2 - Restoration Yachting and Its Purposes

Summary

Charles II introduced yachting into this country and the sport was taken up by a few high prestige individuals outside the Royal family, such as Sir William Petty and Roger North.

Charles II and His Yachts

Up to the end of the eighteenth century, the word ‘yacht’ had much wider definitions than being only a leisure craft. As early as 1599, an Antwerp dictionary defined ‘jaght schip’ or ‘jaght’ as ‘a swift, light vessel of war, commerce or pleasure’. This definition reflected the use by the Dutch of yachts for transport and business on Holland's shallow lakes and inland seas. These uses of yachts were introduced into England by Charles II in the middle of the seventeenth century.

In 1646, when his father was losing the Civil War, his son, the future Charles II, fled from Falmouth to the Scillies, and thence to Jersey. He passed the time learning to sail in these locations and, in the summer of 1646, had a boat built at St Malo, borrowing the money from the Governor of Jersey. He then left for France where his mother was living. In 1648, he moved to the Hague, Holland.

As already mentioned, yachts had an important place in Dutch political and economic activity. Heaton wrote:

The Dutch did not race their yachts, but by the seventeenth century they were using them for many other purposes. There were yachts employed on Government business; passenger-carrying yachts; Admiralty yachts in the service of the Navy; dispatch yachts and many privately owned yachts, magnificently painted, sporting lofty sterns and high bowsprits, belonging to the wealthy citizens of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and other towns.

For the Dutch, by the middle of the seventeenth century ‘a yacht was a normal possession of a person of wealth and rank’, an ostentatious way of demonstrating that status, but also ‘an essential of life in a country where water was always nearby’.

We are indebted to the contemporary diarists, John Evelyn (1620–1706), and, especially, his lifelong friend Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) for much of our information about Charles’ yachts. Sadly, Pepys, usefully positioned as Secretary to the Naval Board, only kept his diary for nine years (1660–1669), before, fearing he was going blind, taking his doctor's advice to stop his record.