Author(s): Harold Kidd; Robin Elliott

Sailing

This is a stunning collection of photographs of early powerboats and launches taken from the mid 1890s to the late 1920s by renowned maritime photographer Henry Winkelmann. Of his 600 recorded photographs of powerboats around 450 have survived and form part of the Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Winkelmann Collection. Well-known maritime historians Harold Kidd and Robin Elliott have structured this book chronologically, following the style of Winkelmann’s Waitemata, their earlier book on Winkelmann’s yachting photography. The first image is from 1897 and the last from 1928, a period which saw the decline of the steam launch and the popularisation of the internal combustion-engined 'oil launch', and the first and major leaps into the pursuit of speed on the water for its own sake. The wide range of images shows a variety of craft, some utterly obscure, some quite famous, from elegant launches and humble working boats to dashing early speedboats. All capture the essence of the boat, the place and the time. The format also helps the enthusiast for old launches to understand the processes that produced the 'tram-top' and the 'bridgedecker' with their roots in the classically pure 'flushdecker' of the period just before 1914, when launches had finally broken away from their attempts to look as much as possible like yachts. 260 x 290 mm, 108 pages.