Pilots

Only available in the UK from Kelvin Hughes and Bookharbour.com

"In the days before GPS and radar, the worst nightmare of the sea captain often came when he was nearest to safety. Running in from the ocean in thick weather on a dark night, reduced to dead reckoning and perhaps having had no sight of sun or stars for days, his situation was desperate. Captain after captain pressed on with his position uncertain, under the sort of stress today’s navigator need never know, until, ahead in the darkness, he saw a blue flare burning from the pilot boat. Soon the ladder would go over the side to welcome the man the crew wanted to see more than any living soul: the pilot."

To manage this huge topic, Chasse-Maree brought together an international team of historians under the direction of Tom Cunliffe. Working for five years with Cunliffe as ‘Chief Pilot’, this highly qualified group of experts has produced a major three-volume work that is as authoritative as it is beautiful. Volume 1 encompasses the thrilling pilot schooners of North America and their British counterparts. Contemporary images illustrate a text that takes in the California Gold Rush, the development of the New York schooner to the yacht America and beyond, blockade runners from Virginia, ice in the St. Lawrence seaway, the powerful schooners of Liverpool, the mysterious but lovely shallops of Swansea and many more besides. Alongside paintings are line drawings and photographs with salty yet scholarly commentaries. Reading the book opens the mind to all facets of sailing-boat development, yet the yarns of the lives and sometimes the deaths of the pilots themselves maintain a lively human interest.

Extract:

It would be improper to continue a discussion about the New York pilot schooner without considering the most famous of them; one which, with supreme irony, was not in fact a pilot schooner at all, but a yacht. This was George Steers’ America, arguably the most influential sailing vessel of all time, always excepting the Santa Maria and Noah’s Ark, neither of which are likely to have won prizes for the subtleties of their hull form.

Like many true geniuses, George Steers’ talent flowered early. The son of an immigrant shipwright, he had designed and built his first boat at the age of ten. This small craft was lost when he almost drowned in her, saved by his elder brother James. When he was sixteen he built a fast little sloop, then at eighteen, he produced a very rapid rowboat which he named the James Cox Stevens. Stevens was a man of huge influence in the city and to name the boat after him was a political move of the sort favoured by many owners and builders throughout the sailing pilot period.

Steers’ shrewd use of the name brought him to the great man’s attention and in due course he was commissioned to build Gimcrack, Stevens’ famous schooner aboard which the New York Yacht Club was founded in the mid-1840s.

In 1849, Steers forsook a partnership in Brooklyn to cross the East River and work for a builder called William Brown. This proved advantageous for all concerned, with Brown’s excellent reputation as a builder and Stevens’ patronage of Steers. In 1850, Brown agreed with George Schuyler of the New York Yacht Club that he would build a schooner to take on the Royal Yacht Squadron in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in London. The price was high at $30,000, but Brown promised that if the yacht did not beat all-comers, it would be refunded in full! On the test day, Steers’ new boat, the America, was beaten by a light-weight flyer that would have fallen apart if taken outside Sandy Hook, so a compromise was reached at a knockdown price of $20,000 for the eminently seaworthy schooner.

A club syndicate was now formed under Commodore James Cox Stevens, the America came to England and the rest is too well known for inclusion here. Suffice it to say that the yacht was so stoutly built by Brown’s men that she lasted until World War II, when she was finally destroyed as the roof of her storage shed fell in from weight of snow.

America was in the direct line of development from the Mary Taylor and the Grinnell. Unlike the pilot boats themselves, she did carry some decoration in the form of trail boards, with a noble American Eagle under her broad transom. She also employed more rocker to her keel than was customary in the pure working forms, but her sections and her rig, with its 5,263 sq ft of flat-cut cotton sails, are pure 1850’s pilot schooner.

It seems that attempts to ‘power up’ this working sail plan met with little success. A jibboom was tried while sailing in England, but the experiment was not repeated after the spar broke during the race for the schooner’s most famous victory.

At 2¾ inches per foot, America’s masts were extremely raked, as were those of her pilot relatives. Her ‘bullet-proof’ foremast measured 20½ inches at the partners.

Her lines were taken off more than once, sometimes after rebuilds, so it is not easy to ascertain her exact shape. However, the most likely source of the truth is probably a half-model said to have been carved by Steers himself for presentation to Queen Victoria but never presented. Her dimensions were given in the New York Herald in June 1851 as 95ft on deck, midships beam 23ft, draught 11ft, with a measured displacement of 180 tons. Marina operators would also have been interested in the length of her bowsprit which stood a mere seventeen feet outboard. Nothing was said about the surprising overhang of her boom aft.

America shipped sixty-one tons of inside ballast with nothing on the keel. She carried fifteen crew forward with three private cabins while her comfortable saloon slept a further six. She was tiller steered, sported the usual pilot schooner break in the deck forward of the mainmast and featured an unusual round cockpit.