Yachting and Yacht Clubs
As the Dutch came to preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the early yacht was a pleasure craft used first by royalty and secondly by the burghers on the canals as well as the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Racing yachts was incidental, coming out of private games. English yachting originated with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his reaffirmation to the English monarchy 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, ruled 1685–88), ordered for more yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and back, on a £100 wager. Yachting became fashionable for the affluent and royalty, but after that time the fashion did not last.
The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was instigated at about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard association, and held much naval panoply and formality. The closest thing to a race was the “chase,” in which the “fleet” pursued an imagined enemy. The club went on, for the large part as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, when conglomerating with other groups, it became 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 the throne 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 organisation 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 site of British yacht racing. The association at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, again at the accession of George IV. All members were required to possess boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing tests for great bids were held, and the society life was superlative. Ultimately 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 persisted when the English gained power. Sailing was mostly for pleasure and found 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 that area from the late 19th century. The first continuing American yacht association, the Detroit Boat Club, was instigated in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens founded the New York Yacht Club while on board 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 to the second half of the 19th century. The craft of bigger yachts was initially largely affected by the success of America, which was drawn by George Steers for a group led by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) found its namesake after its success at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and built in today’s sense, with just a model used. Not until the second half of the 19th century did what was called naval architecture come about. Not until the 1920s did the use of the science of aerodynamics do for the craft of sails and rigging what science had done earlier for hulls.
Because most of all sailboats had been individually manufactured, there was a desire for handicapping boats before the one-design class boats were designed. Thus, a rating rule was created, which ended up in the International Rule, accepted in 1906 and amended in 1919. In modern times, one of the fastest growing areas in the sailing industry is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are built to standard specifications in length, beam, sail area, and other areas (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing between such boats can be done on an even par with no handicapping necessary. A great example is the standard International America’s Cup Class adopted for racers in the 1992 America’s Cup race.
As long as yachting was an activity mostly for the royal and the affluent, expense was no object, and the size of boats developed, in both length and weight. The rise and popularity of smaller craft occurred 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) led single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray proved the value of small craft. Later in the 20th century, particularly after World War II, smaller racing and pleasure craft became commonplace, down to the dinghy, a favourite training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, craft of less than 3 m were setting sail single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.
Kinds of power yachts
Post the decade 1840–50, when steam started to replace sail power in market boats, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were used increasingly in personal boats. Large power yachts were progressed to a high degree, and long-distance cruising was a favoured pastime of the wealthy. The first power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; those then gave rise to those powered by the completely submerged screw or propeller type of propulsion. As in the case of naval and merchant vessels, auxiliaries with both sail and power were the yacht fashion for many years. By the latter half of the 20th century, a lot of yachts were still auxiliaries, but the larger part were only power yachts that had gasoline or diesel engines.
In the last decade of the 19th century there was a boom in the design of bigger steam yachts. Notably among these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, that had triple-expansion engines, twin screws, and a compartmented iron hull, and was operated by a crew of at least 150. The Mayflower, purchased 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 more sizeable and more reliable internal-combustion engines were developed, many big boats were using them for power. The establishment of the diesel engine, with heavy oil for fuel, advanced during World War I. In the decade following that, big power-yacht manufacture blossomed, hitting a climax in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. During that period the best auxiliary yacht built was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.
The manufacture of large power boats lessened from 1932, and the trend from then was toward smaller, less costly craft. From World War II, many small naval boats were bought by private owners for conversion to yachts. In the late 20th century, yachting had become a globally popular sport enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen who are actually sailing and upkeeping their own small leisure boats. The amount of boats and yachtsmen has increased steadily, not only in the traditional places on the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.
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