As the Dutch came to dominance in sea power during the 17th century, the first yacht was a leisure craft used first by royalty and secondly by the burghers for the canals as well as the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Yacht racing was incidental, arising as private matches. 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 presented him with a 20-metre (66-foot) leisure boat with a beam (maximum width) of 5.6 m (18 feet), which he then named Mary. Charles and his brother James, the duke of York (James II, sovereign 1685–88), built additional yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and back, on a £100 bet. Yachting was found to be fashionable among the affluent and nobility, but after that period the trend did not last.
The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was formed in about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard association, with great naval panoply and gravity. The closest thing to racing was the “chase,” for which the “fleet” pursued an imagined enemy. The club went on, mostly as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, after joining with other organisations, it became known as the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).
Yacht racing began in some organized method on the Thames about the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland funded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV rose to the throne in 1820, it was called the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded following a racing fight, to become the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1830. The first English yacht society had been initiated 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 continuing location of British yacht racing. The organisation at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, likewise at the rise of George IV. All members were required to own boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing tests for large bets were held, and the social life was lovely. It came to be that the Royal Yachting Club boats were raised in size to over 350 tons.
In North America, yachting began with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and went on when the English took power. Sailing was mostly for pleasure and reached its apogee in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which sailed on the Mediterranean Sea and established a standard of luxury and sophistication for the later yachts in that area from the late 19th century. The first enduring American yacht association, the Detroit Boat Club, was started in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens instigated the New York Yacht Club aboard his schooner Gimcrack.
Kinds of sailboats
The Early sailing yachts followed the design of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century through to the later half of the 19th century. The craft of large yachts was initially greatly put upon by the success of America, which was drawn by George Steers for a club headed by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) was named after its win at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and manufactured in the modern sense, with just a model used. Not until the latter half of the 19th century did what was known as naval architecture come into action. Not until the 1920s did the application of the study of aerodynamics do for the structure of sails and rigging what science had earlier done for hulls.
Because most of all sailboats had been individually custom-built, there arose a requirement for handicapping boats previous to the one-design class boats were built. Therefore, a rating rule was written, which is found in the International Rule, taken on in 1906 and revised in 1919. In modern times, 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 standard dimensions in length, beam, sail area, and other areas (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing such boats can be held on an even keel with no handicapping necessary. A prime example is the uniform International America’s Cup Class adopted for yachts in the 1992 America’s Cup race.
So long as yachting was an activity mostly for the nobility and the affluent, money was no issue, and the size of boats grew, in both length and weight. The promotion and desire of smaller yachts came in the second 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) sailed single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray proved the seaworthiness of less sizeable yachts. Thereafter in the 20th century, notably after World War II, smaller racing and pleasure craft became more common, down to the dinghy, a favoured 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, in which steam started to replace sail power in market boats, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were employed increasingly in pleasure craft. Bigger power yachts were progressed to a high element, and long-distance cruising was a favoured occupation of the wealthy. The early power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; they then made way to those powered by the completely submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. As in the case of naval and merchant boats, auxiliaries carrying both sail and power were the yacht archetype for many years. By the latter 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 rise in the construction of large steam yachts. In particular among these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, with triple-expansion engines, twin screws, and a compartmented iron hull, and was manned by a crew of at least 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 for World War II.
As larger and more dependable internal-combustion engines were created, many bigger boats were using them for power. The development of the diesel engine, with heavy oil for fuel, was furthered in World War I. From the decade after that, big power-yacht manufacture grew, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. During that point the best auxiliary yacht built was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.
The manufacture of large power yachts fell away from 1932, and the trend thereafter was for smaller, less costly boats. After World War II, a lot of small naval vessels were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. At the late 20th century, yachting is a widespread loved activity enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen individually manning and upkeeping their own small leisure boats. The popularity of boats and sailors increased steadily, not only in the traditional areas by the beach but also on inland waterways and lakes.
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