CARVEL MARVEL

Classic Boat 2022 Awards NOMINATED

The story of the new International 8-Metre yacht Starling Burgess begins nearly a century ago, on a rainy autumn night in Maine. At least one light was on, as her eponymous designer W Starling Burgess burned the midnight oil on a new design brief for a client. Those who know anything of this great American polymath might already guess that this design, to one of history’s most fiercely contested rules, would be at the forefront of technology and design. Those to whom the name of Burgess rings only the most distant of bells should not be blamed: the legacies of sailing’s great designers have been alternately diluted by time, expanded by whim and disfigured by patriotism or enthusiasm.

A 20TH-CENTURY POLYMATH

It would not be unreasonable to argue that the only American yacht designers who have occupied a station as high as Burgess’s are Nat Herreshoff, Olin Stephens, and his own father Edward Burgess, American’s foremost yacht designer before his untimely death at the age of 43 in 1891. The death of Edward’s wife Caroline just six months after left Starling orphaned aged 13 with his three-year-old brother. By 17, while still at school (the Milton Academy), he had designed and patented a sophisticated lightweight machine gun and commissioned his first yacht from family friend ‘Uncle Nat’ (Herreshoff). After going on to study at Harvard University, Starling opened his own design office aged 23, and. His design work in the aeronautical field from 1908 led him from building Wright designs under sole licence to forming, with Greely Curtis and Frank Russel, Burgess Company and Curtis, later just ‘Burgess Company’, with 800 employees and contracts to build Burgess-Dunne hydroplanes for the US Army and Navy.