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As the Dutch rose to dominance in sea power during the 17th century, the first yacht had been a leisure craft used mostly by royalty and later by the burghers for the canals and the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. 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 reaffirmation to the English monarchy in 1660, the city of Amsterdam sent him 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), made additional yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and back, on a £100 wager. Yachting was found to be fashionable among the affluent and aristocracy, but after that time the fashion did not last.

The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was formed around about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard group, and held large naval panoply and formality. The closest thing to racing was the “chase,” in which the “fleet” pursued an imagined enemy. The club endured, mostly as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, after joining with other clubs, it was 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 founded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV rose to monarchy in 1820, it was then called the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded after a racing argument, 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 patronage made the Solent - the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Wight - the continuing location of British yacht racing. The organisation at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, also at the ascension of George IV. Each member was required to possess boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing tests for great bets were held, and the social life was superlative. It came to be that the Royal Yachting Club boats grew in size to more than 350 tons.

In North America, yachting began with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and went on when the English gained dominance. Sailing was mostly for leisure and rose to its epitome in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which cruised 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 association, the Detroit Boat Club, was formed in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens founded the New York Yacht Club while aboard his schooner Gimcrack.

Kinds of sailboats
The Early sailing yachts were within the style of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century through to the second half of the 19th century. The style of bigger yachts was first greatly impacted by the victory of America, which was drawn by George Steers for a group led by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) was named after its win at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and built in the modern sense, with merely a model for an outline. Not until the second half of the 19th century did what was called naval architecture come about. Not until the 1920s did the employment of the science of aerodynamics do for the design of sails and rigging what such study had earlier done for hulls.

Because almost all sailboats were individually built, there arose a requirement for handicapping boats as this was before the one-design class boats were designed. Therefore, a rating rule came into being, which is found in the International Rule, taken on in 1906 and edited in 1919. In modern times, one of the fastest growing areas in sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are manufactured to single specifications in length, beam, sail area, and other elements (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing for these boats can be had on an even par with no handicapping at all. A prime example is the standard International America’s Cup Class taken on board for yachts in the 1992 America’s Cup race.

As long as yachting belonged largely for the aristocracy and the wealthy, expense was no issue, and the size of boats developed, in both length and weight. The rise and desire of smaller yachts came 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) captained single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray made plain the seaworthiness of less sizeable yachts. Thereafter in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and leisure yachts became more common, down to the dinghy, a preferred training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, boats of less than 3 m were sailed single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.

Kinds of power yachts
Post the decade 1840–50, in which steam was set to replace sail power in public craft, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly used in pleasure boats. Sizeable power yachts were progressed to a high element, and long-distance cruising became a fond occupation of the well off. The earliest power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; those then gave rise to boats powered by the completely submerged screw or propeller type of propulsion. As well as naval and merchant craft, auxiliaries carrying both sail and power were the yacht fashion for many years. By the latter half of the 20th century, a lot of yachts were still auxiliaries, but the large part were exclusively power yachts that had gasoline or diesel engines.

In the last decade of the 19th century there was a rise in the design of more sizeable steam yachts. Conspicuous of these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, containing 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 saw active service during World War II.

As bigger and more reliable internal-combustion engines were created, many bigger yachts started using them for power. The creation of the diesel engine, with heavy oil for fuel, progressed for World War I. In the decade after that, big power-yacht creation grew, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. During that point the largest auxiliary yacht built was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.

The building of big power boats lessened in 1932, and the fashion after that was in preference of smaller, less costly boats. After World War II, a lot of small naval boats were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. At the late 20th century, yachting is a globally loved activity enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen personally manning and upkeeping their own small leisure boats. The popularity of craft and owners is increasing steadily, not only in the traditional places by the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.

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