"There was a fine display of racing yachts and others whose owners came to enjoy the sport. Several of them had come over from the Ostend Regatta, one of them bringing an enormous silver cup, by far the largest I ever saw in the numerous regattas in which I was a participator. Most of the yachts' cabins were given up for the sails to be ready for shifting, and the Three Cups Hotel was crammed with yachtsmen. Taking it all together, it was one of the pleasantest yachting proceedings I ever enjoyed. Like too many harbours on our coast, Harwich had been a terrible sufferer by the lamentable interference with tidal laws by men entirely ignorant of the science, and interested workers. The harbour is, or rather was, entered in a straight line, and then diverges inside up the bed of the River Stour to the left, and to the right of that river the tide ascends the River Orwell to Ipswich. Above the right bank of the Orwell is the residence of the man whose memory every lover of his country should adore--_Philip Bowes Vere Broke_--the gallant captain of the _Shannon_, who, in less than fifteen minutes captured by boarding a frigate of superior force. There were on the Orwell two schooner yachts belonging to Sir Hyde Parker, whose ancestor commanded the _Tenedos_ frigate which was sent away by Broke that he might fight the _Chesapeake_ on equal terms. "Dredging for personal gain was permitted to the westward outside the harbour, with the result that the deep-water channel was diverted no less than two thousand feet from the east to the west side, a large sand-bank forming on the east side below Landguard Fort, and a corresponding destruction of Beacon's Cliff ensued on the opposite side. "Four yachts in our class started from a point on the harbour between the town and Walton Marsh. We had a soldier's wind (side). A brand new yacht, the name of which I forget, was on our weather-side, and the two others to leeward; and we three leeward-most vessels headed rather towards the projecting bank before Landguard Point, the weathermost yacht pressing us to leeward as much as possible; I kept my eye most of the time on the weather yacht, the master of which kept his eye on us, taking advantage of every opportunity of pressing us to leeward. So near was he that I could see his eyes most distinctly, but he outwitted himself, as he got the whole four yachts so far to leeward that unless we could cross the bank a tack would be inevitable.