Benny the Bilge Rat
We have added a new contributor to Rule69, and he prefers to be known as Benny the Bilge Rat, and nowRule69’s resident nay-sayer (there’s more than one around here – ed) takes a swing at the Holy Grail.
A cup by any other name would sail as sweet! OK, we’re plundering Shakespeare, but there’s no better way to introduce the Rule69 campaign to give the so-called “America’s Cup” back its proper name.
“What?” I hear you say, “How can that not be the Cup’s name?” Because it isn’t, dear reader, and never was. Pull up a hammock while we explain. As ever, the history contains the truth of the matter (and apologies to those smarty-pants among you who already know this stuff).
For starters, the Cup was never intended as the trophy for the initial race around the Isle of Wight. It was made in the UK, two years before, as a table decoration by the royal silversmiths, Garrards of London.
No connection with sailing. It was bought by Henry William Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey, who then donated it to the Royal Yacht Squadron. The RYS named it “The R.Y.S. 100 Pound Cup” and made it the trophy for their round-the-island race in 1851. Posters for the regatta named it “The R.Y.S. 100 Pound Cup”. Couldn’t be clearer (see above).
After the schooner America won, the New York Yacht Club brought the cup back to the US and mistakenly engraved it with the name “Hundred Guineas Cup”. (An English pound was 20 shillings; a guinea was a gold coin worth 21 shillings. Maybe the nouveau riche grandees at the NYYC thought “guinea” made them sound high falutin’.)
In 1852 George Schuyler, on behalf of the NYYC, then drafted the Deed of Gift that donated the cup in trust “upon the condition that it shall be preserved as a perpetual Challenge Cup for friendly competition between foreign countries”. That was, and still is, the legal foundation of all subsequent challenges.
Yet somehow the name “America’s Cup” became accepted for both the trophy and the event.
If you ask AI, it asserts that “the Deed of Gift explicitly named the trophy after the winning vessel, America.” No, it did not! Where does AI get this garbage? There is no mention of the yacht America in the original Deed, or any words that could be construed as meaning the Cup was re-named to honour that yacht. Nothing. (The original manuscript was lost, but we can be confident that the witnessed copy Schuyler provided to the club in 1857 was accurate.)
Next, how in hell did we get the possessive apostrophe added to America? It’s not “Ryder’s Cup” or “Stanley’s Cup” or “The World’s Series”. English yachting magazines of the late 19th Century and early 20th referred to the event as “The America Cup”, with the yacht’s name correctly given in italics and without the redundant “’s”. The nonsense of the possessive apostrophe was probably encouraged by the pretension of prefacing yacht names with the definite article “the”, as in, “The Britannia” and “The Intrepid”. This is sheer linguistic snobbery, with no grammatical foundation. Sheesh!
But we pedants at Rule69 aren’t completely silly. The use of “America’s Cup” is so pervasive that going back to the original name would be impractical. Mind you, even that false name is now being debased even further. Next year’s event in Naples is, officially, the “Louis Vuitton 38th America’s Cup”. The pinnacle of our sport has been hawked to the makers of fancy French handbags. Imagine what George Schuyler and his old drinking buddies at the New York Yacht Club would make of that. – The Rat.
