Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 154.djvu/195

place. "The America," writes an 1851 enthusiast, "has a low black hull, two noble sticks of extraordinary rake, without an extra rope, and is altogether the beau ideal of what one expects to read about in one of Fenimore Copper's novels." Another adds, "When close to her you see that her bow is as sharp as a knife-blade, and is 'scooped away' as it were, until it begins to swell again, the sides springing out round as an apple till within a few feet of the mainmast, where she reaches her greatest beam." She was a schooner of 170 tons American, 208 English, built at New York by David Steers, a naturalised Englishman, born at Dartmouth in Devonshire, a true genius in the matter of naval architecture, celebrated for the amazing speed of his pilot schooners. Her extreme length, "over all" as it is called, was 100 feet; between her stem and sternpost, 94 feet. She drew ten feet of water forward, five feet aft. Her extreme beam was 23 feet. Her sails had in all probability as much to do with her superiority as her hull. They were matchlessly cut, and designed to lie flat as a board, being made of stout cotton instead of the heavy canvas used by the English vessels. She depended almost entirely on her lower sails. The America's mainsail was laced to the boom, an improvement the conservative feeling in this country generally adopted for racing vessels in the seventies! Her foresail only worked on a boom when running; her forestaysail also was occasionally fitted with a boom. Her maintopsail was a toy; she had no fore topmast. Her jib-boom was a decorative English after-thought. She was extremely handy, worked very lightly, with seven men and a boy for crew, it was stated, many less at any rate than an English vessel of her size would have needed. To sum up the work she did in a sentence—up to the date of her advent our yachting had been before all things under naval influence, and yachts were treated like frigates. All that the America utterly abolished.

Mr Stevens was everywhere feted and lionised. No courtesy was too great for him. His yacht, having accidentally or purposely been allowed to take the ground, with the result that some feet of her false keel were carried away, was despatched to Portsmouth Dockyard, entering at eight o'clock, and coming out fully repaired at twelve, the admiral-superintendent himself supervising every thing that was done, and insisting that no charge should be made. This dry-docking had its effect. It silenced those who protested that the America must have been possessed of some secret and illegitimate propelling power below. The victorious schooner was commanded to Osborne Bay. Her Majesty, accompanied by the Prince of Wales in a white suit and sailor hat, and her husband, the Prince Consort, went aboard, spent three-quarters of an hour in admiring inspection, and left after bestowing generous largess on the crew. Two camps were formed: some of the English yachtsmen adopting the "I told you so" argument, and denouncing all that was English, others indulging in great indignation, denying that the America was "a gentleman's yacht," she was only a racing machine; asserting that Mr Stevens did not cross in her, but came over by a steam-liner; vowing that the trials were no trials, and so on.

Commodore Stevens returned to New York with his cup, but without his ship, and was accorded a