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As the Dutch came to dominance in sea power during the 17th century, the initial yacht had been a pleasure craft used first by royalty and later by the burghers in the canals and then in the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Racing was incidental, borne from private challenges. English yachting started 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 sent him a 20-metre (66-foot) pleasure boat with a beam (maximum width) of 5.6 m (18 feet), which he then 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 popular with the affluent and nobility, but after that time the trend did not last.

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

Yacht racing began in some ordered method on the Thames about the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland funded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV ascended to sovereignty in 1820, it was called 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 organisation had been initiated 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 location of British racing. The society at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, also at the rise of George IV. Each member was required to have boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing races for great bets were held, and the club life was lovely. It came to be that the Royal Yachting Club boats grew 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 had power. Sailing was mostly for fun and rose to its epitome in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which traveled on the Mediterranean Sea and established a benchmark of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in those waters from the late 19th century. The first enduring American yacht group, the Detroit Boat Club, was formed in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens began the New York Yacht Club while aboard his schooner Gimcrack.

Kinds of sailboats
The first sailing yachts took 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 initially largely impacted by the victory of America, which was designed by George Steers for a association led by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) found its namesake after its success at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and manufactured in a contemporary sense, with just a model used. Not until the second half of the 19th century did what was known as naval architecture come about. Not until the 1920s did the use of the research of aerodynamics do for the structure of sails and rigging what science had already done for hulls.

Because most of all sailboats had to be individually built, there was a desire for handicapping boats as this was before the one-design class boats were built. Therefore, a rating rule came into being, which ended up in the International Rule, adopted in 1906 and amended in 1919. In modern times, one of the most rapidly flourishing areas in sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are manufactured to single dimensions in length, beam, sail area, and other elements (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing for those boats can be done on an even par with no handicapping at all. A perfect example is the uniform International America’s Cup Class adopted for racers in the 1992 America’s Cup race.

For the time that yachting was done largely for the aristocracy and the affluent, cost was no issue, and the size of boats increased, in both length and weight. The promotion and popularity of smaller boats came in the second 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 demonstrated the hardiness of smaller yachts. Later in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and recreational craft became commonplace, down to the dinghy, a favoured 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, during which steam started to replace sail power in public vessels, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly favoured in pleasure yachts. Sizeable power yachts were developed to a high degree, and long-distance travel turned into a preferred pastime of the well off. The first power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; they then gave way to those powered by the wholly submerged screw or propeller type of propulsion. As in the case of naval and merchant vessels, auxiliaries carrying both sail and power were the yacht standard for a number of years. By the latter half of the 20th century, many yachts were still auxiliaries, but the large part were exclusively power yachts that had gasoline or diesel engines.

From the last decade of the 19th century there was a rise in the design of large steam yachts. Conspicuous among these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, containing triple-expansion engines, twin screws, and a compartmented iron hull, and was operated by a crew of over 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 more sizeable and better quality internal-combustion engines were developed, many big yachts started using them for power. The establishment of the diesel engine, with heavy oil for fuel, was furthered for World War I. During the decade following, bigger power-yacht building grew, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. In that period the best auxiliary yacht constructed was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.

The manufacture of larger power craft declined in 1932, and the style from then was toward smaller, less expensive craft. After World War II, lots of small naval boats were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. In the late 20th century, yachting had become a widespread popular competition enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen who are actually sailing and keeping their own small leisure yachts. The number of yachts and sailors increased steadily, not only in the traditional areas on the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.

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