How America Won the Cup

Approaching the 35th America’s Cup, Adrian Morgan admires the Great Gamble that won the first event for the Schooner America

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On 28 March, 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 historians of the America’s Cup it was a tragedy, for the shed was the final resting place of America, a low, black schooner whose legacy has inspired controversy ever since. Nearly 75 years after one of the world’s most celebrated yachts was crushed beneath tons of corrugated iron and snow, the myth of her invincibility still endures.

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 22 February, 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition.

The price agreed for her building was high – $30,000 – but extraordinary conditions were written into the contract. If she did not prove to be the fastest vessel in the United States the syndicate could refuse her. Moreover, if she were to prove unsuccessful in England, her builders would be obliged to take her back. Stevens, a wealthy man and notorious gambler, was taking no chances – he meant to cover his bets either way.

“News of her informal victory spread like wildfire”

She was a gamble even on the drawing board, her underwater shape influenced by Englishman John Scott Russell’s Wave Line theory, which aimed to produce a hull that offered least resistance to the water, concave bows replacing the rounded bows of the era.