JULIEN GIRARDOT MEETS HANNEKE BOON IN CORNWALL TO DISCOVER THE LEGEND AND LEGACY OF PIONEERING CATAMARAN DESIGNER JAMES WHARRAM
Falmouth, Cornwall, 1955: a legend is born along Customs House Quay. A smartly dressed young man with wild, curly hair has launched a 23ft catamaran, built in just a few months for the modest sum of £200 (the equivalent of around £6,500 today).
Rigged as a ketch with battened junk sails, the aptly named Tangaroa (meaning ‘God of the Sea’ in Polynesian) marked the beginning of the epic Wharram story.
At the time, catamarans were considered dangerous and eccentric, while yachting was a pastime largely reserved for high society. But sailing already has other visionaries. On the deck of Tangaroa, beside James, are two young women: Jutta Schulze-Rhonhof and Ruth Merseburger. In puritanical post-war England, setting off to cross the Atlantic with two young women – and German ones at that – was downright shocking! But these three young people care not a jot about conventional thinking. They dream of adventure and their enterprise is an act of defiance.
For years James Wharram has nurtured a passion for the history of sailing pioneers and the ethnic origins of the multihull. Devouring every book on the subject he could lay his hands on, he discovered the story of Joshua Slocum, the first solo circumnavigator (1895-1898), and the voyage of Kaimiloa by the Frenchman Eric de Bisschop. The tale, published in English in 1940, of de Bisschop’s attempt to prove the seaworthiness of double canoes by making a voyage from Hawaii to France on a catamaran he had built on the beach, became Wharram’s primary source of inspiration.
Wharram disagreed with many assumptions of the time, and his first Atlantic crossing was an opportunity to refute Thor Heyerdahl’s theory on the settlement of the Pacific islands. Wharram contested the assertion of the Danish anthropologist who, after his voyage aboard the Kon-Tiki in 1947, affirmed that the boats used were simple rafts. Wharram was convinced that the boats were more akin to double canoes with sails, capable of going upwind and holding a course. These early multihulls, consisting of two hollowed-out tree trunks, were connected by crossbeams bound together with plant fibre. The sails were probably made from what is known as ‘tapa’ in Polynesia, hammered tree bark, which was also used to make clothes.
