2" 3' 5"
6. Launch. Between thwarts 3 ft. 1 in.
To carry 140 men. Double skin
diagonal. Teak. 42 11' 6" 4' 6"
7. Berthon collapsible boats weighing
7 cwt. for destroyers.

With the exception of the larger classes, viz. cutters, pinnaces and
launches, the V-shape of bottom is still preserved, which does not tend
to stability, and it is difficult to see why the smaller classes have
not followed the improvement made in their larger sisters.

Pleasure boats and racing.

Though the number and variety of sea-going boats is of much greater
importance, no account of boats in general would be complete without
reference to the development of pleasure craft upon rivers and inland
waters, especially in England, during the past century. There is a
legend, dating from Saxon times, which tells of King Edgar the Peaceable
being rowed on the Dee from his palace in Chester to the church of St
John, by eight kings, himself the ninth, steering this ancient 8-oar;
but not much is heard of rowing in England until 1453, when John Norman,
lord mayor of London, set the example of going by water to Westminster,
which, we are told, made him popular with the watermen of his day, as in
consequence the use of pleasure boats by the citizens became common.
Thus it was that the old Thames pleasure wherry, with its high bows and
low sharp stern and V-shaped section, and the old skiff came into vogue,
both of which have now given way to boats, mostly of clinker-build, but
with rounder bottoms and greater depth, safer and more comfortable to
row in.

In 1715 Thomas Doggett (q.v.) founded a race which is still rowed in
peculiar sculling boats, straked, and with sides flaring up to the sill
of the rowlock. Strutt tells us of a regatta in 1775 in which watermen
contended in pair-oared boats or skiffs.

At the beginning of the 19th century numerous rowing clubs flourished on
the upper tidal waters of the Thames, and we hear of four-oared races
from Westminster to Putney, and from Putney to Kew, in what we should
now consider large and heavy boats, clinker-built, with bluff entry.

Longer boats, 8-oars, and 10-oars, seem to have been existent at the end
of the 18th century. Eton certainly had one 10-oar, and three 8-oars,
and two 6-oars, before 1811. The record of 8-oar races at Oxford begins
in 1815, at Cambridge in 1827. Pair-oar and sculling races in lighter
boats seem to have come in soo