Tents and Marquees

As the Dutch came to preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the first yacht had been a leisure craft used initially by royalty and then by the burghers for the canals and the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Racing yachts 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 throne 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, sovereign 1685–88), built more yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and returning, on a £100 bet. Yachting rose as fashionable for the affluent and aristocracy, but after that point the trend did not last.

The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was formed at about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard organization, and had much naval panoply and formality. The closest thing to a race was the “chase,” when the “fleet” pursued a fictional enemy. The club endured, mostly as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, when merging with other organisations, it became known as the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).

Yacht racing was first seen in some organized 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 sovereignty in 1820, it came to be called the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded after a racing dispute, to become the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1830. The first English yacht club had been started 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 perpetual setting of British yachting. The organisation at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, again at the accession of George IV. All members were required to have boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing races for large stakes were held, and the society life was splendid. It came to be that the Royal Yachting Club boats increased 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 dominance. Sailing was largely for leisure and reached its high point in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which sailed on the Mediterranean Sea and established a minimum of luxury and sophistication for the later yachts in the 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 founded the New York Yacht Club while aboard his schooner Gimcrack.

Kinds of sailboats
Early sailing yachts followed the style of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century until the later half of the 19th century. The style of large yachts was first heavily put upon by the victory of America, which was designed by George Steers for a club started 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. Earlier yachts were not designed and manufactured in today’s sense, with only a model for an outline. Not until the later half of the 19th century did what was labeled naval architecture come about. Not until the 1920s did the use of the research of aerodynamics do for the craft of sails and rigging what it had already done for hulls.

Because most of all sailboats had been individually manufactured, there came a need for handicapping boats before the one-design class boats were designed. Therefore, a rating rule was written, which resulted in the International Rule, accepted in 1906 and amended in 1919. Today, one of the most rapidly blossoming areas in sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are manufactured to the same dimensions in length, beam, sail area, and other elements (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing between those boats can be had on an even keel with no handicapping at all. A prime example is the generic International America’s Cup Class taken on for yachts in the 1992 America’s Cup race.

As long as yachting was done largely for the aristocracy and the wealthy, cost was no object, and the size of boats increased, in both length and weight. The rise and preference of smaller boats came in the latter 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 hardiness of less sizeable boats. Later in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and leisure craft became commonplace, down to the dinghy, a preferred 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
After the decade 1840–50, in which steam started to emulate sail power in commercial vessels, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly favoured in personal boats. Large power yachts were developed to a high element, and long-distance sailing turned into a preferred pastime of the rich. The early power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; those then gave way to boats powered by the wholly submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. As well as naval and merchant vessels, auxiliaries with both sail and power were the yacht archetype for many years. By the second half of the 20th century, a lot of yachts were still auxiliaries, but the majority were exclusively power yachts that had gasoline or diesel engines.

From the last decade of the 19th century there was a rise in the manufacture of large steam yachts. Notably within 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 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 gave active service for World War II.

As more sizeable and more dependable internal-combustion engines were produced, many bigger yachts began using them for power. The development of the diesel engine, with heavy oil for fuel, was furthered during World War I. From the decade that followed, large power-yacht creation grew, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. In that point the biggest auxiliary yacht constructed was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.

The construction of big power craft fell away after 1932, and the style thereafter was for smaller, less pricey boats. Following World War II, a lot of small naval boats were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. In the late 20th century, yachting is a globally loved sport enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen individually owning and upkeeping their own small leisure craft. The number of yachts and owners is increasing steadily, not only in the traditional locations by the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.

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