Excerpt from The History of Yachting At first sight it seems singular that no history of the origin and early development of yachts and yachting has ever been written. A little reflection, however, will convince one of the amount of labor necessarily involved in such an undertaking. And had I been able to foresee the difficulties before me, it is doubtful whether this task would have been begun. But once undertaken, it became most interesting; and as the libraries, museums, and old print-shops of Holland, Great Britain, and the United States, little by little, yielded their treasures, forming links here and there - with many fathoms of space between - it became a matter of unbounded pleasure to discover these old links - rusty though they were - and forge them into a chain as complete as historical chains usually are. The researches, of which this book is a portion of the harvest, were begun many years ago, before any indication of the present popular interest in yachting had been felt. My labors, I may add, have been two-fold: first, to collect all data relating to the subject; also, so far as possible, the contemporary portraits of the yachts to which the data refer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.