Yachting and Yacht Clubs
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As the Dutch rose to preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the early yacht had been a leisure craft used first by royalty and secondly by the burghers on the canals and then in the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Yacht racing was incidental, borne from private challenges. English yachting started with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his return to the English throne in 1660, the city of Amsterdam presented him with 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, sovereign 1685–88), made additional 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 nobility, but after that time the fashion did not last.
The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was started in about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard group, and had great naval panoply and formality. The closest thing to racing boats was the “chase,” for which the “fleet” pursued an imagined enemy. The club went on, for the large part as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, after conglomerating with other groups, it became known as the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).
Yacht racing began in some stipulated fashion on the Thames about the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland instigated the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV rose to monarchy in 1820, it was named 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 society 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 continued site of British yacht racing. The association at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, again at the rise of George IV. All members were required to have 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 more than 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 took power. Sailing was largely for fun and rose to its high point in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which cruised on the Mediterranean Sea and established a standard of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in the area from the late 19th century. The first continuing American yacht association, the Detroit Boat Club, was started in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens began the New York Yacht Club while on board his schooner Gimcrack.
Kinds of sailboats
The Early sailing yachts took 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 originally greatly impacted by the victory of America, which was created by George Steers for a group started 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. The first yachts were not designed and manufactured in today’s sense, with only a model for an outline. Not until the second half of the 19th century did what was labeled naval architecture come about. Not until the 1920s did the employment of the study of aerodynamics do for the structure of sails and rigging what such study had already done for hulls.
Because nearly all sailboats were individually built, there was a desire for handicapping boats previous to the one-design class boats were built. Hence, a rating rule came into being, which ended up in the International Rule, accepted in 1906 and revised in 1919. In modern times, one of the rapidly blossoming areas in sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are manufactured to single specifications in length, beam, sail area, and other areas (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing for these boats can be had on an even basis with no handicapping at all. A great example is the generic International America’s Cup Class taken on for racers in the 1992 America’s Cup race.
So long as yachting was an activity primarily for the nobility and the rich, expense was no problem, and the size of boats grew, in both length and weight. The promotion and desire of smaller boats occurred in the second 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 voyage around the world (1895–98) sailed single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray demonstrated the seaworthiness of small boats. Following this in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and leisure yachts became commonplace, down to the dinghy, a popular training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, boats of less than 3 m were traveled in single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.
Kinds of power yachts
After the decade 1840–50, at which point steam was set to emulate sail power in public craft, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly used in leisure vessels. Bigger power yachts were developed to a high standard, and long-distance travel turned into a favoured pastime of the rich. The early power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; those then gave rise to yachts powered by the wholly submerged screw or propeller sort of propulsion. Like naval and merchant craft, auxiliaries with 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 that had gasoline or diesel engines.
From the last decade of the 19th century there was a boom in the manufacture of more sizeable steam yachts. Conspicuous 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 more than 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 in World War II.
As larger and more dependable internal-combustion engines were created, many big yachts were using them for power. The creation of the diesel engine, using heavy oil for fuel, progressed in World War I. From the decade that followed, bigger power-yacht building flourished, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. From that period the best auxiliary yacht built was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.
The building of large power craft declined in 1932, and the trend from then was for smaller, less costly yachts. From World War II, a lot of small naval vessels were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. At the late 20th century, yachting has become a internationally loved competition enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen personally manning and keeping their own small pleasure craft. The amount of craft and sailors is increasing steadily, not only in the traditional areas on the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.
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