Steam has played sad havoc with the beauty of our naval and merchant vessels; but, though it has not spared our pleasure fleets, it has left untouched numerous graceful fabrics among the yachts of the country, and sail-power may survive for many years yet in the most beautiful form it has ever been moulded to by the genius of man. There is a story told of a butterfly alighting on the breast of a dying girl and taking wing at the very moment she expired, and soaring into the blue sky with the sunshine sparkling on its bright wings. I thought of this tale the other day when I spied the hulk of what appeared to have been a sailing frigate or an old East India merchantman towing up Channel. There was a strong, clear wind, and the water flashed like a prism, and I was gazing with interest at the poor old dismasted hulk when a fine schooner yacht, beating to the eastward, swirled up under her stern. A noble sight was that pleasure vessel. Her lee rail was almost flush with the foam which swept like a storm of snow under the gleaming milk-white curve of her lower cloths; to windward her sheathing was hove high, and the yellow metal glittered like new gold as it glanced through the network of spray and the shining emerald-green fibres of water which leapt about her glossy sides. She might have been the very spirit of the old dismantled sailing ship, leaping into bright and beautiful being as the most exquisite and the completest expression of marine grace. It would have gratified the most morose sailor to see her. Here was a sight to comfort Jack for the loss of the noble sailing ships of his younger days. The grand piles of canvas, the little skysails topping the swelling pyramids, the magnificent sweep of jibbooms bearing their marble-coloured cloths in layers like a heap of clouds, the ringing minstrelsy of the wind among the taut hemp that resembles a spider’s web as you look at it against the sky of the horizon—these things are gone, or fast going; the ocean will soon be bare of them, and the star-like shine of sails upon the sea-line smothered by the long black coils of furnace smoke. But while such yachts as that whose flashing progress I watched remain afloat the sea will still possess her English beauties.

It is the owners of such vessels who are perpetuating all that is fair, all that is memorable, of the traditions of our English ship-building yards. The survival is a very fit one. It seems proper, indeed, that the stateliness and elegance of the sailing vessel should come into the keeping of men to whom the deep is its own exceeding great reward—as poetry was to Coleridge—who traverse it for love only of its caressing waters and the glorious life of its noble expanse, and who make it the framework for marine pictures into whose idealization enters all that money, fine taste, and devotion to what is beautiful and harmonious can furnish.

Surely to those who love her for herself the sea is a bountiful and great-hearted mother. The fascination the ocean exercises over the mind cannot be expressed in language; and happy is the man who, yielding to her spell, counts himself one of her sons as a yachtsman. Mercantile Jack may profess to despise such seafaring as a fresh-water job; but, nevertheless, let him own that he envies the sand-white decks, the snug forecastle, the easy life, the glorious runs under blue skies and over tumbling and silver-bright waters. No other form of “sailorizing” yields so much unalloyed pleasure. Privacy is the first grand privilege. You will get that in your yacht, but you will get it aboard no other kind of ship which ever I have heard of. No amount of passage-money will save you from worry and companionship you may not be in the humour to enjoy on board the finest passenger vessel. It is hotel-life: you are a number; you have luggage; you are making the voyage for a direct object; in short, you have a destination, and the having a destination makes one of the main differences between yachting and going to sea in any other way.

A yacht is a man’s home. He need never be in a hurry. Like Jefferson in “Rip Van Winkle,” he lives about in spots. He may leave a good deal to his skipper, but he is always master; he owns the craft which others steer, and never a humour can come into his head which he may not indulge without having anybody to argue with him. It is a fine thing to be lord of the sea in this fashion. A captain of a big ship is a great man, but he is a sort of a slave also. His business is to make haste, and obstacles vex his soul. The patent log that he tows astern typifies the condition of his mind. A head sea is an affliction, and most of the wonders of the deep are great nuisances to him. He wants to sight nothing. He objects to excitements and adventures. All that he prays for is fine weather and so many nautical miles a day. These are the penalties of having a destination.

The bliss of yachting lies in the having to go nowhere in particular, and one port being as good as another. If you can’t weather a point, then there is nothing to do but put your helm up and come back again. The barometer seldom tells lies, and one of its safe readings, which makes yachting so delightful, is “Keep the harbours aboard.” That certainly may always be done in the English Channel, and not for this reason only does one cease to wonder that it should be the most popular of all yachting waters. Much has been written about yachting in the Scotch lakes and northward among the isles. Such cruising might suit a man who is easily sea-sick, and who is never so comfortable as when his tow-rope is aboard a tug. But the yachtsman who has the instincts of a seaman will choose the wide waters of the English Channel, pushing away to the westward until the Atlantic swell is under his forefoot and his white sails mirrored in water as blue as the heavens. The Channel is a sea of itself, and most of the changes of the sea may be felt and enjoyed on its breast. Here you will get breezes which toss a yacht prettily enough, and the calms are made beautiful and soothing by the gentle swell that runs out of the vague horizon, and keep the water flashing and fading under the sun. Once to the westward of the North Foreland, there is no finer space of water for yachting, and nowhere more beautiful shores and nobler coast scenery. It is a great maritime highway, too, always full of ships, and so crowded with marine interests that the yachtsman is never weary of looking over the side of his vessel. Given a strong and sweeping wind from the southward of east, with the sharp blue sky which that sort of breeze makes; and let the sun still be soaring, and the atmosphere so transparent that the coast stands along like a photograph; and let your mainsheet be eased, and the white heights of the North Foreland on your starboard quarter, the whole of the grand old Channel is under your bowsprit. Though there be no cups to win, there shall be a hundred races to run as you go; and, keeping to leeward of the Goodwins, every jump of the yacht unrolls a glistening length of white, and green, and brown, and golden shore.

Indeed, there is not a little sport to be got out of the unpremeditated races of yachting. I remember once coming up Channel, homeward bound, in a fine clipper ship. We had the wind abeam, and fore-topmast studding-sail out, and we went ahead of everything like a roll of smoke, until, coming abreast of the Isle of Wight, a powerful yawl—as superb a yacht as ever I saw—came frothing and buzzing along, with her main boom almost amidships, and Dunnose like a blue shadow over her stern. She ratched like a phantom to windward of us, and then, settling herself upon our weather quarter, starboarded her helm, eased away her sheets fore and aft, and overhauled us as if she had a mind to tow us. She was in a smother of foam. It must have been up to a man’s knees in the lee scuppers. She showed us the whole of her deck—a lady sitting in the companion, coolly ogling us through a binocular glass; three or four yachtsmen aft, squatting under the weather rail. But the view she offered was not prolonged. She forged ahead of us like a “bonito,” and in a couple of hours was a small leaning white pillar upon the horizon dead over our bows.

These are the unpremeditated matches I mean, and I have known some of them to be run with as wild a desire for triumph as ever a regular yacht-race kindled. They used to make one of the heartiest pleasures of yachting; but nowadays where is the foeman worthy of the steel of the slashing yawls, and cutters, and schooners? Nearly everything that floats goes by steam, and for a yacht to race a steamer would be as sensible as to make up a Derby of locomotives and thoroughbreds. Yet those crank racers, with their enormous spread of cloths—though they be things of beauty—are certainly not a joy to everybody. They are very proper to take prizes, but those who love the sea most wisely will least envy the privileges of the owners of such craft. Sailing with your mast at an angle of fifty degrees, half the mainsail dark with water, the froth hissing and seething and bubbling up to the lee side of the skylights, all hands holding on to windward and wondering what’s going to happen next, may be exhilarating to some souls, but it is a mad sort of yachting. These crank and nimble spinners give you no chance of looking about. They are a fine sight to watch. I know nothing more exciting to witness than a great narrow-waisted yawl, almost on her beam ends, hurling through an ocean of foam, jumping the seas until half her keel is out of water, then burying her bows in the storm of froth as if she were about to dive out of sight, her metal to windward looking like a sheet of polished gold, with the sunshine sparkling in the wet of it. But to be aboard! Decks that one can walk on may be an unsailorly prejudice, yet they are comfortable; and the obligation to stick to windward and to hold on with clenched teeth grows tedious and even fatiguing if too long imposed.

But the word yacht is a generic term, and comprises many different kinds of vessels. The middle kind between the knife-like racer and the motherly, lubberly tub, is the best for those who go down to the sea in pleasure vessels, not to do business, but to enjoy the freshness and wonder and beauty of the ocean. There are scores of them afloat, superbly modelled craft, whose lines would have made the old Baltimore clipper-builders green with envy. I will name no names, but will think of a yacht I have seen—a schooner, near about 150 tons by yacht measurement, with magnificent spars exquisitely stayed, a bow bold about the figurehead, but fining away with delicate keenness at the forefoot, with such a swell of the side as promises stability in a gale of wind, but arching thence to the keel in a conformation so tenderly sinuous and beautifully clean that a sailor would want to know no more to enter her in his mind as one of the fastest vessels of her class. This she is, but she gives you a beam as well as speed. There is plenty of room to walk about her decks; there is no fear of falling down the forehatch for want of a gangway to get into the eyes of her; the coils of her running-gear are never in the road. Is there anything more tenderly beautiful than a vessel of this kind slightly leaning under her cotton-white cloths, her polished and swelling heights of canvas softly shaded at the leeches, the brass-work on her deck full of blinding crimson stars which wink like bursts of fire from the mouths of cannon watched from a distance, as the lift of the swell veers the brilliant metal in and out of the sphere of the sun, whilst a line of froth streams past her like a shower of silver dust upon the sea, and the gentle moaning of water at the stem mingles with the vibratory humming of the wind in the vessel. This is the sort of vessel in which a man can take his ease and enjoy all that the sea has to offer. And this, too, is your ship for Channel cruising. She would carry you round the world if you had the mind to try her. She’ll creep into the wind’s eye with the luff of her foresail blowing to windward, not shivering, but standing out full of wind that way, whilst the after half is drawing and doing its work. I know her to be a typical boat, and that is why I describe her. Whilst such craft as she remain afloat, the grace of the sailing vessel in its most beauteous form survives, and steam may be defied to demolish a lingering but most noble marine ideal realized.

Owners of yachts do not all take the same view of the delightful pastime. Between the yachtsman who never seems so happy as when he is out of soundings, and those sailors who creep from port to port, and take a three weeks’ spell of rest in every harbour they succeed in making, there is a prodigious stretch, filled up by a surprising variety of tastes. But the harbour-haunting yachtsman grows rare. His excursions to sea, even out of sight of land, are every year more frequent. He learns to hear a music in the wind that’s piping merrily, and the threat of lightning in the horned moon ceases to scare him. This is as it should be. Yachting is surely but a sorry entertainment when warps hold your vessel against a stone or wooden pier, and no livelier recreation offers than bobbing for flounders in the mud at the bottom of the water alongside. Our English summers are not very long, and there is much to be seen, much to inspirit the mind, much to invigorate the body. The warm and brightly-coloured sea, for many a league enriched with verdant and dazzling and tender stretches of coast scenery, courts the fortunate yachtsman with promises which it never breaks. It is not racing only, it is not sailing only; it is the calm day sleeping under the rich azure heaven; the water a breathless surface of molten glass, shadowed here and there where the shallow soundings are; the horizon streaked with floating wreaths of vapour or darkened by the blueish smoke of a long-vanished steamer; the coastline some miles away swimming in the haze of heat, and the water in the south blending with the flood of light which the sun flashes into it. Here and there is a motionless smack, with her reddish sail reflected without a tremor under her; or a distant ship whose white canvas seems to be melting upon the faint light blue over the horizon. Or it is the summer night, with a flood of moonlight shivering the ripples, whilst on either hand the sea stretches away in solemn darkness touched faintly in places by the lustre of the glorious planets unpaled by the moonshine. A soft breeze murmurs over the water, and keeps the spectral canvas on high sleeping, and a narrow wake goes away astern into the darkness, with fitful flashes of phosphorus in the circling eddies, in the run of the ripples as they break near the silent hull.

Small wonder, indeed, that the sea should court men as it does, and fascinate them too. Happy the man who can take the pleasure it yields as a yachtsman, and in his own beautiful vessel can traverse its glorious waters as idly, and freely, and gaily as the wind that impels him.