James Wharram

Wharram died on 14 December 2021, at the age of 93.

In 2008–09 James Wharram and Hanneke Boon conceived the Lapita Voyage expedition, sailing two double canoes based on traditional Polynesian hullform and crab claw sails, from the Philippines to Tikopia and Anuta in the Solomon Islands. The ‘Lapita Voyage’ was a major expedition in Experimental Marine Archaeology. It was the first exploration of one possible migration route into the Central Pacific by Ethnic sailing craft.

The rig on Wharrams since the early 1980s is the 'Wharram Wingsail Rig', an appropriate tech squareheaded rig with low turbulence pocket round the mast and a short adjustable gaff at the head. The advantages of this rig are simplicity, low turbulence and the fact that it can be lowered in a following wind at any time. The Centre of effort on all Wharram rigs is kept low, giving them very good stability. No full-size Wharram has been known to have capsized.

From 1973 Wharram was assisted by his co-designer Hanneke Boon. In 1987-92 James and his partners built a new flagship, the 63-foot catamaran Spirit of Gaia, which they sailed into the Pacific and round the world, to study Indo-Pacific canoe-craft (1994–98).

The story was told by Wharram in the 1969 book Two Girls Two Catamarans.

No scholars in the Western world at this time believed that the Polynesians had boats capable of directed ocean voyages. Wharram believed otherwise and set out to prove it by doing it himself. He followed this first Atlantic crossing by building a 40-foot V-hull double canoe, Rongo, in Trinidad in 1957–58, with Bernard Moitessier's help, and sailing her across the North Atlantic in 1959 from New York to Ireland. This was the first west-to-east crossing of the Atlantic by catamaran or multihull.

Wharram was born in Manchester, England. In 1953, after long studies into the records of boats of the Pacific in the libraries and museums of Britain, and inspired by Eric de Bisschop's book The voyage of the Kaimiloa, he designed and built the first British ocean-going double-canoe-catamaran, the Tangaroa (length 23 feet 6 inches (7.16 m)) and in 1955–56 sailed with Jutta Schultze-Rohnhof and Ruth Merseburger, across the Atlantic to Trinidad – the beginning of cruising and transatlantic crossing with a catamaran.

James Wharram (15 May 1928 – 14 December 2021) was a British multihull pioneer and designer of catamarans.