America’s Cup

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America’s Cup

Origins. One of the oldest and most prestigious prizes awarded in international yacht racing, the America’s Cup was originally an 100-guinea silver trophy offered by the Royal Yacht Squadron to the winner of a race around the Isle of Wight on 22 August 1851. John Cox Stevens, a wealthy New Jersey real estate broker and founder of the New York Yacht Club, won the race by defeating seventeen British yachts. He named the cup after his yacht America and put the trophy on display at his Annandale, New Jersey, estate. After his death in 1857, the cup became the trust of the New York Yacht Club “as a permanent challenge cup, open to competition by any organized yacht club of any foreign country.”

Social Atmosphere. In the late nineteenth century yacht racing in the United States, as in England, was a pastime of the wealthy, and it attracted many spectators. The first challenge for the cup since 1857 occurred in 1870 and stimulated enormous interest in New York. On the day of the race, businesses closed down and the harbor swarmed with countless spectator craft festooned with ribbons and pendants. The race itself was the focus of intense rivalry on the part of the participants. The seemingly glamorous world of yachtsmen attracted international public attention and led to speculation in sporting journals as to the merits of particular captains and hull designs. Ship owners spent fortunes on sleek vessels and highly trained crews. Until 1920 the course for the America’s Cup generally started in Upper New York Harbor, ranged out into the Atlantic Ocean for thirty miles, and ended off Staten Island. (An inside course, which was sailed within the confines of New York Harbor, was last used in 1887.)

Ashbury. There was no competition for the cup in the 1860s because the Civil War brought a temporary halt to pleasure boating and racing off the eastern seaboard. In 1870 James Ashbury, a wealthy British railroad entrepreneur, became the first contender for the cup. On 8 August the race featured seventeen New York Yacht Club schooners against Cambria, the British vessel. Cambria finished 42 minutes behind Magic, the winning vessel. Ashbury complained about the course and number of ships, maintaining it gave the New York Yacht Club an unfair advantage in defending its possession of the cup. In response to that complaint,

the New York Yacht Club announced that future challenges would be one-on-one matches rather than mass affairs. In the first one-on-one challenge in 1871, Ashbury entered the Livonia, but it lost two of the three races to the Columbia of the New York Yacht Club.

Challenges. The Canadians and British were consistent challengers to the cup in the late nineteenth century. In August 1876 the Canadian yacht Countess of Dufferin lost to the American Madeleine. Five years later Canada again made a bid for the cup. The Bay of Quinte Yacht Club of Belleville, Ontario, entered Atalanta, a boat designed and owned by Alexander Cuthbert. Mischief, designed by A. Cray Smith, defeated Atalanta. Cuthbert, who wanted to challenge for the cup again with Atalanta in 1882, was thwarted by a rule change that said the same boat could not challenge for two years. In 1885 the New York Yacht Club accepted the challenge of England’s Royal Yacht Squadron on behalf of Sir Richard Sutton. In perhaps the best series of races in the history of the challenge, the English cutter Genesta lost to the American sloop Puritan, owned by a syndicate headed by J. Malcolm Forbes, the son of railroad and shipping magnate John Murray Forbes. The New York Yacht Club retained possession of the America’s Cup with victories by Mayflower over the British Galatea in 1886 and by Volunteer over Thistle in 1887.

Dunraven and Lipton. After Volunteer’s victory, the New York Yacht Club instituted a new rule stipulating that the challenger had to reveal the design of its boat before the race. In 1889 the Royal Yacht Squadron, on the behalf of the earl of Dunraven, issued a challenge for the cup. The challenge was withdrawn, however, when Dunraven refused to indicate the design of his boat, only its dimensions; however, in 1893 Dunraven yielded to the demands of the New York Yacht Club and entered his boat, Valkyrie II. The American boat Vigilant, the first of several America’s Cup champions designed by master boatbuilder Nat Herreshoff, defeated Valkyrie II. In 1895 Dunraven’s Valkyrie III lost to Defender, another boat designed by Herreshoff and owned by J. P. Morgan. Dunraven’s charge that the interference of spectator boats caused his boat to lose led to such acrimony that the New York Yacht Club did not expect to receive another British challenge for the cup until the next century. However, in 1899 the Yacht Club received a challenge from Sir Thomas Lipton, the Scottish-bred Irish tea merchant. His yacht, Shamrock I, lost to the American vessel, Columbia. Lipton’s 1899 challenge was the first of five that the New York Yacht Club would accept from him during the next thirty-one years. Despite his determination, Lipton failed each time to wrest the cup away from the Americans.