Frank Samuelsen and George Harbo

He had been a merchant mariner, a surf fisherman, and a part-time pilot before becoming a clammer in a boat of his own building off the New Jersey Shore with his younger friend Frank Samuelsen.

[1][2][3] Sources show Fox and the Police Gazette offered and provided towing of the Fox to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (which was the last outside propulsion used by Harbo and Samuelsen until reaching Europe); payment of expenses incurred by the American consulate in Le Havre for their food, clothing, and temporary shelter upon reaching the continent; and, of course, publicity of their feat in the Police Gazette.

It was apocryphally reported that the steamer ran out of coal off the coast of Cape Cod; when the Captain ordered all wooden objects aboard broken up and stoked to make steam for the remainder of the trip, Samuelsen and Harbo relaunched the Fox over the side and rowed back to New York.

[10] In fact, when the Herald newspaper correspondent met the steamer “at the dock in Hoboken, the boilers were chuffing steam and Harbo, Samuelson, and the Fox were all aboard.

The reporter describes the weathered state of their skiff, lashed to the steamer’s deck next to the ship’s pristine white lifeboat, which seemed a giant in comparison.”[11] Though they soon faded into obscurity, their speed record for rowing the North Atlantic was not broken for another 114 years.

In 1985 folk singer Jerry Bryant wrote The Ballad of Harbo and Samuelsen which has since been recorded by many other artists including William Pint and Felicia Dale.

In the summer of 2010, four rowers – skipper Leven Brown (37), Ray Carroll (33), Don Lennox (41) and Livar Nysted (39), on the Artemis Investments – bested the record set by Samuelsen and Harbo by crossing the Atlantic Ocean in 43 days, 21 hours and 26 minutes.