America the myth - part 2

Adrian Morgan looks at 'the race' and whether or not the first America's Cup winner was indeed revolutionary

Continued from part 1 yesterday...

The news of America's informal 'victory' spread like wildfire. Those who might ordinarily have engaged in a little flutter over the Yankee schooner shied away. In those days huge sums were wagered on yacht racing. In one 224-mile Channel race some £50,000 changed hands.

Stevens was probably more worried about the Laverock race that he cared to admit for when he did challenge the Squadron is was to be a schooners-only race, over an offshore course and in over 6 knots of wind. There were no takers. He then made it known that he was willing to race any 'cutter, schooner or vessel of any other rig', but the stake was to be an outrageous 10,000 guineas, more than double the cost of her building: 'a staggerer', according to James Steers' huge even by the standards of a notorious gambler like Stevens.

Historians have tended to read this as evidence of Stevens' faith in his schooner. If Bell's Life's account of the Laverock race is to be believed, may it not have been designed to frighten away competition, leaving Stevens to claim, as the papers would say, that British yachtsmen were, indeed, running scared and allow him to return home reputation intact?

Not surprisingly there was again no response. For two weeks America lay at Cowes, sails furled. Hopes of a race with Joseph Weld's Alarm, for a purse of $5000, came to naught and the British press, sensing a good story, were scathing.

The Times wrote: 'Most of us have seen the agitation which the appearance of a sparrow-hawk on the horizon creates among a flock of wood-pigeons or skylarks when, unsuspecting all danger and engaged in airy flights of playing about over the fallows, they all at once come down to the ground and are rendered almost motionless with fear of the disagreeable visitor. Although the gentlemen whose business is on the waters of the Solent are neither wood-pigeons nor skylarks, and although the America is not a sparrow-hawk, the effect produced by her apparition off West Cowes among yachtsmen seems to have been completely paralysing... It could not be imagined that the English would allow an illustrious stranger to return to America with the proud boast that she has flung down the gauntlet to England and had been unable to find a taker.'

Eventually Stevens' friend, George Robert Stevenson, son of the railway engineer, offered to race his unremarkable 100 ton Titania, designed by Wave Line theorist John Scott Russell, over a 20-mile windward leeward course for £100. The date was fixed for August 28. In the meantime the Royal Yacht Squadron, stung by the criticism, took the plunge. When finally America did manage to compete, it was to be for a 27in high cup, crafted by Garrard in High Renaissance style of 134 ounces of silver, worth 100 guineas, subscribed to by their members.

The race, 53 miles around the Isle of Wight, was scheduled for August 22. A south westerly, aided by a strengthening east-going tide, prevailed that morning. No one had any doubts about the outcome. A Bell's Life correspondent had reported that the Le Havre pilot, seeing her for the first time in Le Havre, had called her 'a wonder' and The Illustrated London News a 'rakish piratical-looking craft whose appearance in bygone days in the Southern Atlantic would have struck terror into the souls of many a homeward-bounder...' Betting was heavily in favour of the Yankee schooner.

The fleet, when it finally assembled in two lines off Cowes, must have been apprehensive - and the press, assiduously stoking the fires, had already written their headlines. After the race, as the fleet headed for the Nab, Steers was to complain that the British yachts had tried to form an impenetrable barrier to America's progress. For such a competitive fleet to have acted thus in harmony must have meant they felt they faced a threat. But did they?