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British, though, she was worth every penny. Near the finish line, aboard her royal yacht, Queen Victoria herself waited to present the "100 Guineas Cup" to the winner. "Sail ho!" came the cry from the bridge. "Which boat is it?" demanded the Queen. "The America, Madam." Said Victoria: "Oh, indeed. And which is second?" There was a pause while the signalman's glass swept the horizon. "I regret to report," came the halting reply, "that there is no second." At least not that eyes could see —the British were so far behind.
That set the pattern. Over the next 86 years, the British tried 14 times to win the Cup, the Canadians twice, and all their efforts met with defeat at the hands of Yankee design, tactics or luck. "I willna challenge again. I canna win," sighed Glasgow Tea Baron Sir Thomas Lipton in 1931, when the fifth of his Shamrocks suffered the same inglorious fate as the previous four. Next came T.O.M. Sopwith, famed stunt flyer, hydroplane racer and aircraft builder—and with him the grand era of the J-boat, majestic, 130-ft.-long monsters with 165-ft. masts and clouds of sail, crewed largely by professionals and capable of speeds up to 18 knots on a close-hauled reach. No faster or prettier oceanracers ever existed—or ever will again. In 1937, with Europe in turmoil, Commodore Harold Vanderbilt's Ranger, designed by Naval Architect Olin J. Stephens II, even then a brilliant, but little-known youngster, sank Sopwith's Endeavour II in four straight races, and the America's Cup was bolted into a trophy case in the New York
Yacht Club—there to remain, virtually forgotten, for most of a generation. Within a few years, proud Ranger was destroyed, her 110-ton lead keel melted down, her steel hull sold for scrap.
Finally, in 1958, came a new challenge from Britain. But not in J-boats, which no one could afford to build.
The class now was the International 12-Meter Sloop,* half as big as the J, half as fast, twice as maneuverable—and twice as exciting. The excitement was less the Twelves (after all, the class had been around for 51 years) than the men who turned up to crew them. They were gifted amateurs, many of plebeian ancestry, who earned their spurs in the democratic rough-and-tumble of "one-design" small-boat racing—where the sailor was more important than his boat, and skill, imagination and daring were the stuff of success. To the sport of big-boat racing, they brought new techniques and tactics that were ingenious, efficient, and often downright impolite. From the very start, as four U.S. Twelves squared off to decide which would defend the Cup against Britain's Sceptre, the most dramatic of the audacious new skippers was a blocky, blue-eyed bandit named Bus Mosbacher.