Christopher Dodd is a journalist turned writer and historian, specialising in rowing. After thirty years helping to edit the Guardian, he co-founded the River & Rowing Museum at Henley-on-Thames, where he is the emeritus historian. His new book is a historical novel about the birth of war reporting during the Civil War; read more about and purchase the book here.

Scribe and Sketcher, Paper and Paint

During his Atlantic voyage George Washburn conversed with fellow passengers when not immersed in his big reading bag of American newspapers. The occupant of the cabin next to his was a quiet young man who spent his time sketching in the saloon. He told Washburn that he was from Philadelphia, and was on his way to Paris to take up a bursary at the École des Beaux Arts.

Having never seen more of Philly than the railroad depot, Washburn enquired if his sketch book contained any images of the city, and was treated to a sequence of images of boathouses and rowers on the Schuylkill River.

'I was raised on Mount Vernon Street which is virtually on the water, and so I was soon messing about in boats,' the artist said. 'I learned to pull an oar and go rowing with my friends whenever we had the time and inclination.'

'Well, young fella, I don't blame you. You're fortunate to have access to some good water by the look of it. Myself, I fell in love with rowing at Yale, and after moving to Boston I took every opportunity to get out on the Charles River. I'm George Washburn, by the way, a scribe with the New York Tribune.'

'Pleased to meet you, Mr. Washburn. I am Thomas Eakins, and my ambition is to become a portrait painter, or at least some kind of an artist!'

The scribe and the sketcher henceforth swapped stories about rowing on the Housatonic in New Haven, on the Charles in Boston and the Hudson and East River in New York.

Washburn regaled Eakins with tales of Harvard crews, sons of Boston Brahmins and Protestant old money classes who were to be identified by their crimson silk head scarves. They were often pitched against Irish immigrants from St Mary's Temperance Society, the Maid of Erin or Saint James Young Men's Catholic Total Abstinence Society.

Eakins described the lively boathouse scene at Fairmont Park by the Schuylkill, and he gave Washburn a lesson on the pitfalls of depicting rowing on canvas. 'I've studied life drawing at the Pennsylvania academy of fine arts and anatomy at the Jefferson med school,' he said. 'The sort of slim boats we row make composing a picture difficult because they are so long and narrow, and then the light plays off the water and sky simultaneously every few seconds. It sparks and reflects disturbance created by oars.'

'Rowing is not so easy to write about either,' Washburn said. 'If you are lucky enough to find a place where you can see what's happening in a race, the action is usually a long way off and parallax plays hellfire with judgement'

He described his experience of the first Yale versus Harvard race, when Yale went down twice in the day to the Bostonians.

'I was captain, and so it still irritates me that we were beat. But at least we started something. It began because the new Boston, Concorde and Montréal Railroad wanted to attract fares to Center Harbor resort on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. We Yalees were naive. Between losing the first race and losing the second, we were plied with ale, mineral water and brandy with a hearty meal and cigars.'

Washburn described matches off the Battery between Whitehall dories. 'There's plenty of rowing in New York,' he said. 'There's regattas at Dunlap's Hotel on the East River, and the Empire City Club on the Harlem river. And sometimes by the Staten Island ferry, Nautilus Hall I think it's called. You come across the Ward Brothers? A foursome professional crew from up the Hudson Valley, unbeatable.'

Browsing through his newspapers one day, Washburn's eye alighted on a small item giving notice that the proprietors of a private gymnasium on 6th Avenue and 14th Street intended to form a New York athletic club, modeled on the German gymnasium near the railroad station at Saint Pancras in London.

The pioneers were named as William Buckingham Curtis, Harry Buermeyer and John C Babcock. Surely, Washburn thought, John C Babcock must be the same Babcock whom he met at the Battle of Antietam in 1862, the same Babcock who practised architecture in Chicago, the same Babcock who was a scout with the Union army, Babcock the cartographer with Pinkerton's detective agency, Babcock the oarsman and sculler? He wondered aloud to Eakins if Babcock had made any progress with his ideas of giving oarsmen seats that slide. Eakins was intrigued, saying he would mention it to his keen rowing friend Max Schmidt when next writing to him. 'Max will try anything that makes the boat faster!'

'Your friend Max might like to know of another experiment I happened upon,' Washburn said. 'I was visiting my parents in Troy on the Hudson, where my father is a pastor, when one day my walk took me past a paper mill where I spied a racing single as streamlined as a spear drawn up on the shore

'Its keeper revealed that it was made of laminated paper, a process that he had discovered by accident when repairing a leak in Josh Ward's boat using materials readily to hand.a He glued paper over the hole and sealed it with varnish. He figured, this Elijah Waters fellow, thjat a shell made entirely of paper with sealed chambers for buoyancy would be stiffer and lighter than a boat made of Spanish cedar. This is the boat of future champions, he ventured to me. Something to look out for.'

All across the Atlantic Ocean fog persisted for day after until one morning a beach emerged some miles north of where the pilot of the China intended to be. He was required to execute a sharp turn in order to dock at Queenstown, the port of call known to Bostonians as Cobh. From the day's Cork Examiner Washburn learned that the war he was sent to England to report on between Prussia and the Austrian Empire was already over.

About NEWS Fit To PRINT - The birth of war reporting

A novel by Christopher Dodd set in the golden age of the printed word. NEWS FitTo PRINT will be published on the anniversary of the pivotal Battle of Antietam which took place on 17 September 1862

NEWS Fit To PRINT...
takes place during America's Civil War which tore the Union apart before stitching it back together. The conflict created tremendous thirst for news, a thirst that newspaper and weekly magazine publishers were keen to quench. Demand for the printed word heralded a golden age in gathering, printing and distributing news.

News Fit To Print follows the experiences of George Washburn of the New York Tribune who shadowed the Union army at the bloody Battle of Antietam and rode horse, train and ferry to deliver his exclusive report in person. Antietam was a pivotal episode in the North-South struggle. The setback inflicted on Robert E Lee, commander of the Confederacy forces, persuaded Union President Lincoln that the time was right to publish his controversial Declaration of Emancipation.

The Tribune syndicated Washburn's scoop to 180 newspapers world-wide. The scribbler who gave birth to war reporting was welcomed by the group of journalists known as the Bohemians who gathered in Pfaff's Cave on Broadway to eat, drink and roister. George Washburn began his adult life as a lawyer. After attending Yale and the law school at Harvard he acted as bodyguard for speakers at emancipation meetings in Boston. His habit of feasting on news led him to close his law office and beat on the Tribune's door. He sharpened his journalistic pencil in Carolina where the Union Navy was blockading ports to close down the South's cotton exports.

Washburn lived by the seat of his pants. At the behest of his editor he shadowed Union commander George McClellan, known to his officers as Young Napoleon and to his men as Little Mack, to determine the general's possession - or lack of - leadership talents.

Washburn hobnobbed with scouts and spies and bystanders and militia men who followed the colors. He deployed diplomacy, disguise and deception in the field. He marshaled intellect, curiosity and guile to disentangle the fake from the factual in rumor swirling around Washington and the White House;. He met coincidence, curiosity and courage wherever his hunch and his horse took him. When the War Department banned army contact with the press, he was forced to judge who among the generals would bow to the edict, and who wouldn't.

Washburn's fit-to-print scoop from Antietam led to a distinguished career as an editor at the Tribune, and chilling out in Pfaff's Cave led to a love affair with Ida Godiva, a beguiling bareback rider and Vaudeville performer. Their relationship will develop in the sequel to News Fit To Print, when Washburn moves to London to set up a bureau for the Tribune and take advantage of the newly-laid wonder, the Atlantic cable.

Author Christopher Dodd...
is a former Guardian journalist, feature writer and rowing correspondent. He has reported from nine Olympic regattas and written a dozen books on rowing history. He is a founder of the River & Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames and contributes regularly to ROW-360 magazine and the blog HearTheBoatSing.