Launchings

Whirlwind. Mrs. Edwin Thorne, mother of Landon Ketchum Thorne, Manhattan banker, broke the bottle, and the America's Cup contender in which her son owns the biggest share tilted easily down its ways in the shipyard of George Lawley & Son at Neponset, Mass. Head up, like a horse freed in pasture, the Whirlwind checked up off Squantum Island, her waterline standing out between her white topsides and the green paint on her mahogany underbody. She is 130 ft. overall, 86 ft. on the water; she has a canoe-like stern, long, overhanging bow, a longer and squarer keel than the other proposed defenders. L. Francis Herreshoff designed her. Her steel frame came from Pennsylvania, her mahogany from South America, her pine deck and spruce mast from Washington, her black walnut trimmings from Indiana.

Weetamoe. John Pierpont Morgan was not there, but his son Junius was and so were General Cornelius Vanderbilt and Gerard Lambert, all members of the owning syndicate. Jane Nichols, small granddaughter of Mr. Morgan, had been told to swing the bottle hard, and did, but the Weetamoe stuck. She had been built on the ways and the wood had soaked up some of the grease. For two hours workmen in the Herreshoff yard in Bristol, R. I. hammered, sawed, used jacks. Still the Weetamoe stuck. A squall was coming up, the sun was going down. Workers and christeners went home, deferred the launching for two days. Finally afloat, the Weetamoe looked like a long-necked bird. Her line of keel, almost straight from the heel of the sternpost to the fore-end of the water line, gives her a decided gain in wetted surface over all the others, makes her fast in light airs, but hard to steer before the wind.

Yankee. At Neponset, Mass, the Yankee, beamiest of all the new boats, was launched. She is owned by a Boston syndicate, was designed by a member of the syndicate, Frank Paine. She has a beam of 22 ft. 4 in. and is unique among cup contenders in that she has no cast-lead keel but carries her ballast in a trough-keel formed by moulding the garboard plates into a hollow space, where lead will be stowed as needed.

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