The Freyberg boys PART 2
In my last article I left them in December 1899. Oscar was 18 and had recently bought the competitive yacht Mapu. Paul was 15 and Cuthbert 13, both becoming useful crewmembers, while Claude was 12 and Bernard was just 10. The next 10 years saw enormous changes to their lives.
Mapu was something of a freak. She was designed in Auckland by accountant John Waymouth, one of the few students of yacht design in New Zealand from the 1860s. Waymouth had two sons who became prominent in yachting. John Jr was a boatbuilder in Auckland while the younger son, Oliver, known as ‘Noll’, was a skilled helmsman.
John Jr originally built in October 1883 as the 33ft, 6-ton centreboard fishing smack for fisherman William Knox with a ‘whaleboat bow’ which looked for all the world like
