4 - The Development of Yachting in the Eighteenth Century Part Two: Yachting in Boom Time London

Summary

The Start of the Industrial Revolution and Yachting's First Golden Period

Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones (1749) sailed from London to Lisbon, in the vain hope of a cure for his jaundice and dropsy. As his ship sailed down the Thames in August 1754, he recorded in his journal:

When we have passed Greenwich we saw only two or three gentlemen's houses, all of them of very moderate account, till we reached Gravesend …

And here I cannot pass by another observation on the deplorable want of taste in our enjoyments, which we shew by almost totally neglecting the pursuit of what seems to me the highest degree of amusement; this is, the sailing ourselves in little vessels of our own, contrived only for our ease and accommodation, to which such situations of our villas as I have recommended would be so convenient and even necessary.

Fielding was proposing a greater take-up of yachting. He also wanted a greater, more ostentatious display of wealth along England's most important trading river, the symbol of English greatness and history. He may well have had in mind how Capability Brown (1716–1783), the great landscape gardener, was defining how a country mansion and its parkland should look. So, Fielding imagines vistas of Georgian mansions along the lower Thames, with the owners’ yachts lying alongside their private quays. This was certainly happening to some extent, since an engraving of 1751 shows Mr Baptist May's yacht under sail in front of his house.

Within a few years, Fielding's aspirations were to come true. Britain and her allies won the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), which resulted in France losing most of her colonies. The war ended with the thirteen British colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America and the British possessions in India secure; and with Canada, Florida and many Caribbean islands acquired. Britain was now the leading maritime power in the world, thus fulfilling what Thomas Arne and James Thomson had seen as the national destiny when they penned their ode ‘Rule Britannia’ in 1740: ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves’.