckoning. LOOKOUT is every bit as big a deal today as ECDIS was 33-years ago.

LOOKOUT isn’t cheap at $13,990– but most decent marine electronics aren’t. The system works with existing IP cameras, so if the vessel is already equipped with a FLIR, such as the very pricey ($24,000) FLIR m364c for infrared night vision, it’s vision capabilities can be even further enhanced. Prices of FLIR cameras are coming down, so like most smart electronics, the price of the components are likely to come down over time. Available since last summer (2024), the system is available at getalookout.com

Installation can be done by the sailor with a few tools, but as with any piece of marine electronics, the best option may be to ask a qualified marine electronics technician to set it up for you. It works on both sailboats (mast-top placement) and motor yachts.

The demos of the product are incredible. Here’s one from YouTube that shows LOOKOUT at work.

I’ve long maintained that the most powerful application of artificial intelligence is machine vision, and LOOKOUT bears this out with an elegant interface and an implementation model that puts the required processing power onboard (as opposed to suffering from the latency and lag of a network model). With further iterations and an integration with an autopilot and radar, it’s not inconceivable that LOOKOUT’s technology could be used for collision avoidance, and dramatically reduce the high risks of the high seas. LOOKOUT may not lead sailors to the marine equivalent of a driverless car, but for some single-handed boaters it definitely will take away some of the anxiety that comes with ducking down below for a moment and taking one’s eyes off of the waters for even a second.

During the course of my research into the mid-19th century bowhead whaling fishery in Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk I’ve depended on the archives of the Nantucket Historical Society, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the Providence, Rhode Island public library for access to their collection of ship’s logs.

When I started the project ten years ago, access to those collections was much the same as it was when I was a college student 50 years ago in the late 1970s — I showed up, talked your way past a librarian into the stacks, and if I was lucky and the librarian was in a good mood, I was allowed to touch some primary source material — aka original documents — if I promised not to write on them with ball point pens or eat my lunch while poring over the spidery Spencerian script penmanship.

When I narrowed my research down to two ships — the Massachusetts and the Phoenix of Nantucket — I made several research trips across Nantucket Sound on the Hy-Line ferries to spend the day at the Nantucket Historical Association’s archives in the former Quaker meeting house on 7 Fair Street reading whatever I could about the two ships and their voyages of 1856.

The first few visits were very unproductive. Because I was making a day trip, I had about six hours of reading time in the library, and initially thought I could read and transcribe from the old log books enough information to enlighten me about the events that transpired over the summer whaling season of 1858 around the wild Shantar Islands.

Alas, being unfamiliar with the format of the typical ship’s log, and totally bewildered by the handwriting of the “keeper” (the log was “kept” by the first or chief mate, who thus was referred to as the “keeper) and the abbreviations, conventions, and actual situation of the ship as described in entries such as the one below from the 1856-58 voyage of the whaling ship Massachusetts:

Thankfully, the kind librarians at the NHA were very helpful and helped me decipher some of the more inscrutable words. They began by telling me that, no, my great great grandfather Thomas Chatfield, captain of the Massachusetts was not the “keeper” of the logbook, but that it had been “kept” by chief mate William Folger of Nantucket.

The example above is the entry for Wednesday March 3, 1858. The header of the page reads “Bound to the Sandwich Islands March /58” — situating the ship in the Pacific on its way to the Hawaiian Islands after cruising off the coast of Baja California and Cabo San Lucas the previous three months.

In the left margin is the day and date “Wednesday 3d.” The entry then begins (as nearly all entries begin) with “Comd” — an abbreviation for “Commenced”. Reading on, Folger writes:

Learning to decipher such a entry takes practice and building some familiarity with the keeper’s handwriting.

“Comd with a moderate trade from ENE Steering W by S at 5 AM made the Isl of Owhyhee bearing W 10 miles dist Middle part light air from the SEd at daylight got the anchors ready at 9 AM took a pilot latter part standing in for the Bay at meredian the harbor bearing WSW 5 miles dist”

For the last few years I have been helping the Nantucket Historical Association transcribe logbooks of various whaling voyages. Because I need the transcript of the Massachusetts for my book on the wreck and rescue of the Phoenix, I was happy to learn the NHA had posted the full scans of the Massachusetts’ 1856 log book on a service called From the Page: “a crowdsourcing platform for archives and libraries where volunteers transcribe, index, and describe historic documents.”

Every morning I wake up and transcribe four pages of log book entries on the From the Page website. The web interface shows the scan of the original log in one window, and a transcription window to the right. When I log on go the project page for the Log of the Massachusetts and look for pages that need transcription.

Seeing that page 118 of the 182 page project needs to be transcribed, I select it and begin deciphering the script. The first line is the page header where the keeper always writes the name of the vessel of the left page and the general situation and year — “Bound for the Sandwich Islands /58” on the right.

The header on page 118 the reads, “Remarks while at Hilo S I / 58” Typing in the transcription box, I write “Remarks while at Hilo” then pause, and zoom in on the scan of the original log to try to decipher this puzzling abbreviation:

Because I’ve already spent about 40 hours puzzling over Mr. Folger’s penmanship I know the first cursive letter is an “S” and the second is an “I” and the underlined superscript beside the S is his way of noting things are plural. Deducing from previous pages that the ship has arrived at the Sandwich Islands, I put in square brackets and all-capitalized letters my interpretation of the “S” to mean “[SANDWICH]” and beside the “I” I guess “[ISLANDS]”. The diagonal slash and number “58” is how Folger notes the year. In this case 1858.

If I’m unsure of my guess, I would have added a question mark after the capitalized word and checked off the box “Needs Review” — a flag for the NHA’s librarians to please check my work and double check my interpretation. If I am completely stumped by Folger’s scrawl, I would insert three question marks in brackets after the mysterious word in question: [???]

After transcribing the header text, I zoom the view of the scan out, hit a carriage return to insert a blank line, and start transcribing the first entry for Sunday the 7th of March, 1858.

Most log entries at sea end with the position of the ship noted as “Lat by Obs” or Latitude by Observation and “Long by Chr” or Longitude by Chronometer, with the cartesian coordinates expressed in degrees and minutes.

Because the narrative structure of my book depends on knowing where the two ships are, especially when they come together for a “gam” or conversation between the two captains who are the book’s protagonists, I take the coordinates from the log book and enter them into Google Earth.

By placing a new placemark, I can enter in the latitude and longitude and then copy the transcribed text from the logbook into the description space. I can also add images of the original log, photographs of any landmarks or relevant equipment, and insert links to web pages — especially Wikipedia entries describing specific landmarks.

Google Earth is an exceptionally useful tool for a maritime historian. Because my book is set in the Sea of Okhotsk, and because the New England whalers usually sailed that body of water without the benefit of accurate charts (maps), they tended to give landmarks nicknames of their own that bear no relation to their actual Russian names.

Here’s how I keep track of the two ships as they work along the ice pack in the Sea of Okhotsk in the months of May and June 1858.

Because Google Earth does a terrible job identifying geographic features, I took it upon myself to label the names of the islands with both the whaler’s English nicknames and the appropriate non-cyrillic Russian names in use today.

The yellow push pins show the location of the Phoenix. The light blue show the position of the Massachusetts.

Note at the bottom of the screen shot above is an yellow icon for May 25 when the two ships came together for the first time since leaving Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard in the fall of 1856. There the two captains — Bethuel G. Handy of the Phoenix and Thomas Chatfield of the Massachusetts — and “double” brothers-in-law (each married the other man’s sister) spent an afternoon together catching up on the news and having a little Cotuitport “reunion” 15,000 miles away from the Cape Cod village they called home.

The power of Google Earth in helping me track the position of the two ships and gain some understanding of what they saw and experienced can’t be understated. Take for example the log entry of the Phoenix for June 4, 1858. Taking the text from the official transcript (as transcribed by volunteers using “From the Page” and archived on the Nantucket Historical Association’s website, I created a placemark with an anchor icon to note the ship’s position in the anchorage of Fabius Island.

In the placemark’s description I copy over the relevant transcription of the log, and rolling over the icon a popup tells me “Friday 4th Begins calm ship laying at ancker [ANCHOR] off Fabius harbor. [T]hree boats off after whales. [S]aw a few but did not strike. [L]atter part one boat getting wood”

Good to know. As I write about that in the book, I’m able to say with confidence that the winds were calm and the crew was off hunting whales with one of the ship’s boats ashore gathering firewood. But curious about Fabius Island, I turn to Wikipedia where an amazing savant with the username “ST1849” has described a whaling camp established on Fabius over the summer of 1858 by two American whaling ships. To remind myself to include this information in the book, I add a link to the Wikipedia entry for Fabius Island. I also make a note to find the logbooks for the New Bedford whaling ship Cicero and the Fairhaven ship Sharon so I can read the logbook entries from those ships and learn more about the summer whaling camp they established there.

I also have learned the Russian name of the island (Ostrov Nedorazumeniya) and its translation to the wonderful “Island of Misunderstanding” because some Russian cartographers forgot to add it to an early map.

Wondering what the actual island looks like and despairing of ever getting an opportunity to actually travel to the Sea of Okhotsk to see and experience those waters and stark landscape, I went searching for pictures of the Island of Misunderstanding. Finding one, I added an image link to the Google Earth placemark as seen above.

More later about these new powerful tools that are transforming how I research and write my maritime history projects. The potential to integrate the power of Google Earth’s maps with historical imagery and primary source material has me now thinking the final output of my project, The Wreck and Rescue of Captain B.G. Handy is not a traditional book but some hybrid e-book integrated with a “follow-along” guide that replaces the classic model of footnotes and illustrations with something far more interactive and visual.

I’m open to suggestions. The publishing landscape at present is iffy and I have yet to find a literary agent willing to take this project on and pitch it to the usual suspects in publishing. But passion projects being what they are, I continued to persevere and write away to tell the improbable story of two young men who came together across three of the biggest events of their generation– the Gold Rush, the final years of whaling, and the Civil War.

With a gale in the forecast, temperatures in the teens, and a very good friend who is captain of a freight boat to Martha’s Vineyard, what better time to go boating than 4 am in early January aboard a sturdy little newspaper & bread boat?

I was feeling very landlocked after New Year’s, surrounded by sick people, smug in my vaccinated cocoon of invincibility but itchy to get outside and away from the winter of discontent. Walking the schnauzer on the beach, my gaze went to the horizon and I thought about a ferry ride to Nantucket to read some whaling logs at the historical society. But then I remembered Captain Jeff and the Quickwater, so I wrote an email and asked if I could be supercargo some morning.

This morning was that morning and it was awesome, bouncing over Vineyard Sound across the narrowest stretch between the Cape and Martha’s Vineyard in a howling northwest gale, rolling over unseen waves, the spray freezing on the railings, searchlight casting for the channel cans and day markers on the end of the jetty in Oak Bluff.

I snubbed the spring line, helped unload the papers into a waiting van, and for all of 120 seconds stood on Martha’s Vineyard before we cast off and headed right back to Falmouth where the daily bread waited.

All in all the best morning so far in 2025.

Cousin Pete dropped off a bucket of quahogs yesterday. So what was a guy to do on a sunny November Friday afternoon but sit outside on the back steps with a clam knife and open them them up for a nice batch of chowder? Pure bliss. Even the schnauzer was into it.

After shucking about six dozen clams into a bowl, taking care to reserve their juices — or “liquor” as my grandfather called the precious gray essence de clam — I drove up to Stop & Shop to buy a bag of potatoes, some yellow onions, a couple of cans of evaporated milk and a hunk of salt pork.

Salt pork used to be in the meat case near the linguica and other processed pig products, but alas none was to be found. I asked the nice man re-stocking the chicken bin if there was any hiding in back but he shrugged and informed me the stuff is now banned in Massachusetts.

Banned? Are you shitting me? On what grounds? This was the protein of choice for Cape Cod whalemen, packed in barrels for the long ride to the Pacific. Glistening squares of white pig fat encrusted with handfuls of salt. A cardiac surgeons annuity. The second most important ingredient in a true clam chowder after the clams.

So I searched and sure enough I learned that last year the goo-goo’s on Beacon Hill banned the sale of salt pork and some other pig products thanks to a moronic referendum passed in 2016 by the tree huggers and dirt worshippers among us.

F#&k that noise! I can learn how to make my own just like I make my own pancetta and bacon and sausage. So off to the cookbook shelf to find Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie, where he writes:

“Salt pork was one of the most important cured items in Europe, especially so in the age of great exploration because, properly handled, it would last in its brine for up to two years (or even longer, according to some sources) at room temperature. When the cook wanted to use it, he simply removed a piece from its brine, soaked it in water, and simmered it long and slow.”

Salt pork is an essential ingredient for a true Cape Cod clam chowder. It’s diced, fried, and removed for use as a garnish on the finished product. It imparts a wonderful flavor to the onions and potatoes and there is no substitute (in my case I had a nice piece of home-made pancetta which will have to do for now.)

Imagine if the voters of the Commonwealth had banned this stuff in the 1830s? There would have been riots on the docks of New Bedford and Nantucket.

Here’s a link to my disquisition on the topic of a proper clam chowder from 20o7. I’m so pissed off I might even write a letter to RFK Jr. and beseech our new health czar to make Cape Cod chowder great again.

Background

My grandfather Henry Chatfield Churbuck built a dozen Cotuit Skiffs in 1948. At the time they were the latest additions to Cotuit’s fleet of the 14-foot “flatiron skiff” gaff-cat rigged racing boats designed by local boat builder Stanley Butler in the early 1900s. One of Henry’s twelve boats, the Snafu II, was reserved for my father, who raced her for a few years before selling it to the Wright family in the mid-1950s.

When I was ten years old the old boat was bought back from the Wrights — and I sailed and raced her up until my early 30s.

She has been rebuilt and repaired several times since she was first built. A fiberglass deck was put on in the early 70s, but rotted the decking beneath it and was replaced by local builder Dick Pierce in the late 70s in a major refit that included a new centerboard trunk, keelson, and coaming.

In the late 80s a cracked hull strake was repaired and a new mast step installed along with a plywood bottom by an utter hack of a boat builder at the Cape Cod Maritime Museum. He used stainless steel lag bolts and left the heads exposed on the bottom, and somewhere along the way the coaming cracked and began to split.

Diagnosis

The boat hasn’t been sailed for two decades, so last summer my son and I put her into the shop and started to remove layers of yellow paint to get an idea of how much rot, iron sickness, and other hidden issues were hiding. The rub rails were removed, the canvas deck stripped off, and the old ash coaming pried off of the deck beams and carlins. Out came the heat gun and many hours of peeling paint which revealed a little rot under the gunwale amidships in the old white cedar, and some serious rot on the white oak transom.

I ordered a bolt of Dynel (synthetic canvas) for the deck, and drove off Cape to a specialty lumber supplier in Stoughton for two ten-foot lengths of ash for the coaming, and white oak for the transom and rub rails.

The transom

The transom was made from two pieces of white oak held together with bronze rods. I cut out the bottom, rotten piece with a rotary saw and set to work dealing with the rotten hood ends of the strakes where the old iron boat nails had leached into the surrounding cedar. I drilled out the nails and filled the voids with pieces of hardwood dowels impregnated with penetrating epoxy (TotalBoat CPES)

A new transom was cut on the miter saw, coated with penetrating epoxy and glued in place with WEST System epoxy thickened with microballoons.

I added an oak stern post — per the plans, to strengthen the two transom planks and avoid the challenges of drilling long 18″ holes through the edges of them to accept new bronze rods. I want to learn how to do bronze rod plank work, but I figured the combination of the beefy stern post and the epoxy would do the job of holding the stern together and withstanding the considerable force of the rudder’s pintles in the gudgeons.

I fit some chine logs along the corner of the bottom and transom with pieces added up along the ends of the cedar strakes. Everything will eventually be secured with bronze screws driven up through the bottom and into the side strakes. The seat will be rebuilt with a slot cut through it for a boom crutch.

Deck covering

After dealing with the transom replacement I turned to the deck. The underlying plywood installed by Dick Pierce was in excellent shape, so I cut the Dynel into two pieces (the deck is too wide for a single roll to cover), painted half the deck with a thin skim layer of WEST epoxy, then laid out the fabric, troweling onto the surface another thin layer of epoxy until the weave was impregnated and the cloth was solidly tacked down with no bubbles or wrinkles. I used an electric stapler with Monel staples to lock down the edge along the gunwale and the inside of the cockpit. When the first half of the deck cured, I repeated the process on the other half, this time taking care to lay down a straight seam from the mast hole back to the cockpit between the two halves of Dynel.

Half of the deck covered and epoxied in place.

When the decking was in place I trimmed the excess with a hot knife and finished with a thinned coat of platinum grey marine paint.

I cut down a piece of 1/2″ white oak into 1″ rub rails, drilled and countersunk the strips, coated with penetrating epoxy and then, over the course of a nice warm week, gave them six coats of varnish. I’ll wait until the hull is faired, primed, and painted before installing them, probably next spring.

After priming the hull with two-part epoxy primer from TotalBoat, I faired the dings and scratches with Swedish Putty from Fine Paints of Europe. It’s hard to see all the flaws in the hull until it’s primed and sanded and the TotalBoat epoxy goes on thick but sands down beautifully with 220-grit sanding discs on an oscillating sander.

The steamy part

Then came the moment I was dreading. Steaming the ash coaming. My son Fisher ordered some steel five-gallon jerry cans from eBay and while they were en route I began studying everything I could about steam boxes and the arcane science of bending wood. Because I was going to steam a ten-foot plank I was looking at constructing a 12-foot long box out of plywood. Then someone writing on Woodenboat’s forum suggested foam insulation panels and that seemed like the way to go until I remembered a YouTube video from Louis Sauzedde’s excellent Tips from Shipwright series where he steamed wood in a plastic bag. Having just used my vacuum food sealing machine to seal up five pounds of Canadian bacon I smoked in the smoker, I had a 50-foot roll of food bag material which can be used for sous vide cooking. I figured if I could boil food in the bag, then I could boil wood in it too. So it was off to West Marine for a four foot length of heavy duty exhaust hose, and I was in business.

I pre-drilled two holes in the center of the plank to align it with the centerline of the boat, slid it into a 12-foot piece of bag, and suspended it with clothes line from two saw horses. The hose was taped into the center of the bag, the burner was lit, and within 15 minutes steam started to flow.

The rule of thumb is an hour of steaming for every inch of thickness, so with a half-inch thick plank I set a timer for 30 minutes and while I waited smeared a bead of Dolfinite bedding compound around the inside of the deck frame.

There was some debate about giving the plank 45 minutes of steam, but having read that the lignin (the compound is akin to the natural “glue” that binds wood together) could be overcooked, I decided to pull the plank at 35 minutes.

Time was of the essence. So, with my son and best friend assisting me, and everyone wearing work gloves, we slit the end of the bag, slid the plank out, and rushed it to the waiting boat.

For some reason I had it in my mind that the plank would be like a noodle and fairly easy to bend to fit. It was not. It fought us for an hour, bending into the boat with some muscle but feeling like it wanted to explode into splinters at any moment. Clamps wouldn’t pull the plank flush with the deck, and whoever the genius was that smeared Dolfinite around the opening deserved a failing grade, leading my son to dub the brown goo “boat diarrhea.” Just as we were about to give up and head to the lumber yard for a new piece of ash I wished out loud for a comealong strap to crank the stubborn plank into place. “One second, ” said my son, who went to his truck and grabbed a ratchet strap.

With one end of the strap anchored to a screw driver inside of the mast step, and the other end hooked around the aft end of the plank, we cranked it into place, whacked it with a rubber mallet to get it aligned just so, and with high-fives all around, finally declared victory after an hour of struggle and swearing.

The following day I cut and shaped the aft ends of the coaming, cutting the curves and notching them to fit into the transom. The screws were driven, the holes bunged with plugs, and the edges chamfered with a hand plane.

The curved piece will be joined to the two end pieces by butt blocks screwed to the inside and outside of the coaming.

That concludes the woodworking part of the restoration (until I make new spars this winter). With a few days in the high 60s, I’ll finish fairing the hull with fairing compound, Swedish putty, and another coat of two-part epoxy primer, then sand it all down with 220-grit sandpaper and try to get a coat of the custom yellow paint I had made up by George Kirby paint in New Bedford.

All in all a very therapeutic exercise in ancestor worship. Once this project is finished I’m going to turn my attention to another Churbuck-built skiff, number 42, the Dolphin.

Stay tuned for more over the the winter.

I’m a former political reporter and statehouse bureau chief for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, a daily newspaper covering the Merrimack Valley along the Massachusetts and New Hampshire border. In the early 1980s I covered elections for every position from local school committees and boards of selectmen to state representatives, US Congress, the US Senate, and in 1985, the US Presidency.

I enjoyed the beat and did my level best to be as objective as possible in my reporting, fact-checking candidate claims, and always offering candidates a chance to respond to, or rebut, claims made by their opponents. However being Massachusetts, the dominance of the Democratic Party made some of the races feel like foregone conclusions, whereas over the border in New Hampshire, the Republican Party was dominant: neither state would have been considered a “swing” state, however both had a mixture of elected officials from both parties.

As I got to know the candidates I realized the minority party was less than eager to trust me or respond to my questions for the single reason that on the eve of the election the paper would publish on its editorial page its endorsements. Almost without exception the candidates it blessed were local Democrats. I assume the endorsements were handed down by the owner/publisher and that was the power of owning a newspaper personified, so I kept my mouth shut because otherwise there was never any whiff of interference with my coverage. But those endorsements made my job harder, not easier, and trying to argue my independence to a skeptical candidate and their handlers was ultimately what drove me out of political journalism and into the business and technology beats.

Being young and naive I couldn’t comprehend why, in a job where the concept of objectivity and fairness were paramount, the newspaper would suspend its neutrality and tell its readers who to vote for. Sure, I understand the history of American journalism where most cities were covered by multiple newspapers competing for the same readers, most blatantly and openly aligned with one party or the other. As a voter, the idea that I would register as anything other than an Independent seemed to me to be a biased career blunder beyond comprehension. While covering the 1984 New Hampshire presidential primaries I watched top tier political reporters like Walter Robinson at the Boston Globe, or David Broder at the Washington Post go out of their way to refuse even a free cup of coffee offered to them at a candidate’s event. Some journalists, I believe, even felt that political reporters should not vote at all to keep themselves objectively centered.

Last week the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post told their editorial boards not to endorse a candidate in this election. The outrage in the comments sections, the vows to cancel subscriptions, the accusations of billionaire cowardice and perfidy made me realize how far journalism has drifted from the core principle of objectivity to opinion. Seriously, does any editorial board believe its endorsement is going to change any intelligent voter’s mind when it comes to casting their ballot? I have no problem with a columnist stating a preference for a candidate or political position. I have no problem with readers writing letters or posting comments with their opinions. But when the nearly always anonymous editorial political endorsements are published as the preference of the news organization as a whole, that’s where the public’s trust in journalism begins to erode.

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.