hirty-oared galleys, with two men at
each oar. There were also smaller twenty and twelve-oared boats, but
not a single "four" but ours. The sea was heavy and lumpy, the course
was five kilometres (three miles), and there was a fresh breeze blowing
off the land. Our little mahogany Oxford-built boat, lying very low in
the water, looked pitiably small beside the great French galleys. It
wasn't even David and Goliath, it was as though "Little Tich" stood up
to Georges Carpentier. We saw the race from a sailing yacht; my father
absolutely beside himself with excitement.

Off they went! The French galleys lumbering along at a great pace,
their crews pulling a curiously short stroke, and their coxswains
yelling "En avant, mes braves!" with all the strength of their lungs.
It must have been very like the boat-race Virgil describes in the fifth
book of the Aeneid. There was the "huge Chimaera" the "mighty Centaur"
and possibly even the "dark-blue Scylla" with their modern counterparts
of Gyas, Sergestus, and Cloanthus, bawling just as lustily as doubtless
those coxswains of old shouted; no one, however, struck on the rocks,
as we are told the unfortunate "Centaur" did. Still the little
mahogany-built Abercorn continued to forge ahead of her unwieldy French
competitors. The Frenchmen splashed and spurted nobly, but the little
Oxford-built boat increased her lead, her silken "Union Jack" trailing
in the water. All the muscles of the French fleet came into play; the
admiral's barge churned the water into creaming foam; "mes braves" were
incited to superhuman exertions; in spite of it all, the Abercorn shot
past the mark-boat, a winner by a length and a half.

My father was absolutely frantic with delight. We reached the shore
long before our crew did, for they had to return to receive the judge's
formal award. He ceremoniously decorated our boat's bows with a large
laurel-wreath, and so--her stem adorned with laurels, and the large
silk "Union Jack" trailing over her stern--the little mahogany
Oxford-built boat paddled through the lines of her French competitors.
I am sorry to have to record that the French took their defeat in a
most unsportsmanlike fashion; the little Abercorn was received all down
the line with storms of hoots and hisses. Possibly we, too, might feel
annoyed if, say at Portsmouth, in a regatta in which all the crack
oarsmen of the British Home Fleet were competing, a French four should
suddenly appear from now