By this time, however, there was peace on the North Atlantic, and many a good seaman was free to turn his attention to enjoying and improving the tools of his profession. By this time, also, the Americans had made great headway as ship-builders and seamen, and by rivalry with the Old World for trade, and by experience in the Newfoundland fisheries and the West Indies fruit-trade, had acquired a skill in building and rigging ships that astonished the world by their speed and weatherly qualities. It was natural that these ideas should influence pleasure craft on this side of the water, as Great Britain’s long sea-struggles had influenced its sailors; and when, in 1844, the New York Yacht-Club was founded, the conditions were favorable for beginning that home development of yachting as a sport which was soon to place the Americans and Canadians among the leading yachting peoples of the world, and to lead to those international tests of speed that nowadays excite so wide-spread and intense an interest.
“AMERICA” (AS ORIGINALLY RIGGED) AND “MARIA.”
The great preponderance in numbers and value of pleasure-vessels in the United States, and in the number of clubs and club-members, is due not only to our large population and long coast-line, but to the great extent of inland waters furnished by our rivers and interior lakes, and to the prevalence of bays or protected lagoons, such as Narragansett Bay, the Great South Bay of Long Island, New York harbor, Delaware and Chesapeake bays, and the long series of “sounds” that border the southern Atlantic coast from Barnegat to Biscayne. The Great Lakes are bordered by yacht-clubs on both sides, and furnish space and weather for quite as serious work as tries the skill of ocean navigators, while a hundred smaller lakes make fine pleasure-waters and excellent training-grounds for fresh-water sailors.
Though the first regatta in America was sailed in 1845, little over half a century ago, the evolution of American yachts began with the building of the sloop Maria by Robert L. Stevens, one of that family of remarkable inventors, who had already devised the first practical screw-steamer, and afterward created the Monitor. Her model, as we learn from an excellent article in “The Century” for July, 1882, by S. G. W. Benjamin, was suggested by the low, broad, almost flat-bottomed sloops employed to steal over the shallows of the Hudson and the Sound—vessels depending upon beam rather than on ballast for stability, and imitated by many of our coasters, which are so stiff that they sometimes make outside voyages without either cargo or ballast; but the Maria had a long, sharp, hollowed bow, whence she expanded aft, with little taper at the stern, so that her deck-plan was that of an elongated flat-iron. The principal novelty about her, however, was the use of two “center-boards.”
A center-board is a plate of wood or metal, suspended, usually by a corner pivot, within a sheath or box in the waist, which can be let down through the keel into the water, so as to form an adjustable keel. It is the most convenient form of a very old device for preventing a boat’s drift to leeward, or tendency to capsize under the pressure of the wind. In earliest times, a mat was hung over the side. Later this was replaced by the leeboard, apparently a Dutch invention, which may still be seen on the canal barges in Holland, and which was a feature of the pirogues or periaugers (shallow double-ended sailing-canoes) that in early times formed almost the only type of small sail-boat in New York waters. Two other novel, foreshadowing features possessed by Mr. Stevens’ boat, were the use of rubber compressors on the traveler of the main boom to ease the strain of the sheet (rubber is applied in many places about modern rigging), and the bolting of lead to the keel as outside ballast.
The Maria justified the expectations aroused by these and other novelties in hull and rig by beating everything in existence, until a Swedish gentleman in New York constructed a much smaller boat, the Coquette, on very different lines, for although only sixty-six feet long she drew ten feet of water; and in a match on the open sea she beat the Maria easily, showing the superiority of the deep-keeled model for windy weather.
Profiting by these experiences and widely gathered information, a new designer essayed the task of making a still better yacht. This was George Steers, the son of a British naval captain and ship-modeler, who had become an American naval officer and was the first man to take charge of the Washington navy yard. He built several graceful and fleet-winged sloops, famous in their day, such as the Julia, David Carl’s Gracie, and many pilot-boats and ships. His most celebrated production, however, and the one which gave our yachtsmen an international reputation and established their method of pursuing recreation as the foremost American sport, was the America, from which the “America Cup” races take origin and name.
The origin was really accidental. When the first World’s Fair was to be held at the Crystal Palace in London, one of the attendant festivities was a great national gathering of British yachts in their favorite harbor, Cowes, at which, it was announced, foreign yachtsmen were to be welcome, especially Americans. In preparation for it, John C. Stevens, of Hoboken, then Commodore of the New York Yacht-Club, and some of his friends, ordered a new yacht from George Steers with which to cross the Atlantic and meet the English racers. This new boat, completed in the spring of 1851, and named America, was schooner-rigged, but had raking masts, no topsails except a small main gaff, and only one jib, whose foot was laced to a boom. Such was the style of the day; but later she was changed in rig so as to carry far more and bigger sails, more like those of a modern schooner-yacht.