America - the myth (part 1)

Was America really the revolutionary craft the press made out at the time? asks Adrian Morgan

She has a low, black hull, two noble sticks of extreme rake... When close to her you see that her bow is as sharp as a knife-blade, scooped away as it were outwards till it swells towards the stern, the sides gradually springing outwards as round as an apple till a little forward of the mainmast, where she has her greatest beam, being there some twenty two feet and some inches across.. . Standing at the stern and looking forward the deck is nearly of wedge shape, the bow being as sharp as the apex of a triangle, and the stern not being very much less than the extreme width of the beam'
Bell's Life, August 1851

On March 28, 1942, an unusually heavy snowfall smothered the New England countryside. At the height of the blizzard, the roof of a nondescript shed on the waterfront at Trumpy's Yard in Annapolis collapsed. The incident was scarcely newsworthy. America was at war and had other, far more pressing, matters on its mind.

But to the historians of the America's Cup it was a tragedy, for the shed was the final resting place of a low, black schooner whose legacy has inspired controversy ever since. Almost 60 years after the world's most celebrated yacht was crushed beneath tons of corrugated iron and snow, the myth of her invincibility still endures.

America was designed by George Steers, superintendent of the mould loft at the yard of New York's leading shipbuilder, William H Brown, at the foot of 12th Street on the East River. Steers' father had learned his trade at the Royal Naval Dockyard at Devonport, emigrating to the United States in 1819, a year before George was born. Brown agreed to build a 'strong, seagoing vessel, and rigged for ocean sailing'. The schooner's lines were a development of Steers' earlier 66ft pilot schooner Mary Taylor, built in 1849, which had established the 31-year-old designer's reputation.

With a hollow entry and carrying her maximum beam of 22ft well aft, America measured 101ft 9in overall on a waterline length of 90ft 3in. On her steeply-raked 79ft 6in foremast and 81ft mainmast she carried a simple rig: jib, foresail and mainsail, totalling 5263 sq ft, cut by Rubin H Wilson of Port Jefferson, Long Island, New York from cotton duck woven at Colt's Factory in Paterson, New Jersey.

America was commissioned by a syndicate headed by Commodore John Cox Stevens of the New York Yacht Club specifically to take up a challenge proffered by Lord Wilton of Grosvenor Square, London, commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron in a letter dated February 22 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition. In his reply, Stevens wrote: '... some four or five friends and myself have a yacht on the stocks, which we hope to launch in the course of two or three weeks.

Should she answer the sanguine expectations of her builders, we propose to avail ourselves of your friendly bidding, and take with a good grace the sound thrashing we are likely to get by venturing our longshore craft in your rough waters...'