As the Dutch found preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the initial yacht was a leisure craft used first by royalty and then by the burghers on the canals and then in the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Yacht racing was incidental, arising as private games. English yachting started with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his return to the English monarchy in 1660, the city of Amsterdam gave him a 20-metre (66-foot) pleasure 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), made additional yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and back, on a £100 punt. Yachting became popular among the rich and royalty, 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 had great naval panoply and formality. The closest thing to a race was the “chase,” in which the “fleet” pursued an imaginary enemy. The club persisted, for the large part as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, after conglomerating with other societies, it became the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).

Yacht racing was first seen in some organized manner on the Thames in the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland funded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV came 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 formed 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 location of British yacht racing. The association at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, again at the rise of George IV. Each member was required to possess boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing tests for large bets were held, and the social life was superlative. Eventually Royal Yachting Club boats grew in size to bigger than 350 tons.

In North America, yachting was first accomplished with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and continued when the English gained dominance. Sailing was for the most part for pleasure and rose to its apogee in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which sailed on the Mediterranean Sea and created a minimum of luxury and sophistication for the later yachts in the area from the late 19th century. The first continuing American yacht group, the Detroit Boat Club, was formed in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens instigated the New York Yacht Club while aboard his schooner Gimcrack.

Kinds of sailboats
The first sailing yachts were within the lines of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century through the later half of the 19th century. The design of large yachts was initially greatly impacted by the victory of America, which was drawn by George Steers for a club headed by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) was named after its victory at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and crafted in the modern sense, with merely a model being used. Not until the second half of the 19th century did what was labeled 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 it had done earlier for hulls.

Because nearly all sailboats had been individually custom-built, there arose a need for handicapping boats before the one-design class boats were made. Hence, a rating rule was decreed, which ended up in the International Rule, accepted in 1906 and edited in 1919. In modern times, one of the fastest blossoming areas in the sailing industry is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are created to standard requirements in length, beam, sail area, and other elements (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing for such boats can be held on an even par with no handicapping necessary. A great example is the generic International America’s Cup Class taken on board for yachts in the 1992 America’s Cup race.

So long as yachting was an activity mostly for the royal and the affluent, cost was no issue, and the size of boats developed, in both length and weight. The promotion and desire of smaller boats occurred 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 voyage around the world (1895–98) sailed single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray demonstrated the value of smaller craft. Thereafter in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and pleasure boats became more popular, down to the dinghy, a popular training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, yachts of less than 3 m were sailed single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.

Kinds of power yachts
Following the decade 1840–50, in which steam began to replace sail power in market vessels, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly favoured in pleasure craft. Large power yachts were developed to a high standard, and long-distance sailing turned into a favoured pastime of the affluent. The early power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; they then made way to yachts powered by the wholly submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. Like naval and merchant vessels, auxiliaries carrying both sail and power were the yacht standard for a number of years. By the second half of the 20th century, several yachts were still auxiliaries, but the majority were solely power yachts that had gasoline or diesel engines.

During the last decade of the 19th century there was a rise in the construction of bigger steam yachts. In particular within these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, with 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 was used in active service in World War II.

As larger and more reliable internal-combustion engines were produced, many large craft began using them for power. The establishment of the diesel engine, using heavy oil for fuel, progressed from World War I. From the decade following that, large power-yacht manufacture blossomed, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. From that period the largest auxiliary yacht constructed was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.

The construction of larger power craft fell away from 1932, and the style from then was toward smaller, less pricey yachts. From World War II, many small naval vessels were bought by private owners for conversion to yachts. By the late 20th century, yachting had become a widespread loved activity enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen who are actually owning and maintaining their own small leisure yachts. The number of yachts and owners increased steadily, not only in the traditional locations along the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.

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