Gems from the Museum

Continued from page 6

The Wizard of Bristol

Just about every day, curator Kurt Hasselbalch gets a call from a boat builder, yacht owner, model maker, or scholar requesting access to the Haffenreffer-Herreshoff Collection. The 13,500 construction drawings in the archive represent 93 percent of the steam and sailing yachts designed by the legendary Nathanael G. Herreshoff, a mechanical-engineering student at MIT in the late 1860s who became obsessed with building light, fast boats. The Herreshoff documents, a gift from Rudolph Haffenreffer 1895, are only a small part of a larger archive known as the Hart Nautical Collection. Although the Hart collection contains more than 100,000 yacht plans, Hasselbalch estimates that easily half of the calls he fields every year pertain to Herreshoff.

Captain Nat dominated the world of yacht design through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For nearly 40 years, Herreshoff designed and supervised the construction of every vessel built by Herreshoff Manufacturing of Bristol, RI, right down to the fittings. Generally acknowledged as a genius of the craft, the wizard of Bristol developed construction methods and fittings that are standard fare on sailing boats today. And his construction techniques were so sound that many of his sailboats are still in the water, regularly winning races.

Perhaps his greatest fame came from his Americas Cup winners. Five of his yachts successfully defended the cup six consecutive times between 1893 and 1920, a dominance of sailings most prestigious regatta that has never been duplicated. But it is Herreshoffs Reliance, the largest boat ever to defend the cup, that is most revered. The bronze and steel sloop that won the regatta in 1903 measured 43.6 meters. In the final race, it had built up so great a lead that its opponent, Shamrock III, withdrew without completing the course.

In 1997, the museum finished cataloguing the Haffenreffer-Herreshoff Collection in a database and moved the drawings to microfilm, making it easier to fulfill requests for plans. People from around the world use the drawings to restore original boats, build replicas, or create accurate scale models. Because the plans are so complete, its possible to exactly restore or replicate a boat even down to the rivets that hold it together.

With access to the archive simplified and interest in classic yachts growing, Hasselbalch expects even greater demand for the designs. Future plans include digitizing the drawings and linking them to the database to make it even easier to re-create a Herreshoff masterpiece.