For forty years after the turn of last century, Willard Jackson trolled the waters off Marblehead, Massachusetts, in a custom motor launch carrying a wooden camera and a box of glass-plate negatives. His quarry? Any significant yacht, military vessel, or working craft that made its way into and out of that mecca of American sailing. Jackson sold his photographs to private boat owners and to yachting magazines like The Rudder. Like many obsessed with a single project, he must have seemed eccentric, ducking under the spray hood on his launch to insert fragile glass plates into his camera. But over a century later, the archive of several thousand pictures he collected stands as a one-of-a-kind record of the early development of the American yacht.

Matthew Murphy, who grew up sailing the waters of Salem Sound, has studied Jackson's work in the archives of both the Peabody Essex Museum and the Hart Nautical Collections of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum. By thoughtfully selecting and analyzing 75 images, representing the development of the pleasure sailboat in the four decades before World War II, Murphy gives us a mosaic history of this great period in American maritime history.