The month was August and the clay was the twenty-second. Even the time of the afternoon—5:45—was mentioned by the alert correspondent of the Times of London, who further observed that the Prince of Wales went ashore from the royal yacht wearing his while sailor's uniform and tarpaulin hat and danced down the road with boyish vivacity.
To bring the appealing picture into focus it is necessary to add only that the year was 1851, that the young prince was the future King Edward VII, and that the occasion was a race in which the most newsworthy competitor was a schooner from the United States, the America .
Queen Victoria was immensely interested and probably assumed that at least one of the fourteen British cutlers and schooners that had started at 10 o'clock that morning in a 53-mile contest around England's Isle of Wight would defeat the American invader. From the Victoria and Albert , in which the royal party had put aside the cares of state, the smaller steam yacht Fairy was dispatched seaward of the Needles for a view that the young prince and his shoregoing party had relinquished because of wind and drizzle. The Fairy 's return gave rise to questions and answers so famous and so paraphrased that some historians cloud their authenticity with the invidious word “alleged.”
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