On Brambles Bank

Steamship skippers, like horsemen and motorists sensitive to what they drive, say that a ship you are used to never feels quite the same after she has been handled a while by someone else. In the case of the S. S. Leviathan, the saying would hold specially true for a man who last handled her during the War, when her German name, Vaterlard, had just been erased and before she was remodeled to be the luxurious flagship of the U. S. Lines.

Captain Harold A. Cunningham, the Leviathan's present skipper, is such a man. But when last week, on his very first trip with the Leviathan since the War, his first trip as Commodore of the U. S. Lines, he ran his ship aground on Brambles Bank in Southampton Water, he was too good a sport and too proud a sailor to offer even an old saying for an excuse.

It might have happened to anyone. Brambles Bank almost completely blocks the Southampton channel off Cowes. It was only a minor accident and the Leviathan was afloat again in two hours, when the tide rose. But Commodore Cunningham tugged his cap down over the face that has caused him to be called "Handsome Harry," in grim mortification.

British skippers, haughtiest in the world, who gasped with astonishment when Herbert Hartley was given the Leviathan in 1923 ahead of "Handsome Harry" Cunningham--gasped because Hartley was then jobless after grounding first the Manchuria and then the Mongolia of the American Line, whereas Cunningham was right in line for the post, being skipper of the George Washington--were inclined to mix sympathy with their blame last week. "It was jolly bad work," said one of them, "but jolly worse luck. On his very first trip, too--tch, tch. Maybe Hartley left his luck on that Leviathan."