PROCEEDINGS OF THE POLYTECHNIC ASSOCIATION. 651 



[From the New York Tribune.] 



The Ocean Yacht Race. 

 Since the days "when the entire human race sailed to the peak of 

 Ararat in a single boat, the history of the world might almost be 

 written in the history of ships. Maritime discovery seems to hav« 

 preceded, or at least attended, all great eras. But the ancients 

 were afraid of the sea, and even when Greece was in her prime the 

 Mediterranean was more frequently coasted than crossed. Jason, 

 when he brought the Golden Fleece from Colchis, was thought an 

 especial favorite of Neptune, and the coasting trade of Carthage 

 was justly held a marvel of enterprise. In the dark ages which 

 followed the fall of Rome, there was little enterprise on the ocean, 

 excepting that of the Northmen who discovered Iceland, Green- 

 land, and even in 1001, as some claim, the Continent of America. 

 In the fifteenth century, the sea, that before had been the divider 

 of nations — the oceanus dissodabilis — became the buoyant bridge 

 that brought the uttermost ends of the earth into communication. 

 The voyages of Columbus revolutionized the Old world by giving 

 it the New for a rival, and there is no historian who has dared 

 to speculate upon what would be the condition of Europe had 

 America remained till this day undiscovered. Portugal then took 

 the lead, and Vasco di Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope in 

 a vessel of which Mr. Maretzek's operatic craft was not entirely 

 a caricature. Then Balboa beheld from the peaks of Darien the 

 unknown Pacific, with its invisible islands, a sea destined to be 

 the pathway of nations. The Armada, the Venetian and British 

 naval supremacies, the circumnavigation of the globe by Cooke, 

 are among those triumphs over the ocean to which we need not 

 further refer, but which have brought us gradually by a gentle 

 descent from the year 2349 B. C, when Noah sailed about in his 

 ark, to this memorable year when three little American yachts 

 have crossed the Atlantic and astonished and delighted two con- 

 tinents. In writing of such an event, a decent regard for its dig- 

 nity demands a little historical preluding. 



American ship-builders and sailors, and, indeed, those who have 

 never stood on a deck, and don't know much about a taftrail, or a 

 jibboom, to whom "avast there" and " sou'-sou'-west three points 

 on her lee " are cabalistic expressions, will all rejoice in this vic- 

 tory. A victory it is, not merely of the Henrietta over the Fleet- 

 wing and Vesta, but of staunch ships over wind and sea, of enter- 



