Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 154.djvu/193

"Well, if she be right then we are all wrong," said Lord Anglesey, shaking his head with an air of finality as he turned to stump up and down the deck of his great cutter-yacht, the Pearl, after a long look at the black snaky hull of the America, lying alongside in Cowes Roads. It was early in the August of 1851 that the doughty old veteran uttered his sententious dictum. The America was right; and we were all wrong. And that is how the chapter on modern yachting opens.

Up till that date yachting had been regarded as an exclusively English sport. Of foreign clubs we knew little; and, truth to tell, there was little to know. The Russian Tsar had established an Imperial Yacht Club at St Petersburg with a view to encouraging a taste for seamanship amongst his nobles; and a year later Commodore Bartlett was to be so good as to take his yacht, the Warhawk, over to Cronstadt, annex a valuable gold cup with her, and sell her at a big profit to Muscovite owners. Seven years earlier nine substantial citizens of the capital of the United States had founded the New York Yacht Club; but of its existence the Royal Yacht Squadron had either remained unconscious, or had considered it in the light of a piece of republican presumption not to be encouraged.

Nevertheless, one fine summer morning the schooner-yacht America anchored in British waters, and her owner, Commodore J. C. Stevens, professed himself ready and willing to sail any yacht afloat, on level terms, for any sum not exceeding £10,000. A bolt had fallen from the blue; for the America, when crossing the Channel, had encountered the Laverock, one of the largest and fastest of the English cutters, and the haphazard impromptu trial had been a warning to us that the challenge was something more than mere bluster. Excitement ran riot: meanwhile Mr Stevens had formulated his offer, and the R.Y.S. had put on its considering cap. Lord Fitz-Hardinge was exceedingly desirous that Mr Weld should lend his famous cutter, the Alarm, to the club to do battle for the honour of England. But Mr Weld, in the argot of our own day, "didn't quite see it." Then Mr G. R. Stephenson, son of the builder of the Rocket, our first locomotive, picked up the gauntlet on behalf of his 100-ton schooner Titania.

In the interim Mr Stevens had entered the America for a R.Y.S. £100 cup, especially thrown open to yachts of all nations, course round the Wight, no time allowance, the American commodore having refused to start for her Majesty's Cup for that year on account of the time allowance, though the Squadron were willing to have made an exception to their rule as to "members only" in his favour. This is a point which should be made particularly clear, because it is the subject of much misapprehension; and the general belief is that the America carried back across the Atlantic one of