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took his grandson’s hand, assuring him that his inheritance was safe and that he had his grandfather’s blessing to return his name to Wolfe.
    Within the week, Dudley contacted a lawyer in Portland and had his name changed back to Dudley F. Wolfe. B. F. kept the trust as written with Dudley a full heir. Grafton and Clifford would remain Smiths the rest of their lives.
    In the fall of 1925 Dudley was finally accepted to Harvard. Although he still lacked crucial credits, the college allowed him an “uncredited grade” for Latin, which he had failed. * Just as he had at Phillips, he played football, earning a coveted Harvard letter. He also immersed himself in the secret clubs society, and he was a popular member of several despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he was ten years older than his classmates. Beginning his sophomore year with the Institute of 1770, he later joined the “Dickey,” as Harvard’s unofficial chapter of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon was known, and finally the Owl Club. † Entry at all levels into the Harvard club elite depended primarily on wealth and family social standing, two criteria Dudley easily met. Deciding not to live on campus in Cambridge, he rented a brownstone at 177 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It sat just down the street from B. F.’s sprawling mansion at 21 Commonwealth Avenue in fashionable Back Bay, a neighborhood of 15,000-square-foot houses running west for ten blocks from the Boston Botanical Gardens. Dudley, a reticent but generous host, welcomed his new group of college friends to his home, offering them the finest whiskeys and cigars, and, when pressed, telling tales from the front lines of a war they had only read about and of his twenty years at the helm of his own boats.
     
    O N M ARCH 14, 1927, just shy of his ninety-seventh birthday, the family patriarch, B. F. Smith, finally died. Although he had loved him, Dudley nonetheless felt a new freedom after his commanding grandfather was gone. While he had lost a source of emotional support, he had also lost his most critical judge, the witness to his every failure.
    Although Dudley realized he wouldn’t meet his graduation requirements by June 1929, he knew he would earn his bachelor’s degree the following year—the first diploma of his life. Perhaps as a reward, he commissioned a double-masted, sixty-foot schooner from his sailing friend John G. Alden of Boston, who modeled his boats on the Grand Banks fishing vessels: heavy, sturdy, and strong enough to withstand gales. Soon after the yacht’s completion in Wiscasset, Maine, Dudley christened it the Mohawk at the Camden Yacht Club, just up the road from Rockport. As he walked through the venerable but rustic one-room clubhouse after the ceremony, he saw an entry notice for the King and Queen’s Cup Classic, a transatlantic yacht race from New York to Spain. Knowing that races across the Atlantic had always demanded a larger class of sailing yacht of at least one hundred feet, he leaned in to read the specifications and was gratified to see that they didn’t limit the class of boat. Looking out the club window at his powerfully built Mohawk he thought, why not?
    Although no yachtsman in history had taken the risk of racing a sixty-foot boat across the ocean, Dudley was confident that the Mohawk could not only perform well but could maneuver easily around the larger, more cumbersome boats. While smaller yachts had certainly been sailed across the oceans, no one had ever raced one; and, as any sailor knows, pleasure-cruising from point to point, motoring into ports, even sailing off course when necessary to avoid storms, was very different from nonstop, point-to-point racing across 3,000 miles of unforgiving sea.
    A week into the race, Dudley spotted a steamship off the Mohawk ’s port side. He grabbed his field glasses and saw that it was the Italian luxury liner Conte Biancamano on its route from New York to Genoa. While he had never been on that