Strange Appeal

Any yacht from the artist Albert Strange is special. Charmina, once owned by Keble Chatterton and now restored, is no exception

- Steffan Meyric Hughes

Canoe yawls, as previously noted in this magazine, are frequently neither canoe nor yawl. They represent a fascinating chapter in the history of sailing for pleasure evolving, as they have, from a misnomer popularised in 1866, the year John ‘Rob Roy’ MacGregor published his bestselling book A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe, about a solo paddling journey across the waterways of northern Europe. The ‘canoe’ in the title, although inspired by native American birchbark canoes, was in fact half skiff, half canoe and half kayak (never mind the arithmetic) – and confusion about the terminology persists to this day. It’s hard to overstate the importance of that journey. The book, which sold 2,000 copies in its first five days, gave birth to the sports of kayaking and canoeing and perhaps more fundamentally, it opened the eyes of middle-class England to the idea of using rivers and canals, the lifeblood of agriculture and transport for millennia, as a playground. It’s probably fair to say that MacGregor did more to foster Corinthian yacht sailing in Britain that anyone before or since.

The boats, under a series of designers, grew incrementally larger and added sails and cabins. By the time Albert Strange (1855-1917), artist and amateur yacht designer, hit his stride, these little yachts had moved so far from the native American birchbark canoes from where MacGregor took his inspiration, that the term was pretty much a nonsense.