Yachting and Yacht Clubs
As the Dutch rose to preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the early yacht became a pleasure craft used mostly by royalty and later by the burghers for the canals and then in the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Yacht racing was incidental, arising as private challenges. English yachting began with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his reaffirmation to the English throne in 1660, the city of Amsterdam presented him with a 20-metre (66-foot) leisure boat with a beam (maximum width) of 5.6 m (18 feet), which he called Mary. Charles and his brother James, the duke of York (James II, reigned 1685–88), made other yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and returning, on a £100 bet. Yachting became fashionable among the wealthy and nobility, 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 association, with large naval panoply and formality. The closest thing to racing boats was the “chase,” when the “fleet” pursued an imagined enemy. The club went on, mostly as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, after merging with other groups, it became the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).
Yacht racing was first seen in some stipulated 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 sovereignty in 1820, it came to be known as the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded with a racing fight, to become the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1830. The first English yacht group had been formed at Cowes on the Isle of Wight in 1815, and royal sponsorship made the Solent - the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Wight - the perpetual site of British racing. The club at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, also at the accession of George IV. Every member was required to have boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing matches for high bids were held, and the society life was splendid. It came to be that the Royal Yachting Club boats grew in size to over 350 tons.
In North America, yachting started with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and persisted when the English had dominance. Sailing was for the most part for fun and rose to its epitome in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which cruised on the Mediterranean Sea and set a benchmark of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in the area from the late 19th century. The first persisting American yacht association, the Detroit Boat Club, was started in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens began the New York Yacht Club aboard his schooner Gimcrack.
Kinds of sailboats
Early sailing yachts followed the design of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century until the latter half of the 19th century. The style of large yachts was initially greatly affected by the victory of America, which was designed by George Steers for a club headed by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) had its namesake after its win at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and crafted in the modern sense, with merely a model being used. Not until the later half of the 19th century did what was called naval architecture come into action. Not until the 1920s did the use of the study of aerodynamics do for the craft of sails and rigging what it had previously done for hulls.
Because most of all sailboats were individually custom-built, there was a desire for handicapping boats as this was before the one-design class boats were designed. Therefore, a rating rule was decreed, which ended up in the International Rule, taken on in 1906 and edited in 1919. Today, one of the rapidly growing areas in the field of sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are manufactured to single requirements in length, beam, sail area, and other aspects (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing between those boats can be had on an even keel with no handicapping required. A perfect example is the uniform International America’s Cup Class taken on for yachts in the 1992 America’s Cup race.
As long as yachting was done primarily for the royal and the wealthy, cost was no issue, 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 in the sailing of the Englishmen R.T. McMullen, a stockbroker, and E.F. Knight, a barrister and journalist. A voyage around the world (1895–98) captained single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray proved the value of smaller yachts. Following this in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and leisure craft became commonplace, down to the dinghy, a popular training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, yachts of less than 3 m were sailed single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.
Kinds of power yachts
After the decade 1840–50, when steam started to take the place of sail power in public vessels, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly employed in pleasure craft. Bigger power yachts were furthered to a high standard, and long-distance sailing became a preferred pastime of the wealthy. The early power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; they then gave way to boats powered by the fully submerged screw or propeller type of propulsion. Like naval and merchant boats, auxiliaries possessing both sail and power were the yacht fashion for a number of years. By the latter half of the 20th century, a lot of yachts were still auxiliaries, but the majority were exclusively power yachts with gasoline or diesel engines.
During the last decade of the 19th century there was a boom in the construction of more sizeable steam yachts. Notably of these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, with triple-expansion engines, twin screws, and a compartmented iron hull, and was operated by a crew of over 150. The Mayflower, bought by the United States Navy in 1898, was the official yacht of the president of the United States until 1929 and was used in active service in World War II.
As more sizeable and more dependable internal-combustion engines were created, many bigger craft were using them for power. The development of the diesel engine, employing heavy oil for fuel, progressed during World War I. During the decade following that, large power-yacht manufacture blossomed, hitting a climax in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. In that point the best auxiliary yacht constructed was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.
The construction of bigger power craft declined in 1932, and the fashion from then was in preference of smaller, less pricey craft. After World War II, lots of small naval craft were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. In the late 20th century, yachting is a globally loved sport enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen personally manning and keeping their own small pleasure boats. The amount of craft and sailors has increased steadily, not only in the traditional locations on the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.
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