Newport defended the America's Cup for fifty-three years, from 1930 until the trophy finally left Rhode Island in September 1983. The harbor kept the habit. Narragansett Bay still supports one of the largest concentrations of traditional sail on the American East Coast, and the Newport Sunset Sail on Classic Sailboat tours that leave Bannister's Wharf are the public inheritance of that fleet. The wharf itself predates the racing by two centuries. John Bannister, a colonial merchant, built out this stretch of waterfront in the 1740s, when Newport rivaled Boston as a shipping port and its deepwater anchorage rarely froze. The vessels matter more than the route. Gaff-rigged schooners — two masts, the foremast shorter than the main, four-sided sails hoisted on a spar — were the workhorse rig of the North Atlantic coast for a century before Marconi rigs made them obsolete for racing. They survive here as passenger craft because they are wide, stable and slow to heel, and because the silhouette is worth more than the speed. Newport harbor cruises on these hulls move at six or seven knots, roughly walking pace across water. The geography does the rest. A schooner leaving the wharf clears Goat Island within minutes, passes the granite bulk of Fort Adams — begun in 1824, finished in 1857, and still the largest coastal fortification in the United States — then bears toward the Claiborne Pell Bridge, opened in 1969 and standing some 215 feet above the channel at mid-span. To port sit Rose Island Lighthouse, lit in 1870, and the shoal where Ida Lewis kept Lime Rock Light and was credited with saving at least eighteen lives. Off the eastern shore, the Gilded Age cottages of Bellevue Avenue turn their seaward faces outward, which is the way their architects intended them to be read. Light is the last variable. Newport sits on a peninsula, so the sun goes down over water rather than land, and the low August angle throws the Pell Bridge into silhouette while the mansion facades hold color for another twenty minutes. The Newport landmarks that matter — fort, bridge, lighthouses, cottages — were all built facing the channel. That is why a Newport Sunset Sail on Classic Sailboat tour is not simply a boat ride with a good backdrop. The town was laid out to be approached from the sea, and the schooners restore the only vantage from which it composes properly.