Looking Back at The Rainbow Fleet
by Mary Miles
Most everyone has seen the famous H. Marshall Gardiner photograph of
the little boats in the Rainbow Fleet rounding Brant Point. But not too many
people know the story—indeed, all the stories—connected with this fascinating
small flotilla. To find out more, we talked with several people, among
them Helen Wilson Sherman, who as a young girl was among the original
members of the famed fleet. It was her uncle, Austin Strong, who started the
whole thing in about 1926 or 1927.
The Rainbow Fleet by H. Marshall Gardiner
"Oh, those were wonderful little boats," she said with a smile. "I think
their design was inspired by the big Marshall and Crosby catboats, which
were beautiful." Her uncle, a major figure on the island and Commodore of
the Nantucket Yacht Club, knew these big cats—there was a large fleet of
them. One was owned by Nantucketer Lila MacKnight, and Strong particularly
liked it because of its bright green sail. "Now these big Rainbows were
lovely, very graceful looking," said Helen, "but there was no 'body' in the
stem, so they were quite tippy; they heeled easily in the wind. And Uncle
was especially interested in providing sailing instruction for young people—
but it had to be in small, safe boats."
Austin Strong decided to buy a Beetlecat, the smaller version of the big
Cats, because it seemed to have the safety features he was looking for, and
he liked the way it handled. This first one was called the Alofa, and he presented
it to his wife. "Then Uncle bought another, the Kittiwake, for our family,
and later my father bought the Emerald. Before long Uncle had convinced
enough parents to buy the little boats so that he could start a class," Helen
recalled. "Who was in it? Let's see—there was Alan Newhouse, and the Ball
girls, Katherine and Ginny, and Carol Lindsay and Dewitt Smith, Hugh Dunn,
Charlie Reed, Mugs Mitchell, Pauline Smith, and Dick Lovelace had a
Rainbow too. And several more—oh yes, Deborah Butler—I taught her to
sail, and was her skipper. Once we were towed to Edgartown for a race and
we won—she got the glad and I got nothing!" Lots of laughter at this point.
What made these boats—12 feet long with a 6-foot beam and a wooden
centerboard—so distinctive was not only the way they handled but also their
colored sails. "The first sails," said Helen, "were plan white and hand-dyed,
so the colors weren't very bright and they tended to fade. Finally, they got
Ratsey sails, which were woven with colored thread. These never faced,
and stayed vivid; they made quite a picture." She laughed again: "Those little
wooden Rainbows looked just like walnut shells in the water! They handled
pretty well—you had to work hard to tip them over.
"I JUST FOLLOWED ALONG"
"I was about 14 when we started racing," she said. "The fleet grew and
grew, till there were about forty. The first race I ever sailed was in the
Kittiwake. I didn't know what on earth I was doing, so I just followed along
with all the others…and I got a third! That was a yellow flag—blue was first,
red second, and they were triangular flags with a white star. Uncle eventually
hired Bill Swan of the Larchmont Yacht Club to come and teach us racing.
And I won lots of blue flags in the next few years!"
Was she there when the famous Gardiner photo was taken? "Oh yes," she answered, "Uncle decided there had to be a picture of the little fleet, so
they tied us all together bow to stern and a Yacht Club launch towed us out
around Brant Point. The water was dead calm, and we must have looked
pretty funny as we moved around the Point, all hitched in a bunch. I was
Commodore then, and was in the first boat."
Another participant in that photo, Erna Blair, recalls being along on that
famous occasion crewing for her friend Muggins (Margaret) Mitchell. "It was
1930," she said, "even though the picture says 1920—I'd have been only 4
years old then!" Erna says that no one had counted on the ferry coming
around the Point just as the tiny boats had been set up for the picture. "The
lines holding us all together were sort of short so Mr. Gardiner could get all
the Rainbows in the picture," she said, "and all of a sudden here came the
ferry, and we began to clunk together like mad, and you could hear everyone yelling, 'My boat! My boat!' It was pretty funny." She added, still laughing,
that she and Muggins were in the third boat, "the one with the red sail
in the picture."
Uncle Austin was very safety-conscious, said Helen Sherman—everyone
had to know how to swim, and had to carry a life preserver and a paddle on
board. At some point Strong invented a Seamanship contest for the
Rainbows, and, according to Helen, "Pauline and I had become very adept at
sailing. We'd even take a tennis ball and try to hit each other's sails, and that
meant a lot of skillful maneuvering and dodging." In the contest, the
Rainbow racers were judged according to the neatness with which they
furled the sails, how well they "put the boat to bed," and how skillfully they
came up to the mooring. Another test, called the "eggshell landing," was to
see if you could land so exactly that you wouldn't have crushed an egg
between boat and wharf. In the zigzag course among moored Yacht Club
boats, Helen says she and Pauline emerged as winners. "That was our
moment of glory." One special memory of her Uncle's teaching skills, Helen
said, was when he taught her how to sail up-harbor toward Pocomo Head
or Wauwinet, and come down close in to the shore with the centerboard up. "The tide, of course, was very swift, and it was very tricky to do this and not
run aground, but it was lots of fun," she said.
BRINGING BACK THE RAINBOW FLEET
Ultimately there were so many of the little Rainbows racing that an age
limit of 17 was set for that class. The next higher group, formed in 1928, was
called the Indians—these boats were Toppentots. Alan Newhouse, another
original member of the first Rainbow Fleet, said these had Marconi rigs
rather then being gaff-rigged, as were the Rainbows. When he was told that
Helen Sherman had remembered that in the late '20s the Rainbows cost
about $250, including the sail, he laughed and said that today they are probably
thirty times that, with the sail itself costing around $800. He ought to
know, because he's still sailing Rainbows—in fact, he's stimulated a renewed interest in them, and today there is quite a little fleet in Nantucket
Harbor again, with eight or ten of them racing regularly. (Incidentally,
there's a little tiny fleet at the Toy Boat, on Straight Wharf, where a miniature
hand-carved Rainbows made by Nantucket artists await the imaginations
of youngsters.)
"I came to Nantucket from Houston as a kid in 1927, for the summers," Newhouse said, "and now we're here year-round. It's a good place to be!" Learning to sail the Rainbows was valuable, he commented, and lots of fun.
And it wasn't as easy at it looked, either. "While they won't sink, those little
Cats will capsize," he said; "they tend to go up into the wind, keeping your
sail full—in those days I remember two of us would grab the tiller and pull
like mad" to keep the boat in control and move along smartly. He has two
Rainbows now, the Tejas ("Texas") and the Sinbad. Are there any of the original
ones left? Oh yes, he said, after explaining that these were laminated in
fiberglas because, after all, they are over 50 years old. The Beetlecats are
still being made, however, and while move of the Nantucket Rainbow-ing is
done by adults, wouldn't it be a great idea to train kids in them again?
And wouldn't it be another great idea if they let an old kid like yours truly
into the class?
Anyhow, that's a bit of the story of the Rainbow fleet—the original one.
If you have any recollections to add about those good old days, please let us
know. There are probably at least four or five more good Nantucket stories
here, and we'd like to share them.
These island memories were brought to us by the late Mary Miles,
a prolific and skilled writer who loved Nantucket.
