Yachting and Yacht Clubs
As the Dutch found preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the first yacht had been a pleasure craft used initially by royalty and later by the burghers on the canals and the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Racing yachts 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 return to the English monarchy 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 called 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 the same way back, on a £100 wager. Yachting became popular with the affluent and royalty, but after that point the trend did not last.
The first yacht association in the British Isles, the Water Club, was formed at about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard association, and held great naval panoply and rigour. The closest thing to racing was the “chase,” when the “fleet” pursued a fictional enemy. The club went on, mostly as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, after merging with other organisations, it became the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).
Yacht racing began in some organized manner on the Thames about the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland funded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV ascended to monarchy in 1820, it came to be called the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded with a racing dispute, 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 funding made the Solent - the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Wight - the continuing 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 have boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing tests for great bets were held, and the society life was superlative. Eventually Royal Yachting Club boats were raised 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 dominance. Sailing was for the most part for fun and rose to its high point in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which sailed on the Mediterranean Sea and created a minimum of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in those waters from the late 19th century. The first persisting American yacht group, the Detroit Boat Club, was instigated in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens began the New York Yacht Club aboard his schooner Gimcrack.
Kinds of sailboats
The Early sailing yachts took the lines of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century through the latter half of the 19th century. The design of sizeable yachts was originally greatly affected by the success of America, which was designed by George Steers for a syndicate started by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) found its namesake after its win at Cowes in 1851. Earlier yachts were not designed and built in a contemporary sense, with merely a model used. Not until the second half of the 19th century did what was labeled naval architecture come into being. Not until the 1920s did the employment of the science of aerodynamics do for the design of sails and rigging what science had already done for hulls.
Because most of all sailboats were individually manufactured, there came a need for handicapping boats before the one-design class boats were designed. Hence, a rating rule was decreed, which is found in the International Rule, taken on in 1906 and edited in 1919. In modern times, one of the rapidly blossoming areas in the field of sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are built to the same specifications in length, beam, sail area, and other areas (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing between these boats can be done on an even keel with no handicapping at all. A perfect example is the generic International America’s Cup Class taken on board for racers in the 1992 America’s Cup race.
For the time that yachting belonged largely for the royal and the affluent, money was no object, and the size of boats developed, in both length and weight. The promotion and preference of smaller craft occurred in the latter 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 made plain the seaworthiness of smaller craft. Thereafter in the 20th century, particularly after World War II, smaller racing and leisure yachts became more popular, down to the dinghy, a popular 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
Following the decade 1840–50, at which point steam began to take the place of sail power in public boats, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were employed more and more in personal boats. Large power yachts were developed to a high degree, and long-distance travel became a favoured activity of the well off. The earliest power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; these then gave rise to yachts powered by the wholly submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. Like naval and merchant vessels, auxiliaries possessing both sail and power were the yacht archetype for several years. By the latter half of the 20th century, a lot of yachts were still auxiliaries, but the majority were solely 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. Conspicuous among 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 saw active service during World War II.
As bigger and better quality internal-combustion engines were produced, many bigger yachts were using them for power. The development of the diesel engine, using heavy oil for fuel, was furthered from World War I. In the decade after, bigger power-yacht creation grew, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. During that time the best auxiliary yacht constructed was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.
The construction of larger power yachts fell away in 1932, and the fashion thereafter was toward smaller, less expensive craft. From World War II, lots of small naval craft were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. In the late 20th century, yachting had become a globally beloved competition enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen individually owning and maintaining their own small leisure boats. The number of boats and owners is increasing steadily, not only in the traditional areas by the beach but also on inland waterways and lakes.
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