Let those who do not know what it is to be a seaman argue that in Uncle Charlie his tribe had lost its bite. Here was a new kind of excellence for an Adams, since to the earlier members of the family, competitive sport may well have seemed frivolous, even British. He was, moreover, supreme in every kind of boat, from the little Herreshoff S-class to the cup defenders: in 1920 he had, in Resolute, successfully defended the America’s Cup. For some fifty years he was acknowledged to be the ablest helmsman in Massachusetts Bay, and if the ablest there, the ablest on the East Coast - though Long Island Sound may have had its reservations - and if the ablest on the East Coast, then also in the world. My excuse is that his career as a racing skipper was the greatest of his careers, the only one in which he reached supremacy. I can only try to describe what it was to serve as one of the crew of his yachts. I cannot speak of his career as treasurer of Harvard College, as Secretary of the Navy in the Hoover Administration, as the leading citizen of Boston in his day. THE historians spend their time talking about every great Adams except the one I knew, my mother’s brother, Charles Francis Adams, the third of the name.
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