Yachting and Yacht Clubs
As the Dutch came to preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the initial yacht had been a leisure craft used initially by royalty and later by the burghers in the canals and then in the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Yacht racing was incidental, arising as private challenges. English yachting originated 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) pleasure 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, ruled 1685–88), made more yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and the same way back, on a £100 bet. Yachting rose as popular for the affluent and royalty, but after that period the trend did not last.
The first yacht group in the British Isles, the Water Club, was instigated around about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard organization, with great naval panoply and rigour. The closest thing to racing was the “chase,” for which the “fleet” pursued an imaginary enemy. The club endured, largely as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, by joining with other societies, it became the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).
Yacht racing was first seen in some stipulated manner on the Thames around the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland funded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV ascended to the throne 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 argument, to become the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1830. The first English yacht organisation 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 yacht racing. The society at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, also at the rise of George IV. All members were required to own boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing tests for great bids were held, and the society life was splendid. Eventually Royal Yachting Club boats grew in size to bigger than 350 tons.
In North America, yachting started with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and went on when the English held control. Sailing was mostly for pleasure and found its apogee in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which traveled on the Mediterranean Sea and established a standard of luxury and sophistication for the later yachts in those waters from the late 19th century. The first enduring 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
The first sailing yachts took the style of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century through the latter half of the 19th century. The design of bigger yachts was initially largely put upon by the victory of America, which was designed by George Steers for a syndicate headed by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) found its namesake after its victory at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and crafted in today’s sense, with merely a model for an outline. Not until the second half of the 19th century did what was known as naval architecture come into being. Not until the 1920s did the use of the science of aerodynamics do for the structure of sails and rigging what such study had done earlier for hulls.
Because nearly all sailboats were individually custom-built, there came a need for handicapping boats 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 built to single dimensions in length, beam, sail area, and other elements (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing these boats can be had on an even keel with no handicapping necessary. A perfect example is the generic International America’s Cup Class taken on board for yachts in the 1992 America’s Cup race.
So long as yachting was done largely for the nobility and the rich, cost was no issue, and the size of boats increased, in both length and weight. The ascendancy and popularity of smaller craft came 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) led single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray made plain the seaworthiness of small boats. Following this in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and leisure craft became more popular, down to the dinghy, a favoured training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, boats of less than 3 m were setting sail single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.
Kinds of power yachts
After the decade 1840–50, in which steam started to replace sail power in market craft, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were employed more and more in pleasure craft. Bigger power yachts were developed to a high element, and long-distance cruising turned into a favourite pastime of the well off. The first power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; they then gave rise to yachts powered by the completely submerged screw or propeller sort of propulsion. As in the case of naval and merchant craft, auxiliaries with both sail and power were the yacht standard for many years. By the latter half of the 20th century, several yachts were still auxiliaries, but the large part were exclusively power yachts with gasoline or diesel engines.
During the last decade of the 19th century there was a push in the construction of bigger 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 sailed 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 saw active service during World War II.
As larger and more dependable internal-combustion engines were developed, many large yachts began using them for power. The establishment of the diesel engine, employing heavy oil for fuel, was furthered from World War I. During the decade that followed, big power-yacht manufacture grew, reaching a climax in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. From that point the largest auxiliary yacht manufactured was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.
The manufacture of big power yachts declined from 1932, and the style thereafter was toward smaller, less expensive yachts. Following World War II, many small naval vessels were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. By the late 20th century, yachting had become a globally beloved activity enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen individually owning and upkeeping their own small pleasure yachts. The number of boats and owners has increased steadily, not only in the traditional locations on the beach but also on inland waterways and lakes.
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