By this time, however, there was peace on the North Atlantic, and many a good seaman was free to turn his attention to enjoying and improving the tools of his profession. By this time, also, the Americans had made great headway as ship-builders and seamen, and by rivalry with the Old World for trade, and by experience in the Newfoundland fisheries and the West Indies fruit-trade, had acquired a skill in building and rigging ships that astonished the world by their speed and weatherly qualities. It was natural that these ideas should influence pleasure craft on this side of the water, as Great Britain’s long sea-struggles had influenced its sailors; and when, in 1844, the New York Yacht-Club was founded, the conditions were favorable for beginning that home development of yachting as a sport which was soon to place the Americans and Canadians among the leading yachting peoples of the world, and to lead to those international tests of speed that nowadays excite so wide-spread and intense an interest. [Illustration: “AMERICA” (AS ORIGINALLY RIGGED) AND “MARIA.”] The great preponderance in numbers and value of pleasure-vessels in the United States, and in the number of clubs and club-members, is due not only to our large population and long coast-line, but to the great extent of inland waters furnished by our rivers and interior lakes, and to the prevalence of bays or protected lagoons, such as Narragansett Bay, the Great South Bay of Long Island, New York harbor, Delaware and Chesapeake bays, and the long series of “sounds” that border the southern Atlantic coast from Barnegat to Biscayne. The Great Lakes are bordered by yacht-clubs on both sides, and furnish space and weather for quite as serious work as tries the skill of ocean navigators, while a hundred smaller lakes make fine pleasure-waters and excellent training-grounds for fresh-water sailors. Though the first regatta in America was sailed in 1845, little over half a century ago, the evolution of American yachts began with the building of the sloop _Maria_ by Robert L. Stevens, one of that family of remarkable inventors, who had already devised the first practical screw-steamer, and afterward created the _Monitor_. Her model, as we learn from an excellent article in “The Century” for July, 1882, by S. G. W. Benjamin, was suggested by the low, broad, almost flat-bottomed sloops employed to steal over the shallows of the Hudson and the Sound—vessels depending upon beam rather than on ballast for stability, and imitated by many of our coasters, which are so stiff that they sometimes make outside voyages without either cargo or ballast; but the _Maria_ had a long, sharp, hollowed bow, whence she expanded aft, with little taper at the stern, so that her deck-plan was that of an elongated flat-iron. The principal novelty about her, however, was the use of two “center-boards.”