SALEROOM

NATIONAL HISTORIC SHIPS

A 104cm-long (41in) model shows Esperance in her prime, and (left) as she is today at Windermere Jetty Museum

Above: The 1957 Herter’s Eldorado Rocket and 1960 Plymouth Fury made $61,600 combined. The boat with period Johnson 35hp outboard probably accounted for less than a fifth of that

BONHAMS Arthur Ransome’s Windermere ice-breaker

The rather extreme and strangely shaped Esperance is not only a Guinness world record holder as the first ever twin-screw steam yacht; the 19.8m loa (65ft) vessel with a beam of a mere 3.1m (10ft) is also the oldest surviving boat on Lloyd’s Yacht Register.

Built in 1869, Esperance resides today at the Windermere Jetty Museum on the lake where she began her life as a luxury water taxi for industrialist HW Schneider. Built of the highest grade iron with countersunk riveting to provide a smooth finish to the hull, Esperance also featured a peculiarly shaped bow designed to break ice on the lake.

After operating for more than 50 years as a pleasure boat and ferry, Esperance’s engines were removed when she became a houseboat in the 1920s and gained another kind of immortality as the house boat of Captain Flint in Arthur Ransome’s 1930 Swallows and Amazons children’s novel.

Salvaged after sinking in 1941, Esperance is now on the National Historic Ships register. A 1:20 scale model crafted in 2007 by renowned model maker Keith Townsend was expected to fetch £3,000-5,000 at Bonhams’ 25 October marine sale.

RM SOTHEBY’S Flight of fin-tasy

If George L Herter were alive today he would claim beyond a doubt that the person who paid $61,600 for a 1960 Plymouth Fury with a colour-matched Herter’s speed boat hitched to it paid all that money for the boat and got a worthless car thrown in for free.

Herter, who ran a US outdoor goods mail- order company, made claims as outlandish as his boats. In his catalogue he described his bizarre, finned glassfibre boat as “actually a composite of the two fastest boats in the world… The forward part uses the proven design principles of Slo-Mo-Shun, North America’s fastest boat and safest high-speed boat. The rear of the hull uses the design principles of the English Bluebird boat, the fastest and safest European fast boat.” Yeah, right.

Bear in mind Herter also produced a “sonic bullet,” which he claimed increased in velocity after it left the rifle. A true American odd-ball, unfettered by fact, and a grandiose self-publicist who refused to be photographed, he was also a prolific selfpublisher of survival and how-to books, including a cookery tome in which he claimed “The Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ, was very fond of spinach” and had cooked a spinach recipe on that first Christmas eve. Most were co-written with his wife, but for some reason his 1969 relationship guide, How to Live With a Bitch, was a solo effort: today it’s a collector’s item among enthusiasts of the misogyny genre. The claims he made for his boats were no less fin-tastic.

ELDRED’S Whale oil WD40

In the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, whale oil was not just used for lighting but was the WD40 of its day, to be found in virtually every home, office and factory in the industrialised world. As spelled out on this box of whale oil refined in New Bedford, Massachusetts the wonder product was used for “lubricating, cleaning, polishing and preventing rust” on everything from bicycles and cash registers, to horses’ hooves, flutes, furniture, golf clubs, scissors, sewing machines, surgical instruments, telephones and much more. Like rare whisky, these 12 unopened bottles in original box are unlikely ever to be sampled, not least because they sold for $8,125, a costly and cautionary memento of bygone times.