laststandonzombieisland

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will
profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday May 14, the lightning of the Atlantic

Here we see the exceptionally fast oceangoing yacht Atlantic. This 227-foot three-masted steel-hulled schooner had an exceptionally narrow beam (29-feet), giving her a length to beam ration of a very racy 1:8. Designed by famous naval architect William Gardner for industrial magnet Wilson Marshall, she was built at Townsend & Downey on Shooter’s Island, New York in 1903 to be two things: elegant and fast.

She had heating, refrigeration, and water heaters. The lobby was executed in marble and the interior was fitted out with the finest mahogany paneling. There were large and luxurious tiled bathrooms (with bath tub) and a large galley– and in a pinch could do over 17 knots.

More importantly, she was faster and better than the yard’s own previous creation: Meteor III, for Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. That Teutonic craft’s launch in February 1902 was attended by many hundreds of spectators, including Pres. Theodore Roosevelt and Prince Henry of Prussia. Alice Roosevelt, the president’s daughter, christened the boat.

In 1905, Atlantic was entered into the Kaiser’s Cup race, which would travel 3006-miles from New Jersey to the UK for the win of a solid gold cup donated by Kaiser Wilhelm. The American yachts enjoyed sponsorships from various industrialists such as J.P.Morgan, the Kaiser Wilhelm II backed the German team and the British were backed by Sir Thomas Lipton, the tea and grocery magnate.

Famously on one occasion, the Kaiser was asked as to whether his uncle King Edward VII would be attending a state function with some dry humor he replied “No, he has gone boating with his grocer.”

Well the Atlantic, captained by Charles Barr, now a member of the Sailing Hall of Fame, finished in first place with a time of 12d 4h 1min 19s, including some 341 nautical mikes in a single 24 hour period, which is a very fast 14+ knots on that period and 10.2 on average. While this doesn’t seem fast by today’s standards, the record held for sail-powered mono-hulls for nearly a century, only falling in 2002. She was so fast that the German Blitz-class gunboat SMS Pfeil (1600-tons, c.1882), sent as the timekeeper by the Kaiser, was caught napping and had to build steam up to meet the incoming New Yorker with the Naval attaché and ADC Captain (later Adm) Carl von Coerper aboard.

This feat made Barr a superstar of his time and on his death in 1911 Sir Thomas Lipton attended while the pall bearers were members of the British challenge team and from Lipton’s own luxury yacht.

In 1914, with the opening of WWI, the days of racing yachts across the Atlantic had faded. When the US entered the war in 1917, she was acquired by the Navy 10 June 1917 and commissioned as the section patrol boat USS Atlantic II (SP 651). Armed with a trio of 3″/23 cal guns, she was used as a guardship in the Hampton Roads/Yorktown area as well as a tender for smaller, faster subchasers looking, ironically, for the Kaiser’s submarines (whose cup she still held).

Speaking of the cup, the Atlantic’s owner donated the garish gold bauble to the American Red Cross who auctioned it off for a total of $175,000 in donations in 1918. The successful winner of the piece then found that it was simply a base pot-metal cup with a thin sheet of gold, rather than solid as had been advertised. What else did they expect from Willy?

At the end of the war she was decommissioned in 1919 and returned to civilian life. Then twenty years later, war came again.

Her owner gifted Atlantic to the US Coast Guard on 1 April 1941, a full eight months before Pearl Harbor. Commissioned as an auxiliary sail training ship, USCGC Atlantic (WIX-271) she served alongside the exiled Danish training ship Danmark at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, helping to train thousands of guardsmen during the war. Following the end of the conflict, Atlantic was decommissioned by Uncle Sam a second time and disposed of in 1948.

Going back to civilian life for the second time was hard on the old ship and by the 1980s she had fallen into disrepair. By 1982 she had sadly settled to the bottom of Norfolk harbor and her steel hull was later raised and scrapped.

Her original records including log books are preserved at Mystic Seaport, but a full size replica was built at the Dutch Van der Graaf yard for owner  Ed Kastelein. She competed in the 2005 Rolex Transatlantic and is a faithful rendition of the beautiful old Atlantic– sans WWI bluejackets, 3-inch guns, and dizzy WWII coastie trainees.

Specs:

 

Displacement: 303 tonnes
Length:     69.40 m (227.7 ft) overall, 185-ft at waterline.
Beam:     8.85 m (29.0 ft)
Draught:     4.90 m (16.1 ft)
Installed power: steam and sail
Sail plan:     11,058 square feet of sail (18,000 when racing), one 150shp Seaburg vertical triple-expansion engine, one shaft.
Complement (1917-19) 66 US Navy crew,
Armament(1917-19) 3×3″/23cal. (1941-47) small-arms

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