July 3.
ALL over the world the thoughts of yachtsmen are now turning to the triangular course off Sandy Hook, where Sir Thomas Lipton will make his fourth endeavour to wrest from the United States the America Cup which was lost to Great Britain in 1851. Sir Thomas has made three other attempts to secure this trophy. representing the blue riband of the Atlantic, in 1899, 1901 and 1903, and but for the war this present attempt would have been past history by about six years. As it is the Shamrock IV has been in the United States since 1914, and, judging from reports to hand, has suffered nothing by the long wait. On paper, Shamrock TV appears to stand a better chance of winning the trophy than. any representative that England has yet sent across the water, and even to be a better craft than the Resolute. Mr. C. A. Hickman, the navigating officer of the British boat, expressed the opinion before leaving England that the races would not be close: Shamrock TV would either be a great success or a great failure, but his fixed opinion seems to be indicated in the estimate he gave that the Resolute would receive an allow ance of quite eight minutes, which he thought would be more than counterbalanced by the 2,000 sg. ft. of canvas which the Shamrock IV carried in'excess of the sail spread of the defender. We do not yet know what-the time allowance will be, but it seems clear that for this particular race it will be the largest allowance made against a challenger, the highest heretofore being 1 min. 57 sec.
Leaving the idle computation of chances and turning to the history of the America Cup, we find it quite as interesting as the races for which it is the trophy. Tt was not originally the reward for international yachting contests, and in 1851 was the prize for a race round the Isle of Wight, when the America won from the Aurora, in a race in which 15 yachts competed, by 18 minutes. It was not until 1871 that the first attempt was made to bring the cup back to its native land, when the Magic, the defender, won from the Livonia, chal-longer, by the largest margin ever known in these races, over thirty-nine minutes. There was at this time a marked difference between the boats that competed, and the races of 1887, between the Thistle and the Volunteer, may be said to be the last in which the chal-longer and defender were of such diverse types. From that time onwards the challengers more closely approximated the racing machine, though the defenders usually were the lighter boats; the British no longer sent deep-keeled, wall-sided vessels, but built in their place deep draught fin keeled cutters. In a way this tended to make the racing more interesting in that there was some approach to the same class in the vessels competing, and in the 30 mile races which seem to have been the invariable rule since the Valkyrie boats first sailed, the defenders failed to secure victory by more than eleven minutes ori corrected times, while the challengers had to allow from six seconds to nearly two minutes. In all thirty-one races which have been sailed since 1851 the challengers have only twice beaten the defenders on time, the first occasion being in 1871 when the Livonia badly hammered the Columbia by 4 quarter of an hour after the latter had had some gear carried away, and in 1895 when Lord Dun-raven's Valkyrie IIT actually won on time, but lost through fouling the Defender at the start.
These races, which start on July 15 will be of absorbing interest. The three very costly vessels which preceded Shamrock IV have led to the fashioning of a craft which English experts anticipate is the finest that has been turned out for many years. Its performance against the twenty-three metre Shamrock, in the last trial, which Shamrock IV won by 795 seconds, leads to the belief that Nicholson, the designer has said the last word in racer building. The. attention to the stability of the boat by the increase of the wetted surface as she heels, the extremely large sail plan, containing 2,000 more square feet than the Resolute, the height to which the sails have been taken to carry the boat out of the lee should the defender come up to windward, and the general sailing powers credited to the challenger would seem to promise certain victory, but, as her navigator says, she will either be a great success or a great failure.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.