The Cruise of the Branwen

THE WREATH OF OLIVE A very large crowd assembled for the final between England and France, and Verbrugge, the well-known Belgian maitre d' armes, was president of the jury. I shall again refer my readers to the more detailed account printed a little later on, and confine myself here to saying that I did not personally agree with the decision of the jury, though of course I officially accepted it. Even after the bad luck of the rest of the team, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon's magnificent fighting produced a dead heat, and scored a record because he was the first Englishman to hit four Frenchmen one after the other in a final heat. The fact that an English team had reached the final heat at all in an open tournament of this international importance was in itself a record of which they may well be proud as a promise of better things to come. It is open to question whether I was right in continuing to fight the team again immediately after the dead heat; and for whatever that may have contributed to our final defeat I must take full responsibility. The fact remains that the greater experience of the French enabled them to win a majority of the deciding bouts more easily than the previous encounter had led me to imagine would be possible,. and they therefore took the first prize. In deciding to go on at once, I had calculated that our own men had only had part of a full round with the Belgians before the final, whereas the French had not only met the Greeks but had had to fight off a dead heat with them as well, and 77