Page:The history of yachting.djvu/17

 T 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. Material has frequently been found in unexpected places; while, on the other hand.