At Santander

The sea, like the breath of mythical and playful goddesses, goes to the heads of worldlings. It gives them an inexplicable grandeur, a constant vibration between excitement and ease, a strange language. Take, for example, the events at Santander, Spain, on the Bay of Biscay during the last three weeks. King Alfonso XIII went there to join his queen and children. Yachts and warships speckled the harbor. There were receptions in the Magdalena Palace, dances in the clubs, frolicking townsfolk and tourists everywhere. U. S. Ambassador Ogden H. Hammond came down from Madrid. There was a short yacht race; the Queen trounced the King, and the infantes Gonzalo and Jaime finished in the rear; General Don Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja, Marques de Estella, Duque de Ajdur and Dictator of Spain, a spectator, laughed softly on the deck of another ship. . . . At the Maritime Club it was reported that one of the yachts from the U. S. had been sighted. King Alfonso leaped in a launch and put-putted out into the bay. Twenty minutes later, he came back and shouted through a megaphone: "It's only a tourist's yacht. Good jest."

But on another day His Majesty had an opportunity to climb aboard the Nina and say: "I am the King of Spain," to which young Elihu Root Jr. of Manhattan replied: "We had recognized Your Majesty." Nina, tiniest of all the yachts and first to finish in the race from New York to Santander, won the Queen's cup for boats of less than 55 feet waterline length. She had crossed the Atlantic in 24 days. Said her skipper. Paul Hammond: "We carried all the sail we could, but we did not drive the yacht and we shortened sail whenever the weather was heavy."

An hour later, Elena, a 137-footer, sailed across the finish line to capture the King's cup for Class A yachts. Her sailing time was 16 days, 21 hours.* Miss Helen G. Bell, daughter of the Elena's owner, wrote a seaworthy account of the voyage for the New York Times. She told of one rough afternoon and night: "The ship heeled over until the lee rail was awash and now and then as she shipped seas over the stern the water raced down the scuppers. "When I turned in for the night the sky was covered with ominous black clouds. The sea seemed infinitely large, while our little boat had shrunk in size since we left New York. At 4:30 a. m. heavy squalls struck us unexpectedly with terrific force and the wind, with a velocity of forty to fifty miles, made us heel over so that the gauge registered 25 degrees. The lee rail was buried under two feet of water. "I was sleeping soundly at the time, but awoke suddenly to find myself lying jammed up against a bureau across the room from my bunk. The reason for this rude awakening was that I had been thrown clear over the canvas strip attached along the bed to prevent just such an accident. . . . "The slant of the boat was so great that the electric refrigerator refused to work and we were obliged to salt down the meat in order to keep it from spoiling." She told about two wire-haired fox terriers: "Nip developed sea-legs very soon, but Tuck took some time to acclimate himself. By the time the storm was over, however, both had become regular seadogs. Tuck still objected to the slant of the deck, but recovered sufficiently to have a tug of war with the mainsheet. Nip seemed worried because he couldn't find any place to bury bones and none of the works on navigation which we had gave dogs afloat any advice on the subject." She told about one of the encounters of the Elena and the Atlantic in midocean: ". . . the Atlantic came up and passed us. When our jib was reset we passed her so closely that we took her wind and we could see her sails shaking." The Atlantic, 185-footer, winner of the last trans-Atlantic race (in 1905), finished almost a day later than the Elena. Said her skipper, Charles Francis Adams, 62, lawyer, descendant of two U. S. presidents: "We never had more wind than we wanted and half the time we had hardly sufficient to shove us, but just the same it was a wonderful cruise and if we hadn't been racing it would have been perfect." Then little Pinta and Mohawk, big Guinevere and Zodiac, arrived at Santander. But no word had been heard from Azara, and little Rofa had been demolished in a squall (TIME, July 23).

* The Class A yachts left New York eight days after the little boats.