Yachting and Yacht Clubs

As the Dutch found dominance in sea power during the 17th century, the initial yacht had been a leisure craft used first by royalty and secondly by the burghers in the canals and the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Racing was incidental, coming out of private challenges. English yachting originated with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his restoration to the English throne in 1660, the city of Amsterdam sent 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, sovereign 1685–88), made more yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and returning, on a £100 wager. Yachting became popular with the affluent and nobility, but after that point the trend did not last.

The first yacht group in the British Isles, the Water Club, was formed at about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard group, and held much naval panoply and gravity. The closest thing to a race was the “chase,” in which the “fleet” pursued an imagined enemy. The club endured, for the large part as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, when joining with other societies, it became the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).

Yacht racing was first seen in some organized method on the Thames about the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland founded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV rose to the throne in 1820, it came to be named the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded after a racing fight, 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 funding made the Solent - the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Wight - the continuing location of British racing. The club at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, again at the rise of George IV. Each member was required to own boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing races for great bets were held, and the society life was splendid. It came to be that the Royal Yachting Club boats grew in size to over 350 tons.

In North America, yachting started with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and persisted when the English held control. Sailing was mostly for leisure and found its high point 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 those waters from the late 19th century. The first continuing American yacht society, the Detroit Boat Club, was started in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens founded the New York Yacht Club while aboard his schooner Gimcrack.

Kinds of sailboats
The Early sailing yachts were within the lines of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century through the latter half of the 19th century. The style of sizeable yachts was initially heavily affected by the victory of America, which was drawn by George Steers for a association started by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) had its namesake after its victory at Cowes in 1851. Earlier 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 known as naval architecture come into being. Not until the 1920s did the use of the study of aerodynamics do for the craft of sails and rigging what science had already done for hulls.

Because most of all sailboats were individually manufactured, there arose a desire for handicapping boats as this was previous to the one-design class boats were built. Hence, a rating rule was created, which ended up in the International Rule, adopted in 1906 and edited in 1919. Today, one of the fastest growing areas in sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are built to single requirements in length, beam, sail area, and other aspects (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing between these boats can be had on an even par with no handicapping at all. A prime example is the standard International America’s Cup Class taken on for racers in the 1992 America’s Cup race.

So long as yachting belonged primarily for the aristocracy and the wealthy, money was no issue, and the size of boats developed, in both length and weight. The ascendancy and preference 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) captained single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray made plain the seaworthiness of less sizeable craft. Thereafter in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and pleasure boats became commonplace, down to the dinghy, a favourite 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
Post the decade 1840–50, at which point steam was set to replace sail power in commercial boats, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly employed in pleasure boats. Bigger power yachts were progressed to a high degree, and long-distance sailing turned into a preferred occupation of the wealthy. The first power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; they then gave rise to boats powered by the fully submerged screw or propeller sort of propulsion. As well as naval and merchant yachts, auxiliaries possessing both sail and power were the yacht standard for a number of years. By the latter half of the 20th century, many yachts were still auxiliaries, but the large part were exclusively power yachts with gasoline or diesel engines.

In the last decade of the 19th century there was a boom in the design of large 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 manned 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 was used in active service for World War II.

As bigger and better quality internal-combustion engines were developed, many bigger yachts started using them for power. The creation of the diesel engine, using heavy oil for fuel, progressed for World War I. During the decade after, big power-yacht creation blossomed, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. From that period the largest auxiliary yacht manufactured was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.

The construction of large power yachts declined in 1932, and the fashion thereafter was for smaller, less expensive boats. Following World War II, many small naval boats were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. In the late 20th century, yachting is a internationally beloved sport enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen who are actually owning and keeping their own small pleasure craft. The amount of boats and yachtsmen has increased steadily, not only in the traditional locations on the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.

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