The trip of the Cornell four was ill-advised, and there was no particular reason why they should have gone ; but it is unfortunate that the conduct of the stroke-oar, Shinkle, should have cast such a blot upon the entire proceed ing, which fortunately has no parallel in college rowing. The Englishmen at this period enter tained suspicions of every crew that came out of America, and they talked a long time about Cornell's admittance to the Henley Regatta, and asked a great many impertinent questions about their amateur standing. Cornell answered, and they were permitted to row for the Steward's Cup and in another four-oared race at Henley, but refused for the Visitor's. They had a later race scheduled for the Thames Challenge Cup at Put ney, and then were going to Vienna.
It came out later that Shinkle, the stroke, had made an agreement with a saloon keeper in Ithaca by which he was to row hard and win the first race, in which the betting would be against Cornell, and then to lose all the other races, so that the conspirators in Ithaca might make a great sum at long odds. One of the men was to go along in order to place the bets, but he could not get away, and the bets were therefore made at home. But London and Thames, the first crews drawn by Cornell for the Steward's, were too fast, and Cornell made a bad third. A few days later Cornell rowed a slow crew from Hertford College, and Shinkle, unable to lose the race in any other way, fainted about halfway down the course. Then the four went down to Putney for the Thames Challenge Cup, and rowed London and Thames again with the same result as at Henley. The Vienna race was another dirty affair : the race was three miles, and the Vienna crew were so poor that Shinkle could not keep his crew rowing slowly enough ; he had to lose the race according to the agreement, and his only course was to faint, which he did toward the end of the race in a dramatic manner. Shinkle was a big, strong man, who had never before given a sign of exhaustion in the hardest race, and his strange collapses roused suspicion. His fellows openly accused him after the race, and he could not make a satisfactory reply ; they cast him off on the spot, and the whole affair came out from Ithaca. Shinkle, a few years later, was committed to prison for a ghoulish crime.
Three races were rowed at New London— Harvard and Columbia in University and Fresh man eights and Harvard and Yale in University crews. Harvard had a big crew that year, with C. P. Curtis stroking, and it is said that they rowed their stroke very well except that they were ragged when the pace went very high ; a radical defect seems to have been a very hard finish rather than a hard catch, which is a better place to concentrate power. Columbia was light,
and they had not become entirely used to rowing in eights, so that their stroke, well adapted to a four, had too much arm motion to be quite efficient for the ordinary crew in a race in eights over four miles. But the Columbia men gave Harvard a very hard fight for it ; at two miles Columbia had a length and held it until the power of the Cambridge men forced them ahead, and they won by thirteen seconds. The Harvard Freshmen beat Columbia '84 on the Charles at Boston in a race that resembled the Varsity con test in that superior strength won.
Four days later Harvard sent the same eight against Yale and were beaten ; Yale was rowing in exactly the same style as in the previous year, and Davis was nearly supreme at New Haven. Yale's men were all big fellows, — larger even than Harvard's, — yet they rowed a stroke of from thirty-eight to forty-two and forty-three, with the same tremendous drive of the previous year. The two crews were very even in speed, but Har vard lacked the endurance, possibly due to their stiff race with Columbia ; for two miles the crews raced beautifully ; now Yale and now Harvard had the lead, and it was spurt for spurt, but then Captain Brandegee in the Harvard bow prac tically gave out, and for the rest of the race he was a passenger for all that he pulled. Yale had then a fair lead, and Harvard could not cut it down, but they rowed pluckily and well, coming in only six seconds behind Yale. Yale's time was 22.13 against 21.45 for Harvard in the Columbia race.
The Childs Cup race was unsatisfactory; for Columbia could not row on account of the illness of Eldredge after coming to Philadelphia, and Princeton was the only competitor. George Sergeant, Jr., had been chosen to stroke the Pennsylvania four, but on the morning of the race he turned his ankle in a class rush ; no one else could stroke except R. L. Hart, who had stroked in 1879 and 188o, and though a student in the Medical School, he had graduated from the College. Princeton protested on the ground that Hart was not an undergraduate, and in the race they started, but merely paddled over the course a long distance behind Pennsylvania. In the evening, the representatives of the three colleges met, and they awarded the cup to Prince ton. There was some hard feeling, and it looked as though there would be no more Pennsylvania Princeton races ; but before the next year the trouble had died away.