I said that I would land in the pilot-boat and go to London by rail, and would report the ship that night or next morning at Austin Friars. (She was consigned to my firm.) The breeze had considerably freshened before I got on board the pilot cutter, when the _Ganges_ filled away on the port tack, and Captain Deas, contrary to his wont, for he was a very cautious man, crowded on all small sails. The Americans lost no time and were after him, and I had three hours’ view of as fine an ocean race as I can wish to see; the wind being dead ahead, the ships were making short tacks. The _Ganges_ showed herself to be the most weatherly of the three; and the gain on every tack inshore was obvious, neither did she seem to carry way behind in fore reaching. She arrived off Dungeness six hours before the other two, and was in the London docks twenty-four hours before the first, and thirty-six hours before the last of her opponents.’” * * * * * It is always unpleasant to spoil a really good story, but in this instance I feel constrained to point out that the _Flying Cloud_ arrived at San Francisco on August 31, 1851, after her famous passage of 89 days from New York; it is therefore difficult to understand how she could have sailed from Wampoa on the Canton River on or about September 1st of that year, as stated by Mr. Cowper; while the _Bald Eagle_ was not launched until 1852. On January 3, 1852, the _Illustrated London News_, which then, as now, had many readers in the United States, published a portrait of the _Chrysolite_ accompanying an article in which it was stated that both the _Chrysolite_ and the _Stornoway_ had beaten the _Oriental_ and the _Surprise_, and that the _Chrysolite_ had completely beaten the _Memnon_ during a race in the Gaspar Straits. This article excited a good deal of interest in the United States, and it caused the formation by a number of high-spirited young merchants and ship-owners at Boston of a society called the American Navigation Club, which consisted of Daniel C. Bacon, President; Thomas H. Perkins, John P. Cushing, William H. Bordman, John M. Forbes, Warren Delano, and Edward King. In due time they issued the following challenge, which was published in all the leading shipping papers of Great Britain in September, 1852, and was copied into _Bell’s Life_, at that period the great sporting publication of England: