Not the traditional sail canoe
Two quite different things are called sailing canoes. One is the sail-equipped canoe of traditional cultures in the Pacific, Africa and the Americas, which has its own history and belongs to a separate article. The other is the European and North American sailing canoe of the nineteenth century, a decked, lightly built boat that grew out of recreational paddling. This article is about the second.
MacGregor and the Rob Roy
The story is usually started with John MacGregor, a Scottish barrister and writer. In 1865 he had a small decked boat built, which he named the Rob Roy, after the Scottish folk hero, and set off to paddle and sail through the waterways of Europe. He described the trip in a book, A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe, published in 1866, and it sold widely. A small sail was part of his equipment, and he treated it as an aid for a paddler rather than the point of the boat.
MacGregor’s craft was called a canoe, but it differed from the open birchbark and dugout types of the Americas. It had a deck and a cockpit, was light enough to be carried, and could be paddled with a double-bladed paddle. In its design it had features in common with the kayak, and it is a reminder that nineteenth-century terms were not applied consistently.
The Royal Canoe Club
Enthusiasm for the new boats spread quickly. A canoe club was set up in London in 1866, with MacGregor among its founders and the Prince of Wales taking an interest in it, and it later became known as the Royal Canoe Club. The club organised cruises, meetings and races, and its members tried out different designs. Similar clubs formed elsewhere in Britain and in North America. The American Canoe Association was founded in 1880, and meets in the United States and Canada brought together paddlers and sailors.
From paddling to sailing
As the sport developed, many canoeists became more interested in sailing than in paddling. Designers modified canoes for larger sail plans, which called for stronger decks, centreboards or daggerboards to prevent sideways drift, and rudders. Rigs of the period commonly used lug and lateen sails, sometimes with two masts, and sail areas grew larger in relation to the hull. Names that appear in accounts of the period include Warington Baden-Powell, who designed and sailed canoes such as the Nautilus, and the builders who supplied clubs in Britain and North America. It would be unwise to credit any single person with the sailing canoe as a type, since several designers explored similar ideas at about the same time.
A distinctive feature was the way the crew managed the boat. A narrow canoe sailing under a large rig is easily capsized unless the crew shifts weight to windward. Canoeists used hiking boards and sliding seats, so that the sailor could lean far out over the side. These devices later appeared on other small racing boats, and the link with dinghy class racing is sometimes noted by historians of the sport.
Racing canoes
Racing quickly became a major part of canoe sailing. By the 1880s and 1890s there were contests between British and American canoeists, and regattas where classes were defined by length, sail area and other rules. The competitors were often skilled amateurs who built or modified their own boats, and rules and designs changed as people tried to get an edge. Some boats became extreme in their ability to carry large amounts of sail, and the sport was not without capsizes and arguments over the rules.
This led to the creation of agreed class rules. The International Canoe class, a one-person boat with a large sail area, a sliding seat and a narrow hull, developed from this tradition and is still sailed in the twenty-first century. It is a descendant of the Victorian boats, even if the materials and details are very different.
Decline and legacy
The popularity of the decked sailing canoe faded as other forms of small-boat sailing took over. Dinghies built for wider use, which were roomier and easier to handle, attracted more sailors, and the paddling canoe went in a different direction as a touring and sporting boat, as the wider history of the canoe describes. Yet the Victorian canoe left several legacies: the recreational club, the idea of the small boat as a vehicle for adventure and the techniques of crew weight used to control a boat.
The most direct descendants are specialised racing canoes, some small-boat rigs and, in a looser sense, the sailing kayak, which borrowed from the same sources.