The founder of the dynasty was Nathanael (Nat) Greene Herreshoff (1848-1938), a graduate of MIT, who set up the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company in Bristol, Rhode Island in 1878 with his older brother John Brown Herreshoff, a blind boatbuilder. Nat rapidly became one of the prominent American designers of all kinds of racing and recreational craft. Nat kept himself at the top of the game with a series of innovative designs. From 1887 he had taken maximum advantage of the new, rapidly internationally accepted yacht rating rules, the Seawanhaka Rule, finally to produce the 71ft keel yacht Gloriana in 1891. She caused a sensation throughout the world.
This recognisably modern yacht incorporated all the master’s ideas, light displacement (for the time), long graceful ends with sweet lines, replacing the narrow, deep bluff-bowed ‘plank on edge’ cutters of the 1880s, which were designed to cheat the
