Longest Sisters

Two sister ships, the longest in the world (938 feet), were launched, last week, from German yards, and will go into service late next spring for the North German Lloyd. The sisters are Europa and Bremen. Though slim and expected to challenge the trans-Atlantic speed record held by the Cunarder Mauretania, the Teuton sisters will be no lightweights (46,500 tons each). Thus they will be but little lighter than the two heaviest liners in the world: Leviathan and Majestic, which were originally Hamburg-American sister ships, but were snatched from Germany by the Allies, and are now U. S. (Leviathan) and British (Majestic).

Europa had a bottle of champagne smashed over her sharp nose, last week at Hamburg, after the U. S. Ambassador to Germany, Jacob Gould Schurman, had delivered the launching oration in fluent German.

Bremen, the other sister, received her champagne baptism at Bremen. It is no discourtesy to distinguished Ambassador Schurman to say that the Bremen's launching oration was pronounced by a mightier Man. A roar of welcome went up from 50,000 throats as He arrived, striding with ponderous tread, nodding gravely at the plaudits, a man too old and too great to receive aught but universal homage:

HINDENBURG

A deep guttural oration issued from the cavern of his throat. He did not move a muscle when the bottle of champagne tinkled and exploded. Afterwards Old Paul von Hindenburg rode away to begin his vacation, hunting chamois in Bavaria. But Germans remembered his words:

"Seventy years ago [when the orator was ten] the then young North German Lloyd launched its first vessel for trans-Atlantic service. It gave the craft the name of Bremen. . . " Now it is our wish to give this newest and largest vessel of Germany's revived fleet to its elements. ... I christen thee Bremen!"

"I hail the Bremen and the Europa as new links between Europe and America. I hail them as manifestations of the indestructible German capacity for work."

Sagely did the President of the German Republic thus allude to the present German merchant marine as a "revived fleet." The achievement summed in those two words has been prodigious, unprecedented. The victorious Allies seized from beaten Imperial Germany enough ships to reduce her pre-War merchant tonnage of 5,500,000 by almost nine-tenths, or to 600,000, yet today the merchant fleet of Republican Germany is up to 3,500,000 tons, or three-fifths of pre-War tonnage. Absolutely phenominal has been the "revival" of the North German Lloyd fleet, as statistics tell:

1914: 950,000 tons.

1919: virtually extinct.

1928: 721,000 tons.

1929: assured 900,000 tons.

The total tonnage of the U. S. merchant marine is 16,887,501, British 22,782,573.