TREASURE TROVE
The Ria de Arousa on the Atlantic coast of Spain is a great fjord where the woodland comes down to the shore. Its rocky inlets and islands provide intricate pilotage today. In the summer of 1882 a lieutenant, one H. Bremner of HMS Hercules, was sailing his small canoe in this area. He flew a burgee now renowned as a badge of the owner’s deep-sea knowledge and ‘foreign-going’. It was white and red, divided vertically. The white inner portion was charged with a black Maltese cross, edged with yellow, and bearing a yellow naval crown at its centre. This is the flag of the Cruising Club – or as it later became, the Royal Cruising Club (RCC). Bremner was conducting the club’s first cruise in foreign waters. Spain was at peace, but the club history notes that he was ‘prudently armed with a revolver.’
Bremner had signed up to an exclusive outfit founded for the purposes of pleasure sailing. But its original members had something of the buccaneer about them. To quote the original 1890 Articles, the
