The History of Catamarans: Lashed Logs, Voyaging Canoes and the Cruising Boom

The history of catamarans starts with two different boats sharing one borrowed word. Off India's Coromandel Coast, fishermen worked lashed-log rafts the Tamil language called kattumaram; across the Pacific, voyaging peoples crossed an ocean in double-hulled sailing canoes. Europeans met both, took the name from one and the boat from the other — and spent three centuries rediscovering what Pacific sailors already knew. Today that inheritance fills charter fleets: to shop the modern end of the story, browse all boats.

Two Origins in One Word: The Tamil Kattumaram and the Pacific Voyaging Canoe

The word first. Kattumaram combines the Tamil katta, to tie or bind, with maram, wood, tree or log — a precise description of the Coromandel Coast raft: logs lashed together, surfed through the breakers by fishermen who used them for centuries. It is a raft, not a twin-hulled sailing vessel — a distinction any honest history has to keep, because the boat's family tree does not start in India.

The vessel has a different birthplace. WoodenBoat magazine's history of the multihull records that Pacific peoples used multihulls — twin-hulled voyaging canoes with crab-claw sails and lashed construction — to explore and settle the whole Pacific Basin beginning around 3000 BC, some 5,000 years ago, reaching remote Easter Island some 1,600 years ago. These were serious ocean ships, carrying families, plants and livestock on deliberate voyages of colonisation across thousands of miles of open water; the sailing performance of the local craft startled the Europeans who finally crossed the Pacific. The honest summary is that the catamaran is a Pacific invention with an Indian name, applied later by English speakers who had seen both and kept the wrong label.

Europeans Meet the Multihull: Explorers' Accounts and Early Copies

Europe's own experiments came late and went nowhere commercially. The first documented European twin-hulled sailing craft is credited to the English polymath William Petty, who built and sailed one in 1662 — an experiment that demonstrated the speed potential and then vanished from practice. The accounts kept coming: William Dampier's A New Voyage Round the World (1697) praised the swift proas of Guam's CHamoru sailors as boats that "sail the best of any Boats in the World." Through the 1700s, explorers' published accounts of Pacific proas and double canoes kept the idea alive on paper, and in the early 19th century the shipwright Mayflower F. Crisp built a two-hulled merchant vessel, Original, at Rangoon — an earnest attempt that likewise founded no industry. The pattern in this era is worth naming: individual Europeans kept proving the concept worked, and the maritime world kept declining to adopt it — twin hulls offended shipbuilding orthodoxy, were awkward in harbour and hard to rate for racing. What the concept needed was a demonstration too public to ignore. It got one, from the most respected yacht designer in America.

Nathanael Herreshoff and Amaryllis, 1876: The Racing Cat Arrives

Nathanael Greene Herreshoff was already a formidable marine engineer when he turned to the multihull. His catamaran Amaryllis — lightweight hulls joined by a structure that, as WoodenBoat's history notes, let them move somewhat independently — raced her maiden regatta on 22 June 1876, the New York Yacht Club's Centennial Regatta off Staten Island, and simply sailed away from the monohull fleet.

The establishment's response tells you how complete the embarrassment was. Rather than adapt, organised sailing barred catamarans from regular racing classes — an exclusion that, by the standard accounts, lasted until the 1970s. Herreshoff pressed on regardless: his catamaran patent (US No. 189,459) dates to this period and his Duplex followed in 1877. With racing closed and buyers unconvinced, the catamaran went dormant in the West for half a century.

The Mid-Century Revival: Prout and the Home-Build Era

The revival, when it came, came from outside the yacht industry. In Hawaii, the Frenchman Eric de Bisschop built a Polynesian-style double canoe in 1936 and sailed it home to France, publishing Kaimiloa in 1939. In 1947, also in Hawaii, Woody Brown and Alfred Kumalae designed and built Manu Kai, a sleek catamaran often described as the first modern ocean-going catamaran — a reputation rather than a documented record, though her influence is not in doubt: her young assistant Rudy Choy went on to co-found CSK, a foundational American catamaran design firm.

In England, the story turned industrial and democratic at once. The Prout brothers began experimenting in 1949 and converted their Canvey Island factory to catamaran production in 1954 with the Shearwater line — small production cats sold to ordinary sailors. The same year, James Wharram built the 23 ft 6 in Tangaroa in England for £200, following Polynesian design principles. Wharram's own published history records that he sailed from Falmouth on 27 September 1955 with Ruth Merseburger and Jutta Schultze-Rohnhof, reached Trinidad the following winter, then built the 40 ft Rongo in Trinidad and in 1959 sailed her from New York back to Britain — the first west-to-east North Atlantic crossing by a catamaran. From 1965 Wharram designed explicitly for self-builders, putting ocean-capable cats within reach of anyone with a garage. The revival's legacy is the cruising cat itself: cheap to build, cheap to run, and proven at sea.

Charter Fleets and the Cruising Cat Boom

Production builders scaled what the pioneers proved. Lagoon — created in 1984 as Jeanneau's racing and prototypes arm — launched its first cruising catamaran, the VPLP-designed Lagoon 55, in 1987, and per Sail-World's anniversary account has since built more than 7,000 catamarans; South African builders such as Robertson and Caine, building Leopard catamarans for the charter trade from the mid-1990s, industrialised the type further. The demand engine was chartering: fleets in the Caribbean and Mediterranean discovered that a cat offered guests a level saloon, a cabin in each corner, anchorages too shallow for monohulls, and sailing flat enough for first-time sailors.

Private buyers followed the charter fleets home. Through the 1990s and 2000s the cruising cat moved from eccentricity to default choice for a large slice of the blue-water market — which is why so many of the bigger sailboats for sale today sit on two hulls. Racing, meanwhile, readmitted the multihull it had banned: the full story of how foiling catamarans conquered the America's Cup is told in our companion history of that event, and our history of sailboats covers the monohull mainstream these boats disrupted.

Power Cats and Foiling: The Modern Multihull

The newest branches dropped the sails. Production power catamarans — twin-hulled motor yachts offering the cat's volume and stability on an easily driven hull pair — grew through the 2000s into a market of their own; Aquila, founded in 2012, now describes itself on its own brand history as among the world's leading power-cat builders, a maker's claim the crowded boat-show pontoons tend to support. At the other extreme, foiling lifted the multihull clear of the water: hydrofoil catamarans now fly on foils at multiples of wind speed, the technical descendants of Amaryllis herself.

For buyers, the split means "catamaran" now names three different purchases — the sailing cruiser, the power cat and the trailerable sport cat — which share a layout logic and a set of ownership quirks, from wide marina berths to travel-lift haul-outs, that our catamaran buying guide walks through.

What the History of Catamarans Means for Buyers Today

The history hands today's buyer a short checklist. A cat's stability is form stability — it does not heel, but it also gives less warning before its limits, which is why reefing discipline matters more, not less, on a cruising cat. The home-build era is why so many older cats are one-offs whose survey needs a multihull-savvy surveyor. The charter boom is why the used market is rich in ex-charter boats at sharp prices — good value if the maintenance records survive, and our roundup of the best catamaran brands separates the fleet-grade names from the owner-grade ones. And the modern split means the first decision is sail, power or sport — before brand, before size.

When you find the right boat, our transportation providers can quote moving it, wherever in the country it lies.

History of Catamarans FAQs

Where does the word "catamaran" come from?

From the Tamil kattumaram — katta, to tie, plus maram, wood or log — the name of the lashed-log fishing rafts of India's Coromandel Coast. English speakers applied the word to the Pacific's twin-hulled sailing canoes, the modern catamaran's actual ancestors. The name and the vessel have separate origins; honest histories keep them apart.

Who built the first catamaran?

Pacific voyagers, thousands of years before Europeans arrived — the double-hulled voyaging canoe is one of humanity's oldest ocean-going designs. The first documented European twin-hull was William Petty's craft of 1662, and the boat that forced the modern argument was Herreshoff's Amaryllis of 1876. No single inventor exists to credit.

Why were catamarans banned from racing?

Because they won. After Amaryllis outclassed the monohull fleet at the 1876 Centennial Regatta, organised sailing excluded catamarans from regular classes rather than race against them — an exclusion the standard accounts say lasted until the 1970s.

Are catamarans better than monohulls for cruising?

Different, not simply better. Cats offer level sailing, huge living volume, shallow draft and speed; monohulls offer narrower berthing, a more forgiving motion and self-righting ability a cat lacks. The charter industry chose cats for space and comfort; many blue-water sailors still choose monohulls. Your cruising ground and crew should decide.

Bottom line: The history of catamarans is a Pacific invention, an Indian name, a public humiliation of the racing establishment in 1876, and a slow vindication by charter fleets. If two hulls fit your cruising, start with the boats for sale at Boat Deals Direct and filter the fleet from there.