As the Dutch rose to dominance in sea power during the 17th century, the first yacht became a pleasure craft used first by royalty and secondly by the burghers for the canals and the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Yacht racing was incidental, borne from private challenges. English yachting began with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his restoration to the English royalty in 1660, the city of Amsterdam gave him a 20-metre (66-foot) leisure boat with a beam (maximum width) of 5.6 m (18 feet), which he named Mary. Charles and his brother James, the duke of York (James II, sovereign 1685–88), built more yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and back, on a £100 wager. Yachting rose as fashionable with the rich and aristocracy, but after that time the trend did not last.
The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was formed around about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard organization, and held large naval panoply and formality. The closest thing to racing was the “chase,” in which the “fleet” pursued an imaginary enemy. The club went on, mostly as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, when merging with other organisations, it became known as the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).
Yacht racing was seen in some ordered fashion on the Thames around the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland founded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV came to monarchy in 1820, it was then called the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded after a racing dispute, to become the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1830. The first English yacht organisation had been started at Cowes on the Isle of Wight in 1815, and royal patronage made the Solent – the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Wight – the perpetual site of British yachting. The association at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, again at the rise of George IV. Each member was required to possess boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing tests for large stakes were held, and the social life was splendid. Eventually Royal Yachting Club boats increased in size to bigger than 350 tons.
In North America, yachting began with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and continued when the English had power. Sailing was for the most part for leisure and reached its high point in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which sailed on the Mediterranean Sea and set a benchmark of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in those waters from the late 19th century. The first enduring American yacht society, the Detroit Boat Club, was instigated in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens founded the New York Yacht Club while aboard his schooner Gimcrack.
Kinds of sailboats
Early sailing yachts took the lines of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century through to the second half of the 19th century. The craft of large yachts was initially greatly put upon by the win of America, which was created by George Steers for a association headed by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) was named after its victory at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and built in today’s sense, with merely a model for an outline. Not until the later half of the 19th century did what was labeled naval architecture come about. Not until the 1920s did the application of the science of aerodynamics do for the design of sails and rigging what such science had done earlier for hulls.
Because almost all sailboats had been individually custom-built, there arose a desire for handicapping boats before the one-design class boats were made. Therefore, a rating rule was created, which ended up in the International Rule, taken on in 1906 and amended in 1919. In modern times, one of the fastest blossoming areas in sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are built to standard requirements in length, beam, sail area, and other aspects (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing those boats can be held on an even par with no handicapping necessary. A prime example is the generic International America’s Cup Class taken on for racers in the 1992 America’s Cup race.
As long as yachting was an activity mostly for the royal and the affluent, money was no problem, and the size of boats increased, in both length and weight. The ascendancy and desire of smaller craft occurred in the later half of the 19th century out of the sailing of the Englishmen R.T. McMullen, a stockbroker, and E.F. Knight, a barrister and journalist. A journey around the world (1895–98) sailed single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray made plain the value of smaller boats. Thereafter in the 20th century, notably after World War II, smaller racing and pleasure boats became commonplace, down to the dinghy, a preferred training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, craft of less than 3 m were sailed single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.
Kinds of power yachts
After the decade 1840–50, during which steam began to take the place of sail power in public boats, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were employed increasingly in leisure boats. Sizeable power yachts were developed to a high element, and long-distance cruising was a favoured occupation of the rich. The early power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; those then made way to boats powered by the fully submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. As well as naval and merchant yachts, auxiliaries possessing both sail and power were the yacht archetype for a number of years. By the second half of the 20th century, several yachts were still auxiliaries, but the larger part were exclusively power yachts containing gasoline or diesel engines.
During the last decade of the 19th century there was a boom in the manufacture of more sizeable steam yachts. Conspicuous within these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, that had triple-expansion engines, twin screws, and a compartmented iron hull, and was sailed by a crew of over 150. The Mayflower, commissioned by the United States Navy in 1898, was the official yacht of the president of the United States until 1929 and gave active service during World War II.
As more sizeable and better quality internal-combustion engines were produced, many bigger yachts were using them for power. The creation of the diesel engine, with heavy oil for fuel, was furthered for World War I. From the decade following, large power-yacht building grew, reaching a climax in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. During that time the largest auxiliary yacht built was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.
The manufacture of big power craft lessened after 1932, and the trend thereafter was toward smaller, less costly craft. After World War II, many small naval boats were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. By the late 20th century, yachting is a internationally popular sport enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen who are actually sailing and maintaining their own small recreational boats. The popularity of boats and sailors increased steadily, not only in the traditional places on the sea but also on inland waterways and lakes.
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