I recently saw an ad titled, “Endeavour Yacht for Sale,” from a high-end yacht broker. It caught my attention because I owned, sailed and lived aboard an Endeavour 32 sloop, a few decades ago. It seemed unlikely, however, that the yachtbroker was peddling a classic plastic sailboat from the mid-70s.  And I was right.  The yacht being advertised was not an Endeavour yacht, but the yacht Endeavour, the J boat, built and sailed by Thomas Sopwith, which came close to winning the America’s Cup in 1934. The Endeavour is being offered for €19,950,000, or approximately $22,596,000. This is all rather remarkable given that the yacht was once sold for ten pounds. The yacht Endeavour has an amazing history starting with an aircraft manufacturer, moving on to an America’s Cup challenge, an appearance at Dunkirk, a near scrapping, a sinking, a rescue by the “Queen of the J class,” ownership by a corporate felon and then by a mysterious investor from Hawaii.

The Endeavour was build by Camper and Nicholson in Gosport, Portsmouth Harbour, England for Thomas Sopwith. Sopwith a British aircraft pioneer and the founder of Sopwith Aviation Company which built more than 18,000 aircraft for the allied forces World War I, including 5,747 of the famous Sopwith Camel single-seat fighter. Sopwith is probably best known to American readers from the “Peanuts” comic strip where the beagle Snoopy imagines that the top of his dog house was the cockpit of a Sopwith Camel in a never-ending battle with the German ace, the Red Baron. While Snoopy never shoots down the Red Baron, the Sopwith Camel was very successful, shooting down 1,294 enemy aircraft, more than any other Allied fighter of the war.

Given Sopwith’s background in aeronautics, the 130 foot long Endeavour was one of the most advanced yachts of its day with a steel hull and mast. Endeavour was built for the 1934 America’s Cup where she raced against Vanderbilt’s Rainbow. Sopwith’s professional crew went on strike over a wage dispute shorty before sailing to the race. Sopwith crewed the Endeavour with enthusiastic amateurs who may lacked the experience necessary to win. Also, in an echo of the recent litigious America’s Cup races, there were disagreements over the running of the races, prompting the headline in one newspaper, “Britannia rules the waves and America waives the rules.”  Nevertheless, Endeavour came closer to winning than any other British challenger, winning the first two races of a highly contentious series.

Endeavour went on to dominate yacht racing in England before WWII. She is reported to be one of the vessels that helped evacuate the British Expeditionary Forces a Dunkirk in 1940. She passed through the hands of several owners and was sold for scrap in 1947, before being saved by a new owner at the last moment. In the seventies, Endeavour sank in the Medina River in Cowes.  She was bought for ten pounds sterling by two carpenters who patched the holes in her hull with plastic bags and got her afloat again. In the early eighties, Endeavour sat at Calshot Spit, an abandoned seaplane base fronting the Solent. She was a complete wreck, a rusting and forlorn hulk with no keel, rudder, ballast or interior.

In 1984 American real estate entrepreneur and yachtswoman Elizabeth Meyer bought Endeavour and undertook a five year rebuild at a reported cost of approximately $10 million.  Meyer would also go on to rescue and restore Sir Thomas Lipton’s J-boat Shamrock V.  She earned the nickname “Queen of the J-class.”  She is president of J-Class Management and the founded the International Yacht Restoration School in 1993.  Meyer has been instrumental in the restoration of more than 80 classic yachts.

Elizabeth Meyer sold Endeavour to Dennis Kozlowski, CEO of Tyco International, for $15 million in 2000.  In 2005, Kozlowski was convicted of looting the company’s coffers and was sent to prison for a term of from eight to twenty two years. He was forced to sell the Endeavour. The yacht was purchased by Cassio Antunes, a resident of Hawaii, for a reported $13 million. As reported by Bloomberg, “The new Endeavour owner is `an investor,’ said Alexander Busher, a yacht broker with Edmiston & Co. in Monaco who handled the sale, adding he knew little more about him. `He’s a man who’s quite difficult to trace, he plays his cards quite close,’ Busher said.”

And now the Endeavour is back on the market for $22 million. We can only hope that she finds a new owner who will keep her sailing for many years to come.

The America’s Cup (1934)