THE BENNETT CUP: AN AMERICAN PARCEL-GILT SILVER PUNCH BOWL YACHT TROPHY, TIFFANY & CO., NEW YORK, DATED 1883

Sotheby's New York, June 23, 1988, lot 197

Collection of Victor Niederhoffer

Sotheby's New York, June 15, 1998, lot 1693

The presentation inscription reads "Gracie, Bedouin / March race / Oct. 18th 1883 / Course 26 Miles to Windward and return / from Sandy Hook. / Won by / Bedouin , beating Gracie / some 15 minutes."

This piece is recorded in Tiffany's ledgers as 'Punch Bowl-parcel-gilt inside extra $15'.

Bedouin was owned by Colonel Archibald Rogers -1928), heir to the Rogers Locomotive Works, described as “prominent in sports and was known as an engineer and scholar… He was greatly interested in yachting, and he headed the syndicate which built the Colonia, which competed with the Vigilant, Pilgrim and Puritan in defense of the America’s Cup” (New York Times obituary, May 10, 1928). His country house, Crumwold Hall, was built by Richard Morris Hunt in Hyde Park, next door to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt estate. 

The Gracie was originally designed by Abraham A. Schank in 1868 and  owned by Joseph P. Earle; she was a candidate for the America’s Cup in 1881 and 1885, when she was owned and sailed by J. Frederick Tams.

On October 18, 1883 the two yachts, a cutter and a sloop, sailed for the Bennett Cup and $1000 a side on a course "20 miles to the windward and return from Sandy Hook on the open ocean". The race was described in The New York Times the next day under the heading 'The Cutter Bedouin's Victory, the Gracie beaten nearly fifteen minutes in a forty-mile race.' The Bedouin's performance was so superior to that of the older sloop Gracie that watching yachtsman observed 'There goes the death-knell of the American sloop.'