As the Dutch rose to preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the initial yacht had been a pleasure craft used first by royalty and then by the burghers for the canals as well as the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Racing yachts was incidental, arising as private games. English yachting started with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his reaffirmation to the English royalty 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 called Mary. Charles and his brother James, the duke of York (James II, ruled 1685–88), built additional yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and back, on a £100 punt. Yachting rose as popular among the rich and nobility, but after that period the fashion did not last.

The first yacht group in the British Isles, the Water Club, was instigated around about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard association, and had large naval panoply and rigour. The closest thing to racing boats was the “chase,” when the “fleet” pursued a fictional enemy. The club persisted, mostly as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, when conglomerating with other societies, it became known as the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).

Yacht racing was seen in some ordered fashion 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 dispute, to become the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1830. The first English yacht society 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 continuing site of British yacht racing. The society at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, likewise at the accession of George IV. Each member was required to have boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing races for great stakes were held, and the society life was lovely. Eventually Royal Yachting Club boats increased in size to more than 350 tons.

In North America, yachting started with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and went on when the English took control. Sailing was largely for leisure and rose to its epitome in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which sailed 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 continuing American yacht organisation, the Detroit Boat Club, was formed in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens began the New York Yacht Club aboard his schooner Gimcrack.

Kinds of sailboats
The Early sailing yachts were within the design of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century until the later half of the 19th century. The style of sizeable yachts was originally heavily impacted by the victory of America, which was created by George Steers for a group led by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) had its namesake after its victory at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and manufactured in the modern sense, with just a model used. Not until the later half of the 19th century did what was called naval architecture come into being. Not until the 1920s did the employment of the study of aerodynamics do for the craft of sails and rigging what such study had earlier done for hulls.

Because most of all sailboats had to be individually custom-built, there came a desire for handicapping boats as this was previous to the one-design class boats were built. Thus, a rating rule was created, which is found in the International Rule, accepted in 1906 and edited in 1919. In modern times, one of the rapidly blossoming areas in sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are created to standard dimensions in length, beam, sail area, and other areas (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing for these boats can be done on an even keel with no handicapping at all. A great example is the standard International America’s Cup Class adopted for racers in the 1992 America’s Cup race.

As long as yachting was an activity largely for the nobility and the wealthy, expense was no object, and the size of boats grew, in both length and weight. The rise and popularity of smaller craft happened 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 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 seaworthiness of small boats. Later in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and recreational craft became more common, 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
Post the decade 1840–50, when steam began to take the place of sail power in commercial vessels, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly favoured in leisure boats. Bigger power yachts were developed to a high element, and long-distance cruising turned into a favourite activity of the affluent. The first power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; they then gave way to yachts powered by the wholly submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. Like naval and merchant yachts, auxiliaries with both sail and power were the yacht archetype for many years. By the latter half of the 20th century, many yachts were still auxiliaries, but the large part were only power yachts containing gasoline or diesel engines.

In the last decade of the 19th century there was a boom in the manufacture of bigger 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 more than 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 during World War II.

As larger and more dependable internal-combustion engines were developed, many big boats were using them for power. The establishment of the diesel engine, using heavy oil for fuel, advanced from World War I. In the decade after, bigger power-yacht manufacture blossomed, reaching a climax in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. From that period the biggest auxiliary yacht built was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.

The manufacture of bigger power boats fell away after 1932, and the trend from then was toward smaller, less costly boats. After World War II, many small naval craft were traded by private owners for conversion to yachts. In the late 20th century, yachting has become a globally loved activity enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen individually owning and upkeeping their own small recreational craft. The popularity of craft and yachtsmen is increasing steadily, not only in the traditional places along the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.

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