Te Vega - The Story of a Schooner and Her People

TE VEGA – The Story of a Schooner and Her People, By Michel Anctil

© Copyright 2011, 2012

Michel Anctil

All Rights Reserved.  Except for brief passages quoted from official media sources, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

Requests for permission to reproduce may be obtained by contacting the author (anctilmwj@gmail.com).

Second Edition March 2012

Te Vega – The Story of a Schooner and Her People

1.      Te Vega (Ship) – History

2.      Sailing Yacht

3.      Floating School

Cover photo of Deva by Davide Marcesini

Cover design by Will Trillich

Preface to the First Edition

A yacht lay dormant in me for over forty years. It is neither a unique nor a freakish experience, but one I am convinced is shared by many around the world.  What happens is this: we are given the opportunity of living aboard a classic sailing ship and it becomes one of the highest points in our lives, sometimes even an event that changes our lives. It happens to people from all walks of life who find themselves on a floating deck, constrained in a structure tossed on a vast space, following its own agenda and keeping its own time. Whether we are sailors or other crew, passengers or students, this world apart works its magic, leaves a spell that stays hidden in us.  Once the inner yacht awakens from the dormant phase of its lifecycle, a surge of unabashed nostalgia is sure to follow.

My nautical nostalgia began to stir in 2008, when rumors circulated about plans for a reunion of old-timers who had sailed a schooner in the 1960s. Forty years back I was a biology graduate who had recently entered graduate school. At 21 I was having my very first experience at sea aboard a cod trawler in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was a rough nautical baptism but one I was eager to go through in order to advance my research project. Doing biology at sea meant trying to emulate my two heroes, Charles Darwin and Herman Melville. Reading them gave me endless inspiration. So when I heard that Stanford University was seeking applicants for a biological oceanography course taking place aboard a classy schooner heading for the Galapagos Islands, I filed my application without hesitation. I knew that Darwin and Melville had visited the islands only six years apart in the first half of the 19th century, and each in his own way had found inspiration there. To sail where they had sailed and to walk where they had walked on the volcanic islands was a cherished ambition. When Stanford accepted my application, I was ecstatic.

I was 22 when I went to sea on board the schooner, Darwin’s age when he boarded the Beagle late in 1831.  The symbolism wasn’t lost on me even then. But right away it wasn’t the Galapagos that occupied my mind; it was the yacht on whose deck I stood. I was seduced by her good looks, to be sure, but it wasn’t all. The name Te Vega had an exotic ring that suggested — to my youthful romanticism — smooth and carefree cruising. But from the moment we cleared the harbor and sails were hoisted it felt anything but smooth. The pitching and rolling tensed one leg muscle after another in an interplay with the boat that bonded you, quite unlike my days on the trawler a few months before. And I developed a fondness for my cubbyhole of a berth, for the four meals a day it took to alleviate the constant feeling of hunger brought on by labor and salty air in high seas, for the shuttling between deck and below deck through the treacherous deckhouse companionway. The thrill of it all left an imprint that was never erased.  After my three-month cruise I regularly went to sea on other boats for the next seven years, but none could summon the beguiling suite of sounds and other physical sensations experienced on Te Vega.

We, the thousands of people who have sailed Te Vega, can come up with our own idiosyncratic list of what enthralled or irked us about the yacht. But what is it that binds us in acknowledging the tremendous impact she had on our lives?

In retrospect it is no exaggeration to say that a mystique surrounded this schooner. From the time she first slid into Kiel Bay in 1930, Te Vega has possessed an aura of timelessness about her, and she has always garnered admiring glances wherever she has sailed. Few yachts in the world had the variety of destinies in their history that Te Vega experienced. In her 80 years of existence she went through a slew of owners who sailed her in nearly all the seas of the planet, subjected her to a wide spectrum of uses and abuses, but particularly made her their accomplice in various shades of entrepreneurial ventures, philanthropic schemes, educational missions, hedonistic pursuits, and even historical events. She courted disaster often enough to lay claim on the proverbial cat’s nine lives. But she always proved herself a comeback lady, finding owners to rebuild and renew her, to restore her to her classic elegance, to embark her on yet another chapter in her long and fascinating history.

Her mystique is very much borne in the several legends that have circulated about the yacht after World War II, the stories getting better with the telling and re-telling. Of course the most interesting as well as ludicrous is that the ship was built for Hermann Goering, Hitler’s Luftwaffe chief and right-hand man. Te Vega was only one of a flotilla of yachts erroneously recorded to have been owned by the once dashing World War I pilot. The legend was still propagated as fact in European newspapers of recent years, with the further embellishment that her name, Te Vega, was inspired by Goering’s Swedish wife. Another tale in keeping with the Nazi connection is that the ship was bought on the cheap by an American as war booty in 1945.

An unfounded story circulating among sailors about the ship’s origin is that a wealthy man from Newport, Rhode Island, who had hand-drafted plans for his ideal schooner, saw one day in the harbor the very embodiment of his dream sailing yacht. After he was treated to a tour of the schooner by the skipper, and elated the layout matched his plans, his wife secretly copied the drawings, had the ship built in Germany and sailed across the Atlantic to arrive as her husband’s surprise birthday gift! Keeping to the origins, another unsubstantiated tale is that the yacht was commissioned to embody the best of Big Class racing schooner attributes, so the owner could enter her in the America’s Cup. The name Te Vega, which the yacht bore for 51 years, also arose from a legend. It was said to derive from the Polynesian vernacular meaning beautiful star or honorable star, when expert linguists and specialized dictionaries will tell you it simply means the star.  These tales probably remained in the public record because their romantic connotations had a cumulative effect on the celebrity status of the yacht, and added to her allure.

This book, by telling the factual story of Te Vega, will help dispel the legends and other misconceptions about the yacht without, I hope, stripping away her glamour or the sparkle of events and people associated with her. But to get the story right considerable time had to be spent researching the vessel, collecting documents, consulting protagonists in her story and visiting institutions holding documents of interest to the story. For a book of this nature to come together, it takes the assistance of many people contributing numerous personal accounts, documents, photographs, and even video recordings. I wish now to acknowledge their contributions.

My heartfelt thanks go first and foremost to three gentlemen who have actually pioneered the research on the vessel years before I started my own investigations. Palmer K. Stevens is an alumnus of the Flint School, the yacht’s longest owner of record. He spent his high school aboard Te Vega and is a precious source of information about the ship thanks to a website he created. [1] The website provides a useful timeline on the yacht’s history, as well as that of another yacht used by Flint School, teQuest. His selfless dedication and hard work produced the framework without which this book simply could not have existed.  Scott Rasmussen is another Flint School graduate, and a classmate of Palmer’s.  Scott traced legal papers and public records, communicated with people involved with Te Vega, and compiled a multilingual bibliography of primary and secondary sources relating to the ship.  Scott is a technical editor and translator working at the highest international levels, and he provided advice on how to structure the manuscript. The third gentleman is Jim Stoll, a director of the Flint School and responsible for its sailing program.  Jim provided me with information about his ownership years, but even more importantly he made available all his archives related to different historical periods of Te Vega.

Other people have helped by providing information and documents related to specific epochs of the yacht. Sometimes the information filters through internet information bases and forums such as Wikipedia and Schoonerman. [2,3] I must first mention W. Barry Thomson who, as curator of the Natirar estate in New Jersey for the Natirar Association, became an authority on Walter G. Ladd, the first owner of the yacht, and his wife Kate Macy Ladd. He repeatedly shared with me his wealth of knowledge about the time period and the priceless collection of documents he managed to salvage from oblivion.  The book’s first chapter owes much to him. Louisa Watrous, intellectual property manager at the Mystic Seaport Museum, facilitated my examination of the original drafts of the yacht in their Cox & Stevens Collection. Harry W. Havemeyer kindly volunteered information on his uncle Adolph Dick, second owner of the yacht. Raymond W. Harder, who served on the yacht during World War II, made documents available to me and told me anecdotes about a yacht he remained fond of over 67 years. I enjoyed the hospitality of Ray and his wife, Eleanor, at their Los Angeles home. Charles W. Hitz provided information about the first postwar owner of the yacht, Thomas Hamilton, on whom he is an authority. He also shared with me a vividly written account by one of the sailors (now deceased) who was aboard the yacht early in the 1950s. Susan Hill Dolan opened the doors of Castle Hill, the Massachusetts estate of the Crane family and the home in the 1950s of another owner of the yacht, Cornelius Crane. She gave me access to precious ship logs and photographs. Esther Tetuamanuhiri and the Radfords (Manio and Colin) generously shared with me information and documents about Tahitian Princess Miri Rei and her relationship with Cornelius Crane and Vega. Conchi Saenz-Cambra of the Newport Harbor Nautical Museum, located photographs of the yacht from the Rohl and Darr periods of ownership.

Mattie Taormina, special collections librarian at Stanford University’s Green Library, and Patricia White were helpful in gathering numerous archival documents related to the university’s management of the yacht in the 1960s. At Hopkins Marine Station, where the yacht was based during Stanford’s years, Dr. Joseph G. Wible, head librarian of the Harold A. Miller Library, did his utmost to put every document related to Te Vega at my disposal.  The account of the Stanford years owes its comprehensiveness to him. I am also grateful to several Te Vega alumni and crew of the Stanford years who volunteered accounts of their association with the yacht.  Vicki Buchsbaum Pearse and Barbara Block organized the reunion of the oldtimers in Pacific Grove, California, where I was able to collect a wealth of information about the Stanford years. Steve Gann contributed his letters of the period which helped illuminate the sailor’s experience and viewpoint. Other contributors of the period are ex-students Richard Mariscal and Mary Rice, surgeon Benjamin Richards and engineer Odus Hayes.

Finally, for the post-Stanford years, the following persons deserve my sincere gratitude for the time and pains they took to hand me their testimonies and documents: Leo LeBon, Leslie Tack Brown, Steve Wedlock, Kim Pedersen, Janeil Strong-Reyes, Robert Bova, Jim Holm, Eelco Leemans, Rick Groen, Pieter Samara and Claudio Mottola. The latter also proved a warm and generous host aboard the schooner. Without them the story would have suffered in accuracy or humanity.

The extensive reference section at the end of the book testifies to the painstaking work that went into backing up as accurate a narrative of the schooner as possible. The sources take various forms: books, newspaper and magazine articles, personal letters, written or electronic communications with the author, official and archival documents, video productions, and the new medium on the block for research, the internet. The latter by its nature includes ever shifting web sources with varying life spans. For this reason I backed up these sources in print for future reference.

In a goal-oriented society we are not led to accept that the process toward achievement can be more fun than the achievement itself. But in sailing it is commonplace that the voyage matters more than the port of arrival. Similarly, researching and writing this book was a more thrilling experience than seeing the book completed. Once completed, the book is no longer under my control; it becomes the medium of experience of the reader, an altogether different realm.

This New Edition

In this edition, some images were omitted to enhance the reading experience on e-reader screens, and new material was added to chapters 1, 2, 6, 9 and 11.  Citations in the text are shown as bold numbers in brackets that refer to sources in the last section of the book.

Te Vega – A Chronology

1928:  New York Naval Architect firm Cox & Stevens commissioned by Walter G. Ladd to design a schooner.

1929:  Schooner built by Germaniawerft Krupp in Kiel, Germany.

1930:  Schooner Etak launched and delivered to New Jersey-based yachtsman Walter Ladd. Yacht registered and licensed in New York.

1933:  Walter Ladd dies; Etak sold to yachtsman and sugar refinery heir Adolph M. Dick (New York), and rechristened Vega.

1937:  Vega sold to construction businessman Hans W. Rohl; moved to west coast (California) and Hawaii where she and her owner become embroiled in a scandal over defence contracts for Pearl Harbor.

1942:  Vega sold to U.S. Navy and rechristened USS Juanita (IX-77); serves as patrol boat in the Eastern Pacific during the war.

1945:  Juanita decommissioned and restored to name Vega; bought by aviation pioneer Thomas F. Hamilton for charter business.

1951:  Vega sold to plumbing fortune heir Cornelius Crane; late in year schooner dismasted in storm off Tahiti and idled for the next few years.

1954:  Vega sold to Pacific sailing legend Omer Darr; schooner remasted.

1955:  Schooner rechristened Te Vega and operated by Omer Darr as luxury tourist carrier between Hawaii and Society Islands.

1958:  Te Vega stars in the Cinerama production South Seas Adventure; sold to lumber industry executive Harold A. Miller late in the year.

1959:  Te Vega operated by yacht charter firm V.E.B. Nicholson & Sons in the West Indies for three years.

1962:  Te Vega sold by Harold Miller to Stanford University under a bareboat charter agreement and converted into an oceanographic research vessel.

1963:  Te Vega participates in the International Indian Ocean Expedition and in other scientific expeditions in the Pacific for the next six years.

1969:  Te Vega sold to Denver businessmen who set up Te Vega Corporation to run charters.

1970:  Te Vega sold to Florida-based Flint School run by George Stoll and his son Jim; used as a floating school for teenagers for the next eleven years, sailing mostly to the Caribbean and Europe.

1981:  Te Vega put up for sale in Copenhagen.

1982:  Te Vega sold to Massachusetts-based Landmark School, to be operated by husband-and-wife team of Steve Wedlock and Kim Pedersen as Watermark floating school for dyslexic teenagers.

1987:  Te Vega tentatively sold to a Dutch Yacht Charter Company; Watermark rents yacht for school year.

1988:  Te Vega sold to Dutch entrepreneur Pieter S. Samara; schooner leased to Watermark for the last two years of its program and sails to Leningrad.

1992:  Te Vega sold to the family of Calisto Tanzi, founder and head of the food giant Parmalat.

1997:  After more than four years of restoration work and disputes with contractors, Te Vega regains luxury status and enters rally contests in the Mediterranean.

2004:  Te Vega put up for sale in the wake of the Parmalat Scandal that brought down the Tanzi family and shook the financial world.

2006:  Te Vega finally sold to Andrea Della Valle, vice-chairman and executive director of fashion shoe company Tod’s; currently sails the West Mediterranean waters, mainly from La Spezia to Capri, Sicily, Sardinia and the Balearic Islands.

1. Etak and Walter Ladd

A faded photograph dated April 1930 shows a balding 73-year-old man dressed in a business suit and standing on the quarterdeck of a schooner yacht.  He was raising his wine glass to the men around him.  Behind the assembly, the Yacht Ensign at the stern flapped in the breeze as some of the men, unruffled in their nautical outfits, stood in salute, too seized by the ceremony to ponder the vast expanse of Kiel Bay around them.  The name of the vessel can be deduced from the yacht’s life preserver: Etak.  The face of the toasting man appears inscrutable, but there is little doubt he was moved by the occasion.  He was taking delivery of a classic yacht, the culmination of a lifelong quest.

Walter Ladd (center) taking delivery of Etak, April 1930 (courtesy of W. Barry Thomson).

This man, Walter Graeme Ladd, was born 20 September 1856 at Throggs Neck, Bronx County, New York, to William Whitehead Ladd, a self-described commission merchant, and Sarah Anna Phillips.  At his birth the Republic was just 80 years old, and the Civil War loomed.  He was reared in a world where Society was soon to have a specific meaning, a word destined to define a Gilded Age of millionaires who not so much made their fortunes as inherited them, then conspicuously spent them. [4]  It also meant that to be accepted in Society your money had to age well, to acquire a patina of aristocratic distinction by being passed from generation to generation.  This happened to the Astors, Vanderbilts, Morgans and Rockefellers.  Although Walter Ladd appeared to lack the qualifications, he would eventually enter this world.

By all accounts Walter was raised in a middle-class environment with his older brother William W. Ladd, who became an attorney, and his younger brothers Henry M. Ladd, later a clergyman, and James B. Ladd.  Much of what we know of Walter Ladd comes from the research of William Barry Thomson.[5]  Little is known of Walter’s early adulthood except that at 22 he still lived at his parents’ home in Brooklyn, and was employed as an office clerk. [6]  At 26, he married a woman with a large fortune.  It is unlikely he became a wealthy man in the four years between working as a clerk and his wedding in 1883.  So he did not come from wealth when he married Catherine Everit Macy (1863–1945).  For this reason the engagement to Walter was resisted by Catherine’s widowed mother.  Catherine was the daughter of Josiah Macy Jr., an oil pioneer who had developed his own oil refinery in New York and nurtured a friendship and business partnership with John D. Rockefeller.  Josiah’s dealings with Rockefeller added substantially to his fortune.  By the time of his untimely death at 37 by typhoid fever, Catherine, then only 13 and known to everyone as Kate, inherited a sizeable share of her father’s assets, as did her two siblings.

Walter Ladd at 58 (from ref. 7) and young Kate Macy Ladd (from Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation).

In the Gilded Age, people in Kate’s circle would look down on a Brooklyn middle-class man like Walter.  As a social climber he would be politely ignored or contemptuously treated by the old money, who only wanted to deal with the top-drawer of society.  To be born rich was considered by far the best method to be rich.  Walter was left to choose from alternative methods — saving, marrying, stealing, gambling, nursing a little business into a big one, or advancing slowly but doggedly upward by dint of hard work. [4]  Ignoring the unsavory options he concentrated his efforts on nursing a business and scouting for marriage prospects.  Kate’s mother doubtless had a poor opinion of Walter’s pursuits.  In her privately published memoirs, Kate remembered the ambience of anguish and determination that preceded her engagement:

Walter Ladd, who was a Brooklyn man, moved to New York and took a room in 47th Street, giving him an opportunity of meeting me on every occasion.  Always at church time on Sundays, after which, of course, we must have a walk, and he managed to become acquainted with all my friends, so he was asked to all the dances.  This was all too much for my mother, who decided, in the midst of my coming out year, to carry the family off to Lakewood where we spent a dreary month — mother reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch to my sister and myself.  It was a month never to be forgotten for I was not allowed to see or hear from Walter Ladd.  I grew so thin my mother finally became worried, and we all moved back to town, and Walter was sent word he could come to see me. My mother said, We will say nothing about an engagement, but I replied, We are engaged now. I said I would never marry without her consent but I would never marry anyone else. So February 4th, 1882, we announced my engagement. [7]

The mores of the times were defeated by love and, in all likelihood, by Walter’s unwavering ambition to climb the social ladder.  Maybe Walter subscribed to Oscar Wilde’s jape that to be in Society is merely a bore, but to be out of it is simply a tragedy. [8]  Kate’s mother organized a five-month trip to Europe for family and friends, maybe in the hope that the lengthy separation and travel distractions would weaken Kate’s resolve to marry Walter.  If that was her intention, then the scheme failed.  Walter had started a dried fruit import business with a junior partner who had taken residence in Málaga to manage the export side of the business.  When his partner took ill, Walter was forced to sail to Spain to relieve him.  The partner recovered and Walter showed up in Switzerland, where the traveling Macy party happened to be, in the middle of summer.  He spent two weeks with them!  Resigned, Mrs. Macy supervised the wedding in her New York home on 5 December 1883.  The house was packed with guests and the newlyweds spent their first night together at the posh Windsor Hotel. [7]

So Walter became a wealthy man only through Macy money when he wed Kate, although he might have derived a reasonable income as a dried fruit merchant, and he might thereafter have invested whatever small fortune he had amassed.  We know that his personal assets at the time of his death were estimated at over $12 million, according to a New York State tax transfer appraisal. [9]  From the turn of the century, after the death of Kate’s mother in 1898, he liquidated his personal business dealings to concentrate on managing his wife’s considerable fortune.  Although Ladd identified his occupation as Insurance Broker in his 1891 passport application, he changed it to Gentleman in his next passport application two years later, and to None by 1906. [10]  Two developments may have intervened to shift his business interests towards the management of his wife’s assets as trustee.  The first was Kate’s health problems, which eventually made her an invalid; the second, their common desire to engage in philanthropic activities.  Walter’s new circumstances, in turn, allowed him more leisure time to indulge in the consuming hobby of wealthy men, yachting.  From early on he was a member of the New York Yacht Club, and remained so until his death.  His name could be found in the 1910 New York Social Register, a sure indicator that he belonged to Society, but throughout his married life he was reminded by the body language around him that he had entered its precincts like all parvenus — through the service entrance.

Walter and Kate moved in the elite New York circles so ably chronicled in Edith Wharton’s novels.  Interestingly, Wharton was a wealthy Society woman herself and was a contemporary of the Ladds (although there is no evidence they ever met), and she, like Kate, was prone to ailments.  In their circle people lived leisurely lives, funded charitable events, established foundations of various persuasions, attended musical luncheons or evenings and the occasional ball, moved in summertime to estates in Bar Harbor, Maine, or Newport, Rhode Island, where they would likely mill about on the decks of luxurious yachts.  The Ladds followed that pattern, but not as ostentatiously as many of their acquaintances.  An unspoken diffidence, a yearning for a more quiet and private life, owed much to the Quaker background of Kate Macy, but also probably grew from concern for Kate’s health.  This concern led first to renting homes away from the city, in the Somerset Hills of New Jersey.  Then, in 1905, they purchased 560 acres in Far Hills, Somerset County, and built a Tudor Revival mansion on the property.  They called the estate Natirar, an anagram of the name of a river, the Raritan, crossing the property. [5]  Their taste for anagrams has some bearing on this story because the schooner’s name, Etak, happens to be Kate spelled backwards.

From Natirar,