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Frank Cowper (18 January 1849 – 28 May 1930) was an English yachtsman and author who was highly influential in popularising single-handed cruising. He has been credited as "the forefather of modern cruising", and his books "laid the foundation" of the pilot guides used by yachtsmen today. As an author he also saw some commercial success with a number of published adventure and romance novels.
Contents
Yachting
Cowper learned to sail on the Upper Thames, hiring catboats with friends when he was an undergraduate at Oxford. In 1870, in his final year at university, he spent his summer vacation in Auray, in Brittany in northern France, sailing a small dinghy in the Gulf of Morbihan and out into Quiberon Bay.
Between 1892 and 1895 Cowper circumnavigated the British Isles, exploring practically every river and creek round the coast. He also crossed the English Channel to France and Belgium.
Cowper's most well-known work, Sailing Tours, describes these voyages and was published in five volumes between 1892 and 1909. Original copies are now quite collectable, and a full set can fetch as much as £500. In 1985 Ashford Press published a facsimile reprint of all 5 volumes.
Cowper originally undertook the voyages documented in Sailing Tours, mostly single-handed, in the yawl Lady Harvey, a 44 foot (13 m) Dover fishing lugger built in 1867. In his 1921 book Single-Handed Cruising, Francis B. Cooke claimed that no amateur yachtsman had ever single-handed a larger vessel.
Cowper was a contemporary of the first single-handed sailor to circumnavigate the globe, the American Joshua Slocum, but where Slocum braved the oceans, the British coastal waters in which Cowper sailed are famous for their large tidal range and rife with hazardous rocks and currents.
Cowper sold Lady Harvey in 1895, then building a ketch of his own design, Undine II, which became his favourite but which he sold in 1899. He next owned a yawl named Zayda, followed by a French fishing lugger, Idéal, and a 14-ton cutter Little Windflower. In 1921 Cowper purchased the 41 foot (12 m) cutter Ailsa, which was to be the last boat he owned.
Nearly 120 years after the publication of Sailing Tours, it was still being cited by the publishers of sailing guides, Neville Featherstone describing Cowper's writing as "a rich blend of navigational facts laced with his own semi-libellous observations on the world around him". Alan Titchmarsh described it as a "rich source of inspiration" for his 1999 novel, The Last Lighthouse Keeper.
Fiction
Cowper also wrote several adventure and romance novels. One of these, The Island of the English (1898), was described as having "a strong compelling note of verity" and a "vivid flexible style".
Personal life
Cowper studied classical history at Queens College, Oxford, and graduated with honours. The university commuted this to an MA in 1875.
On 28 December 1876, Cowper married fellow author Edith Cadogen, daughter of the Rector of Wicken. They made their home in the Isle of Wight and Edith bore 10 children; 3 did not survive infancy but their eldest, Frank Cadogan Cowper, grew up to become a recognised pre-raphaelite artist. The marriage was troubled, however - Edith accused Cowper of violence and frequent infidelity, and they divorced in 1890.