As the Dutch rose to dominance in sea power during the 17th century, the first yacht had been a leisure craft used initially by royalty and secondly by the burghers in the canals and then in the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Racing was incidental, coming out of private challenges. English yachting started with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his reaffirmation 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), ordered for other 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 among the affluent and aristocracy, but after that point the fashion did not last.
The first yacht group in the British Isles, the Water Club, was formed in about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard organization, and had large naval panoply and rigour. The closest thing to a race was the “chase,” when the “fleet” pursued a fictional enemy. The club endured, largely as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, by conglomerating with other groups, it was known as the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).
Yacht racing was seen in some ordered method on the Thames about the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland founded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV rose to sovereignty in 1820, it was named the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded after a racing argument, 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 funding made the Solent – the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Wight – the perpetual setting of British racing. The association at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, again at the ascension of George IV. Every member was required to own boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing matches for large stakes were held, and the society life was lovely. It came to be that the Royal Yachting Club boats grew in size to over 350 tons.
In North America, yachting was first accomplished with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and went on when the English gained power. Sailing was for the most part for leisure and found its epitome in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which traveled on the Mediterranean Sea and set a minimum of luxury and sophistication for the later yachts in those waters from the late 19th century. The first persisting American yacht group, the Detroit Boat Club, was started in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens founded the New York Yacht Club while aboard his schooner Gimcrack.
Kinds of sailboats
The Early sailing yachts were within the design of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century through the later half of the 19th century. The craft of bigger yachts was first heavily affected by the win of America, which was created by George Steers for a club led 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. The first yachts were not designed and manufactured in a contemporary sense, with just a model being used. Not until the later half of the 19th century did what was called naval architecture come about. Not until the 1920s did the employment of the science of aerodynamics do for the craft of sails and rigging what science had already done for hulls.
Because almost all sailboats were individually custom-built, there was a need for handicapping boats as this was previous to the one-design class boats were made. Hence, a rating rule was decreed, which is found in the International Rule, adopted in 1906 and revised in 1919. In modern times, one of the rapidly blossoming areas in the sailing industry is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are manufactured to standard specifications in length, beam, sail area, and other aspects (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing such boats can be had on an even keel with no handicapping at all. A perfect example is the standard International America’s Cup Class adopted for racers in the 1992 America’s Cup race.
So long as yachting was an activity primarily for the nobility and the rich, money was no problem, and the size of boats increased, in both length and weight. The rise and popularity of smaller boats happened in the later half of the 19th century in the sailing of the Englishmen R.T. McMullen, a stockbroker, and E.F. Knight, a barrister and journalist. A trip around the world (1895–98) sailed single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray demonstrated the hardiness of small boats. Later in the 20th century, particularly 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
Post the decade 1840–50, during which steam was set to take the place of sail power in market vessels, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly used in leisure vessels. Bigger power yachts were furthered to a high degree, and long-distance cruising became a favoured activity of the wealthy. The early power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; those then made way to yachts powered by the fully submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. As in the case of naval and merchant craft, auxiliaries carrying both sail and power were the yacht fashion for a number of years. By the later half of the 20th century, many yachts were still auxiliaries, but the larger part were only power yachts with gasoline or diesel engines.
From the last decade of the 19th century there was a boom in the manufacture of bigger steam yachts. Notably within these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, with 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 for World War II.
As larger and more dependable internal-combustion engines were created, many big yachts began using them for power. The establishment of the diesel engine, using heavy oil for fuel, was furthered from World War I. In the decade following that, large power-yacht manufacture flourished, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. During that time the largest auxiliary yacht constructed was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.
The construction of big power boats lessened after 1932, and the style after that was toward smaller, less costly yachts. Following World War II, many small naval vessels were traded by private owners for conversion to yachts. By the late 20th century, yachting had become a globally beloved competition enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen who are actually owning and upkeeping their own small leisure boats. The amount of boats and owners has increased steadily, not only in the traditional places by the beach but also on inland waterways and lakes.
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