Category: History

XOD racing keelboat centenary celebrations, Royal Lymington Yacht Club, 3rd June

XOD-Fleet-at-Cowes-R-Tomlinson-lr Skandia Cowes Week 2007 day 1, Saturday August 4 X166 Swallow, X86 Aora
The XOD fleet racing at Cowes; photo taken by Rick Tomlinson

The XOD keelboat class will kick off its its centenary celebrations by holding a day race in Edwardian costume at Royal Lymington Yacht Club on Friday 3rd June.

I trust there will be plenty of tweed, eminently twiddleable moustachios, and of course bonnets and demure but practical long skirts!

Some 100 or so boats are expected to compete in a three day centenary regatta including the Lymington and Yarmouth XOD fleets.

In 1911 Yachting Monthly reported that seven 21ft keelboats of a newly established one design class came to the start line for their first race, off Hythe in Southampton Water. The boats were gaff-rigged, and the Bermudan rig came in during 1928.

By 1939, 81 X One Design boats had been built. In 1961, there were 52 starters at Cowes Week, and now a hundred years after the first race the class hasn’t just survived but grown to become the largest fleet on the start line at Aberdeen Asset Management Cowes Week.

The original racewas won by Portsmouth brewer Harry Brickwood. One of the boats in the original race X5 Madcap, is still racing today, while the first XOD, X1 Mistletoe, which was built by Alfred Westmacott on the Isle of Wight, is now at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall.

Cowes Week 2010 was won by X26, which was built in 1923.

The XOD is a pretty wooden yacht of just under 21ft in length; it has two or three crew, and crews of all sizes compete on equal terms. The spinnaker can be flown from within the safety of the cockpit, which avoids any need for foredeck work.

A remarkable history of the slave trade

Slave canoe of the 1840s

Slave canoe drawing from The Illustrated London News, 1849; image reference EO22, as shown on www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library. In West Africa, these canoes were the main vehicles for transporting slaves from the coast to transatlantic vessels. According to The Illustrated London News, the canoes could carry 200 slaves, and were said to be 40ft long, 12ft 7-8ft deep

 

Intheboatshed.net regular Ed Bachmann has drawn my attention to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database website, and the recently published prize-winning book Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The database provided the basis for the atlas in which historians David Eltis and David Richardson have created a comprehensive, 350-year history of kidnapping and coercion featuring nearly 200 maps.

Between 1501 and 1867, the transatlantic slave trade claimed an estimated 12.5 million Africans and involved almost every country with an Atlantic coastline. The extraordinary online Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database includes records of nearly 35,000 slaving voyages, or about 80 per cent of all such voyages ever made. The maps show which nations participated in the trade, where the ships involved were outfitted, where the captives boarded ship, and where they were landed in the Americas, details the experiences of the transatlantic voyages and the eventual abolition of the traffic.

There are also illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries that reveal the human story underlying the trade.

If you don’t buy the book, you can read Professor Eltis’s long essay on the website: A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade on the website.

Thanks for the tipoff Ed!

 

Legendary work and cruising boat designer William Garden passes away

Bill Garden plank on edge cartoon

‘I love to design boats. Rather design boats than eat. Often do. So let’s get going on the perfect ship before you are so old that you have to be carried aboard.

‘I have drawers full of stock plans and a head full of boats that want to be launched.

‘Whether you want the ultimate in a motor or sailing yacht or a one cylinder clam hound, I can fix you up with a plan to suit.’

So wrote the legendary William Garden, who died last week. Born in 1918, he was a Canadian boat designer who drew boat plans for many hundreds of craft in a long career, including both yachts and workboats, and anything in between.

Many of them as attractive as you’ll find anywhere.

He also created a distinctively salty and positive style in writing about his plans and the boats that could be built from them – a style that was very much in keeping with the confident and determined young man we see in the photo on this biographical Mystic Seaport web page. He also had a puckish sense of charm and humour, which is clear from the salty little cartoons he often added to his drawings and plans – such as the one above showing a contented pipe-smoking fella getting progressively less comfortable as his plank-on-edge yacht heels further and further…

Garden must have been quite a character.

There’s a particularly nice article here, and a list of Garden designs held by the Mystic Seaport Museum here.

My thanks go to Peter Vanderwaart for alerting me to Bill Garden’s passing.