One Of The Kind

Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway didn’t play when it came to saving Mah Jong 

- Seaver Jones

In February 1957, a 52-foot yawl splashed into Kowloon Harbor from the Cheoy Lee shipyard in Hong Kong. Mah Jong was the cumulative dream of three American college friends who had pooled their resources, ideas and expectations. Now that the construction was a reality, preparation for a 10-month, 15,000-mile shakedown began.

Hovee Freeman of Providence, Rhode Island, was a U.S. Navy-trained navigator and accomplished sailor. Mike Merle-Smith came from an Oyster Bay, New York, sailing family that had connections in exclusive East Coast yachting circles. Gilbert M. Grosvenor of Washington, D.C., was a National Geographic photo editor and grandson of Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, the first full-time employee and a president of the National Geographic Society.

They’d acquired the plans for their yawl from the heralded yacht designers of the day: Sparkman & Stephens in New York City. A major consideration in choosing Hong Kong for the build was the cost of their enterprise and access to the finest wood known for boatbuilding at the time: Burmese teak. Mah Jong took just six months to build at a cost of $30,000. And by taking the boat’s plans halfway around the world for construction, the three men initiated groundbreaking relations with Chinese builders and craftsmen that would continue into the present, resulting in thousands of handcrafted wooden yachts.

After the launch, Freeman and Merle-Smith, with their wives, sailed Mah Jong on a roundabout cruise that took them to the Suez Canal, where Grosvenor and a guide joined them and headed for the Greek islands. They idled through and around the islands for two months. Grosvenor took photos and wrote an account of the adventure that appeared in the December 1957 issue of National Geographic. He then returned to Washington, and a crew helped the others take the boat to the United States.