As GL Watson noted in his essay on the evolution of modern racing craft (1893), it may just have been that America was foreign that caused the British to examine her hull so closely and be so amazed the examples from closer to home simply lacked a sufficiently exotic air.
Certainly her success did mean that some owners wanted to emulate her and went in for hull extensions to hollow their bows, but that was mostly in the spirit of adoration rather than anything more considered (although in some cases it could hardly help but be an improvement). America was fairly modern in some respects, but not that radical. Tom Waterman’s Mosquito (1848) was a prime example, along with Asheton-Smith’s much earlier Menai and many others. There were dozens of examples of yachts (and revenue cutters) that shared America’s long hollow bows, “sharp” sections and with their midship sections aft of amidships. Even accepting that she bore some relation to wave-line hull forms (which her designer George Steers was silent about), even that method was not revolutionary in terms of the hull shapes it created.
America was in fact claimed in some contemporary articles as a ‘wave-line’ design, a ‘system’ which was achieving prominence after about 1835 thanks to the work of J Scott Russell (who later claimed America as “one of his own”). One of the first myths is that America represented some sort of revolutionary hull design plenty of writers (including WP Stephens) have fallen into the fallacy that before 1849 all yachts were modelled on the ‘cod’s head and mackerel’s tail’ principle a gross over-simplification. However, if precision is lacking, it is all in keeping with the general story of America, which is so beset with misapprehension. The dimensions shown here are one set but it is pretty clear that there are plenty of others her waterline in particular is very variable in the record. LOA 100ft 6in (30.6m), LWL 90ft 4in (27.5m), Beam 23ft (7m), Draught 11ft 6in (3.5m), Displacement 146 tonnes, Sail area 5,263 sqft (488.9 sqm( The schooner America’s exact dimensions are hard to pin down, but was she really so radical?į or a yacht that existed for the best part of 100 years and was measured numerous times, not to mention having won the most famous yacht race of all time, it is extraordinarily difficult to fix even the most basic dimensions of the famous schooner America.
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