The largest boat in this atlas's Bay chapter: an ice-strengthened schooner built in under a year at Oakland for an Arctic collecting expedition, and — until this week — a boat with a famous builder and no known designer.
John Borden, a Chicago businessman, wanted a vessel that could take a Field Museum collecting expedition into Arctic ice and bring it home. He had commissioned Adventuress from Bowdoin Crowninshield fourteen years earlier for much the same purpose; this time he went to Henry C. Grebe, a Chicago naval architect who had run a subchaser yard for the Navy in the First World War.
The boat was built three thousand miles from Grebe's office, at W. F. Stone & Son on the Oakland Estuary. Accounts say forty-six men worked two ten-hour shifts and finished her in under a year — 140 feet of ice-strengthened auxiliary schooner. Latitude 38 has called her the largest schooner ever built as a sailing yacht on the West Coast.
She matters here for what she demonstrates. A Bay yard best known for Bird boats and minesweepers could, when asked, build at the top of the trade — and the Bay's industrial capacity was serious enough that a Chicago owner with an Arctic problem sent the work west.
- Designer
- Henry C. Grebe, Chicago
- Builder
- W. F. Stone & Son, Oakland
- Length
- 140 ft
- For
- John Borden's Field Museum Alaska-Arctic Expedition of 1927
- Construction
- Reportedly 46 men on two ten-hour shifts, completed in under a year
- The 'largest schooner built as a sailing yacht on the West Coast' claim and the 46-men detail both trace to a single lineage — Latitude 38's reporting, drawing on a 1992 WoodenBoat article. An earlier version of the same claim was broader still.
- Her later history has not been researched here.
Wooden Boat Atlas v3.0 · built 30 July 2026 · a project of the Golden Gate Wooden Boat Foundation · licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 · open data · corrections