Yachting and Yacht Clubs

As the Dutch found preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the early yacht had been a leisure craft used mostly by royalty and then by the burghers for the canals and the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Racing was incidental, arising as private games. English yachting began 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) leisure 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, reigned 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 was found to be fashionable with the wealthy and aristocracy, but after that time the fashion did not last.

The first yacht group in the British Isles, the Water Club, was started in about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard association, and held great naval panoply and gravity. The closest thing to a race was the “chase,” when the “fleet” pursued a fictional enemy. The club endured, largely as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, when merging with other clubs, it became known as the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).

Yacht racing was seen in some organized method on the Thames around the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland instigated the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV came to monarchy in 1820, it came to be known as the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded following a racing argument, 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 perpetual site of British racing. The society at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, also at the rise of George IV. All members were required to own boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing matches for high stakes were held, and the club life was superlative. Ultimately Royal Yachting Club boats grew in size to bigger than 350 tons.

In North America, yachting started with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and went on when the English had power. Sailing was largely for leisure and reached its epitome in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which cruised on the Mediterranean Sea and established a benchmark of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in those waters from the late 19th century. The first persisting American yacht club, the Detroit Boat Club, was instigated in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens began the New York Yacht Club while aboard his schooner Gimcrack.

Kinds of sailboats
The first sailing yachts took the style of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century through the later half of the 19th century. The style of large yachts was first heavily impacted by the win of America, which was created by George Steers for a syndicate led 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. Early yachts were not designed and built in today’s sense, with only a model being 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 study of aerodynamics do for the design of sails and rigging what such science had earlier done for hulls.

Because almost all sailboats had been individually custom-built, there arose a desire for handicapping boats before the one-design class boats were made. Thus, a rating rule was decreed, which is found in the International Rule, taken on in 1906 and revised in 1919. In modern times, one of the rapidly blossoming areas in the sailing industry is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are built to the same dimensions in length, beam, sail area, and other areas (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing those boats can be had on an even basis with no handicapping at all. A perfect example is the standard International America’s Cup Class adopted for participants in the 1992 America’s Cup race.

So long as yachting was an activity primarily for the aristocracy and the rich, cost was no object, and the size of boats increased, in both length and weight. The rise and popularity of smaller boats came in the second half of the 19th century from 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) captained single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray made plain the value of small boats. Following this in the 20th century, particularly after World War II, smaller racing and leisure boats became more common, down to the dinghy, a popular 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, in which steam was set to replace sail power in market craft, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly used in personal boats. Large power yachts were progressed to a high element, and long-distance travel was a preferred pastime of the wealthy. The earliest power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; those then gave rise to those powered by the completely submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. As in the case of naval and merchant vessels, auxiliaries carrying both sail and power were the yacht standard for several years. By the second half of the 20th century, many yachts were still auxiliaries, but the majority were only power yachts containing gasoline or diesel engines.

During the last decade of the 19th century there was a boom in the manufacture of bigger steam yachts. Notably of these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, containing triple-expansion engines, twin screws, and a compartmented iron hull, and was sailed by a crew of at least 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 larger and more reliable internal-combustion engines were produced, many bigger craft began using them for power. The establishment of the diesel engine, with heavy oil for fuel, advanced from World War I. From the decade after, bigger power-yacht building blossomed, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. During that point the biggest auxiliary yacht manufactured was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.

The manufacture of large power boats fell away after 1932, and the fashion from then was for smaller, less pricey boats. Following World War II, lots of small naval vessels were traded by private owners for conversion to yachts. At the late 20th century, yachting has become a globally popular competition enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen individually manning and keeping their own small recreational yachts. The popularity of boats and sailors increased steadily, not only in the traditional locations by the beach but also on inland waterways and lakes.

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