As the Dutch found dominance in sea power during the 17th century, the first yacht became a leisure craft used initially by royalty and later by the burghers for the canals and the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Yacht racing was incidental, borne from private matches. English yachting began 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 gave him 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, ruled 1685–88), ordered for other yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and returning, on a £100 punt. Yachting became classy with the wealthy and royalty, but after that point the trend did not last.
The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was started around about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard group, with great naval panoply and formality. The closest thing to racing was the “chase,” for which the “fleet” pursued an imaginary enemy. The club endured, largely as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, after conglomerating with other clubs, it was known as the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).
Yacht racing was first seen in some organized manner on the Thames around the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland founded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV came to sovereignty in 1820, it came to be known as the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded with a racing argument, to become the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1830. The first English yacht organisation had been started 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 setting of British yacht racing. The society at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, likewise at the accession of George IV. All members were required to possess boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing races for great stakes were held, and the society life was lovely. Ultimately 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 gained dominance. Sailing was largely for leisure and found its apogee in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which traveled on the Mediterranean Sea and established a standard of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in the area from the late 19th century. The first persisting American yacht club, the Detroit Boat Club, was started in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens founded the New York Yacht Club aboard his schooner Gimcrack.
Kinds of sailboats
The Early sailing yachts took the style of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century until the latter half of the 19th century. The design of bigger yachts was initially greatly impacted by the win of America, which was drawn by George Steers for a association headed by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) was named after its success at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and built in today’s sense, with only a model used. 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 research of aerodynamics do for the design of sails and rigging what such study had earlier done for hulls.
Because most of all sailboats were individually custom-built, there arose a need for handicapping boats as this was before the one-design class boats were made. Hence, a rating rule was created, which ended up in the International Rule, accepted in 1906 and revised in 1919. In modern times, one of the rapidly flourishing areas in the field of 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 such boats can be had on an even keel with no handicapping at all. A great example is the standard International America’s Cup Class taken on for yachts in the 1992 America’s Cup race.
As long as yachting belonged primarily for the royal and the wealthy, expense was no object, and the size of boats developed, in both length and weight. The rise and desire of smaller craft happened in the second 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 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 value of less sizeable craft. Following this in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and recreational craft 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 setting sail single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.
Kinds of power yachts
Following the decade 1840–50, in which steam started to take the place of sail power in commercial vessels, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly employed in leisure boats. Large power yachts were developed to a high degree, and long-distance cruising was a favourite activity of the affluent. The earliest power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; those then gave rise to those powered by the wholly submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. As well as naval and merchant craft, auxiliaries with both sail and power were the yacht archetype for a number of years. By the later half of the 20th century, several yachts were still auxiliaries, but the larger part were exclusively power yachts with gasoline or diesel engines.
In the last decade of the 19th century there was a push in the manufacture of more sizeable steam yachts. Conspicuous of 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 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 gave active service in World War II.
As more sizeable and better quality internal-combustion engines were produced, many large craft started using them for power. The creation of the diesel engine, employing heavy oil for fuel, advanced in World War I. During the decade following that, bigger power-yacht building blossomed, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. In that time the biggest auxiliary yacht manufactured was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.
The building of bigger power craft fell away in 1932, and the trend from then was toward smaller, less costly boats. From World War II, a lot of small naval craft were bought by private owners for conversion to yachts. By the late 20th century, yachting is a widespread loved activity enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen individually owning and maintaining their own small leisure craft. The amount of yachts 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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