Off Newport

(See front cover)

The Event.

For the America's Cup--rococo, gourd-necked silver trophy 2 ft. 3 in. high, offered by the Royal Yacht Squadron for a sailing race in England in 1851, won by the yacht America, and ever since the property of U. S. yachtsmen:

A series of match races off Newport, R. I., on courses to be announced by signals from the committee boat on the day of each race, the winner to be the boat taking four races out of seven:

The contestants: two yachts built within the limit of the specifications for the Seventy-Six Rating Class under the "Universal Rule"* to race without time allowance.

The defender: Enterprise, owned by a syndicate headed by Winthrop W. Aldrich. and including Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, George Fisher Baker Jr., and Vincent Astor. Skipper: Harold Stirling Vanderbilt.

The challenger: Shamrock V, owned by Sir Thomas Lipton and sailed by his professional captain, Edward Hearn.

The Boats. Critics who say Shamrock V has no chance think so because: 1) Under the rules of the America's Cup races she crossed the ocean on her own bottom and had to be rerigged when she got here, while the Enterprise has been tuning up all summer. 2) She is sailed by an Englishman unfamiliar with the ocean at Newport, while Skipper Vanderbilt has sailed at Newport since boyhood. 3) She is sailed by a professional, and professionals as a class are rarely as resourceful as amateurs.

People who think better of her remember: 1) That in her trials in England she was far faster than all reasonable estimates of her speed based on her measurements. She beat famed Candida, a boat with five tons less displacement and 800 square feet more sail. 2) She can stand up in a wind and is wonderfully fast in light airs. One day at Newport when the U. S. contestants, holding an elimination trial, lay becalmed, she ghosted through them all as though she had an engine.

One thing no one argues--Shamrock V is handsome. Hers is a gull-shaped green body, striped with a white boot-top at the waterline, the light swell amidships giving a look of speed. Mahogany over a steel frame, with keel, stem, and sternpost of wood, a dagger-plate centreboard streamlined and built of teak, plated with bronze. Her hull measurements are within a fraction of an inch the same as Enterprise's; she carries 16 square feet less sail and has a little more displacement. She can ride an English chop on a reach and pull before the wind; what she can do in the slow swells of Newport water remains problematical. She is a modern, but not a strikingly original boat; there are comparatively few tricks in her rigging, few experiments, and it is this that constitutes her main point of difference from Enterprise, the most radically experimental racer ever built, and one of the most expensive.

Enterprise, costing more than $1,000,000, was designed by W. Starling Burgess, who is also an airplane engineer. With the wealth of the great Vanderbilt syndicate behind him, he worked on theories no one had had a chance to apply before. When he put in an aluminum alloy duralumin metal mast, painted white, sailors called it the "bean blower" and scornfully predicted that it would collapse in the first puff. It is made in two layers held together by 100,000 rivets. It is much lighter and stronger than wood. For firmness, it was stepped in a water-tight steel tub full of molten metal--"Wood's metal" (tin, lead, and bismuth) which melts at 120DEG. It is wedged at the deck with hard rubber.

Enterprise has eight mainsails and 50 other assorted pieces of canvas. All summer, sails have been rushed by motor truck from the Ratsey and Lapthorn loft in City Island to Enterprise and back again for alteration. Four sailmakers are on hand at Newport to make minor changes and repairs. Being launched early enough to get her sails in beautiful trim for the trials was one reason why Enterprise beat the other U. S. contestants, Weetamoe, Yankee, Whirlwind, for the right to defend the Cup. In the first trials on the Sound she proved that like Shamrock V she was a ghoster.

The Men. America's Cup contests, long a personal rivalry between Sir Thomas Lipton and U. S. yachtsmen, have created an odd inversion of partisanship. Many Americans would like Lipton to win because they feel he is a fine sportsman. Many Englishmen would like to see him lose because in the 32 years that he has built boats for the cup contests he had never allowed any fellow-countryman to make a challenge, always getting his own in first. Now 80, ruddy, genial, and almost professionally optimistic, he still affects the costume that appears in most photographs--blue serge suit, yachting cap, polka dot tie.

Anyone meeting Sir Thomas Lipton for a day is charmed by him. There are certain stories that he loves to tell: how as a boy of 18, living in the U. S. anc supporting his mother, he managed to save $320 in 18 months . . . how he walked into the White House one day and spoke to President Hayes, who took him for a despatch boy . . . his remark on being shown the tea thrown overboard during the Boston Tea Party: "They had a lot of good sense. It wasn't Lipton's." He refers to the cup as "that old mug." In Newport he has kept much to himself on his yacht Erin. Last week he was seriously ill, result of overexertion which a recent operation forbade.

A different, a less democratic type of sportsman is Harold Stirling Vanderbilt. Deprived of the incentive of fortune-building and at the same time equipped with a limitless facility for the cultivation of whims by his share ($30,000,000) of the monumental capital of his family, he turned to sport all the energy and brilliance of a fine executive intelligence. When he graduated from St. Mark's school he won the Founder's medal for being the best pupil. At Harvard he finished a four-year course in three years and was a member of the Porcellian Club and manager of the football team. During this period the nickname "Mike" was applied to him for some reason now forgotten. Later, his various directorates and the importance of his activities in law and the railroad business did not interfere with his more ardent interests. He became famous as one of the best auction-bridge players in the world, gave his name to a convention of bidding (TIME, Sept. 30), and is largely responsible for the present vogue of contract bridge. When automobiling was a sport he had the fastest car in Newport; when planes became practical he had the most elaborate one in the U. S. One day he left his yacht during a New York Yacht Club cruise, flew from Newport to Southampton to play 18 holes of golf, flew to a Harvard-Yale baseball game and to Poughkeepsie for a rowing race in the late afternoon, going on to dinner in Port Washington, L. I.

Now 46, still a bachelor in spite of many reported engagements, he has retained yachting as his major hobby. As a boy of 12 he had spent his vacations knocking around the Ida Lewis lighthouse. In 1913 he sailed his yacht Vagrant from Portsmouth, Maine to Lisbon, Portugal in 23 days and won the King's Cup. He was Commodore of the New York Yacht Club for three years and served on a submarine chaser during the War. At all his amusements he works hard. He went into training last spring to be in shape to sail Enterprise. He smokes a pipe, seldom drinks. On Vara, in Newport, he does calesthenics on deck in pajamas. After breakfast he goes aboard Enterprise, wearing a business suit and a felt hat. to supervise the daily tinkering with the rigging. In the rain he wears a yellow slicker, but often sails the big yacht in shirtsleeves. When there is the slightest imperfection in the way the boat is handled in practice he puts about and goes through the maneuver over again. He speaks quietly to the crew and addresses his sailing master as "Mr." He sails a boat hard and cleverly on the wind and has a reputation as a windjammer, one who would "set a circus-tent on deck in a blow if he could find a pole to put it on." To the brain busy behind his square, high forehead, prodding out through his pince-nez, the U. S. looks as the course signals go up on the committee boat in answer to a southwest September wind and the two sloops put over the line, from Brenton's Reef to sea, from sea to Cuttyhunk.

* An extremely technical mathematical calculation providing that the rating equals

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