The Origins of Nantucket’s
by Michael R. Harrison
“The Rainbow Fleet, outward bound, Nantucket, Mass.” Postcard by H. Marshall Gardiner, from a photograph taken in 1929. For this staged photo, which Helen Sherman recalled many years later was planned by Austin Strong, the boats were towed around the point by the Nantucket Yacht Club’s motor launch. Note the dead calm water.
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other boat types have sailed at Nantucket, but the catboat alone represents the island’s dual roles as a place of hard work and carefree play.
all images courtesy nantucket historical association collection
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very August, as part of Nantucket Race Week, the little catboats of the island’s beloved Rainbow Fleet raise their colorful sails and parade around the entrance to the harbor at Brant Point, weather permitting. This island tradition dates to the 1920s, and grew out of efforts by the leaders of the Nantucket Yacht Club to find a suitable boat in which children and teenagers could learn to sail. A catboat was originally any boat with a “cat rig,” that is, a single mast, well forward, supporting a single gaff-headed sail. Over time, this rig became associated with beamy, shoal-bottomed centerboard boats designed to operate in the windy, choppy, and shallow waters of such places as Lower New York Bay, Massachusetts Bay, and Nantucket Sound. The catboat is, historically, the quintessential Nantucket boat, after the whaleboat. Although by no means exclusive to Nantucket, the catboat was the dominant watercraft in the local fishing fleet and the preferred party boat for summer visitors from the 1860s to the 1920s. The hull size grew over time. Enormous catboats up to 40 feet long developed, able to profitably fish in Nantucket Sound, or carry dozens of passengers on pleasure trips around the harbor. Smaller catboats designed for racing developed from these large workboats, particularly in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Many
An early catboat anchored in Nantucket Harbor, 1866. SEA HISTORY 171, SUMMER 2020