The yawl before the yacht
Yawls existed as working boats long before pleasure sailing became popular. Small fishing and beach craft on the coasts of eastern England, for instance, used the name, and a yawl was also a type of ship’s boat. This article is about something narrower: the yawl as a yacht in the nineteenth century, when racing and cruising took off in Britain and the United States.
By the later part of that century, a yawl in yachting usually meant a vessel with a main mast and a much smaller mizzen stepped behind the rudder post. In structure it looked like a cutter or sloop with a small extra mast and sail attached at the stern.
The setting: Victorian yachting
Organised yacht racing was growing from the early nineteenth century. In Britain, the Royal Yacht Squadron was founded in 1815, initially as the Yacht Club, and received its royal title later. In the United States, the New York Yacht Club was formed in 1844. Clubs held regattas, set up rules, and recorded the results, and a social world grew up around them.
Different rigs competed in these races. Cutters, which were favoured by many British owners, had a large mainsail and a long bowsprit. Schooners were popular in the United States and for larger yachts. Yawls and ketches appeared in the mixed fleets, particularly among cruising yachts and in handicap classes. For the broader picture of yachting in this period, see yacht history.
Rating rules and the mizzen
A great deal of nineteenth-century yacht design was shaped by how boats were measured. British rules were based on tonnage, calculated from the dimensions of the hull, mainly its length and beam. Because these formulas did not directly measure sail area, a designer could pile on canvas without altering the number used for racing. Owners in the middle of the century tended to build narrow, deep hulls with big rigs, and it is generally agreed that the tonnage formula encouraged this.
Within such a system, a yawl offered a flexible way of adding sail. A mizzen was a modest addition that sat at the end of the boat, and a sail like a mizzen topsail or a mizzen staysail could be carried at little cost under the rules. Other considerations were practical. A divided rig gave smaller sails for a crew to handle, and the mizzen could be a help in balancing the boat or in keeping her steady at anchor. Ocean-racing rules of the following century treated the mizzen differently.
It would be wrong to claim that yawls dominated top-class racing. Cutters and schooners were generally the principal winners in the major classes, and yawls tended to appear in the middle of the fleet and in cruising classes. Their strength was versatility: a yacht rigged as a yawl was often seen as a sensible all-rounder.
The Atlantic dimension
Developments on the two sides of the Atlantic were intertwined. After the schooner America sailed to England in 1851, the American yachts that followed raced British ones in contests which attracted wide public attention. Schooners remained popular for large cruising and ocean-going yachts. Yawls and sloops were commonly used for the smaller classes and for cruising along the coasts.
In the United States, centreboard sloops became strongly associated with the sandy, shallow waters of the East Coast, and yawls were more often found among cruising yachts, and among craft intended for deeper water. In Britain, the many rivers, estuaries and tidal waters encouraged a wide variety of small yachts, and the yawl rig was one of those used by the amateur sailors who took to them. Ideas flowed back and forth, helped by the yachting press and by designers who exchanged lines.
Changes late in the century
By the 1880s and 1890s, yacht design was changing. New measurement rules aimed to take sail area into account, and with them came the “fin-keel” and “plank-on-edge” debates. These controversies affected the shapes of hulls more than the choice of rig, but the effect was that rigs also shifted. Large cutters with long gaffs and bowsprits dominated big-class racing, while the yawl remained a favourite among sensible cruising owners.
Several developments in the following decades reduced the popularity of the rig in racing:
- Sloops and cutters with tall, efficient sails performed better to windward.
- The effort required to look after a second mast seemed less justified as designs became lighter and more refined.
- Rating systems adjusted the treatment of sail area to reduce loopholes.
The yawl did not vanish, however. It continued in cruising yachts and in some celebrated ocean racers of the twentieth century.
What the nineteenth-century yawl tells us
The yawl yacht shows how a rig can become fashionable through a mix of rules, social habits and practical convenience, not only through outright speed. It also shows that nineteenth-century yachting was not a single tradition, but several overlapping ones in which sailors chose the rig that suited their waters and their crews.