yacht

yacht, a sail- or power-driven vessel, usually light and comparatively small, used for racing or for recreation. In recreation, the term applies to very large craft, originally powered by sail and later by steam or internal-combustion engines. It is in this sense that the generality of nonyachting (nonsailing) people usually think of the term. Technically, the word yacht excludes boats propelled by paddles, oars, or outboard motors. Also, recreational powered craft below the largest size are usually called cabin cruisers (see motorboat).

The English word yacht and the equivalent word in many European languages comes from the Dutch use in the 16th and 17th centuries of the word jaght, later jacht, which, with the word schip added, meant “ship for chasing.”

Yachting and yacht clubs

As the Dutch rose to preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the early yacht became a pleasure craft used first by royalty and later by the burghers on the canals and the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Racing was incidental, arising as private matches. English yachting began 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 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, reigned 1685–88), built other yachts and in 1662 raced two of them for a £100 wager on the Thames from Greenwich to Gravesend and back. Yachting became fashionable among the wealthy and nobility, but at that time the fashion did not last.

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The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was formed about 1720 at Cork, Ireland, as a cruising and unofficial coast guard organization, with much naval panoply and formality. The closest thing to a race was the “chase,” when the “fleet” pursued an imaginary enemy. The club persisted, largely as a social club, until 1765 and in 1828 became, after merging with other groups, the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).

Yacht racing began in some organized fashion on the Thames about the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland founded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV came to the throne 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 formed at Cowes on the Isle of Wight in 1815, and royal patronage made the Solent, the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Wight, the continuing site of British yachting. The club at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, again at the accession of George IV. All members were required to own boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing matches for large stakes were held, and the social life was splendid. Ultimately, Royal Yachting Club boats increased in size to more than 350 tons.

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In North America yachting began with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and continued when the English gained control. Sailing was mostly for pleasure and reached its apogee in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which cruised on the Mediterranean Sea and set a standard of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in those waters from the late 19th century. The first continuing American yacht club, the Detroit Boat Club, was formed in 1839. In 1844 John C. Stevens founded the New York Yacht Club aboard his schooner Gimcrack.

Kinds of sailboats

Early sailing yachts followed the lines of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century until the second half of the 19th century. The design of large yachts was first greatly affected by the success of America, which was designed by George Steers for a syndicate headed by John C. Stevens and was the boat for which the America’s Cup was named after its victory at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and built in the modern sense, only a model being used. Not until the second half of the 19th century did what was called naval architecture come into being. Not until the 1920s did the application of the science of aerodynamics do for the design of sails and rigging what science had earlier done for hulls.

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Because nearly all sailboats were individually custom-built, there arose a need for handicapping boats before the one-design class boats were built. Thus, a rating rule came into being, which resulted in the International Rule, adopted in 1906 and revised in 1919. Today one of the fastest-growing areas in the field of sailing is that of one-design-class boats. All boats in a one-design class are built to the same specifications in length, beam, sail area, and other elements. Racing between such boats can be held on an even basis with no handicapping necessary. A prime example is the uniform International America’s Cup Class adopted for participants in the 1992 America’s Cup race.

So long as yachting belonged primarily to the royal and the rich, cost was no object, and the size of boats increased, in both length and weight. The promotion and popularity of smaller craft 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 voyage around the world (1895–98) sailed single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray demonstrated the seaworthiness of small craft. Thereafter in the 20th century, notably after World War II, smaller racing and recreational craft became more common, down to the dinghy, a favourite training boat, of 3.7 metres. In the late 20th century boats of less than 3 metres were sailed single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.