Yankee to Gosport

A boat which few U. S. racing yachtsmen could take reasonable pride in owning is George V's old hulk, Britannia. She compares to her up-to-date mates in Class J as a jubilee coach compares to a Sopwith monoplane, except that she is infinitely more expensive. Britannia was built in 1893, for King Edward when he was the Prince of Wales. Four years later, he decided she was out of style and sold her as an ocean cruiser. Somehow, Britannia found her way back to the royal boathouse and has been there ever since. Last week her worn hull was in a Portsmouth drydock for its annual overhauling. Shipwrights, to whom she has been worth a fortune, gratefully installed her fourth set of rigging, stepped a new 165-ft. silver spruce mast, and scraped two tons of copper off her bottom to decrease her resistance to the water.

In 1894, Britannia accomplished her most noteworthy feat: defeating the American yacht Vigilant, owned by Gerald Gould, in British waters. Last week, the British Channel port of Gosport turned out to welcome the first big U. S. racing yacht which has gone to England since: Boston's sleek white Yankee, which had just crossed the Atlantic in 19 days.

Built for the America's Cup races in 1930, Yankee was bought last autumn by the man who may become the next leader of the small group of fabulously plutocratic U. S. sailors who can do their racing in million-dollar boats: Gerard Barnes Lambert, angel for the Lindbergh flight (see p. 56), onetime head of the St. Louis Listerine business for whose fantastic advertising he gets credit. He took up sailing seriously in 1928, bought first the old schooner Atlantic which he sailed to Spain, then the sloop Vanitie, in which he practiced with experienced skippers like Charles Francis Adams, George Nichols. While Yankee was being cheered into Gosport last week, Owner Lambert explained that instead of being towed across the ocean, she had raced her convoy, Atlantic, which still holds the transatlantic record (12 days, 4 hr., made in 1905), won by 15 hours. British yachtsmen learned his plans: to find a likely buyer for Yankee abroad after racing her in English waters this summer, build a brand new boat next winter if England challenges for the America's Cup.

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