Since 'Mosquito' astonished the yachting world in 1848, until to-day when 'Navahoe' and other American racing yachts have been constructed of metal, iron and steel yachts have been more or less successful; but the difficulty of keeping a smooth and perfectly clean bottom is a considerable source of expense and worry, although the immense strength of the steel shell, and in a large yacht its lightness, will always be a set-off to the trouble of the uncoppered bottom.
[Illustration: 'Lethe,' 163 tons. Built for S. C. Watson, Esq.--Midship section.]
In a lecture on 'Progress in Yachting and Yacht-building,' which I delivered early in 1881, in a fanciful specification of the yacht for the season 2000, I required that the plating below water should be of manganese bronze. Curiously enough, a few years later saw an attempt to combine the strength of steel and the smoothness, anti-fouling, and non-corrosive properties of copper, in the building of a torpedo-boat of this material; while this year the chosen defender of the America Cup has been plated with a similar bronze on a steel frame, the builders claiming, and not without reason, that the additional smoothness of bottom gives her an advantage of five to seven minutes on a forty-mile course. But such a practice seems hardly likely to become general for ordinary racing yachts built for men with a normal depth of pocket, and whilst, as in the old Mississippi steamboat days, it sometimes paid to burn hams, most of us have to try and get along with good coal.
I was going to build the topsides, frames, and beams of my ideal vessel of aluminium, and the other day a small yacht has been built, on the Continent, of this lightest of metals; but the present cost of this material, and, as yet, its unreliability, place it, for the present at least, outside the range of practical material for yacht-building. There seems more hope for some of the very beautiful and immensely strong alloys of aluminium, but they too are expensive, and also heavy. It may be some years before the complete realisation of my design is accomplished, and platinum is substituted for lead as ballast, though when syndicates of millionaires start yacht-building there seems very little limit to extravagance in construction.