This celebration of the finest work of the Beken family of Cowes contains the best images taken from an archive of more than 75,000 black and white plates and prints. All the photographs are superb examples of the family's visual inventiveness, their love of the sea and of the ships that sail on it. The ships captured in the pages of this book range from square-riggers to fast racing yachts, from Whitbread round-the-world racers to America's Cup contenders. The images also constitute a fascinating historical record of the changing face of yachting. Here are the first female racers in their long dresses and straw boaters and the crews of forty or more that were needed to man the most heavily-rigged vessels. A Hundred Years of Sail is one of the loveliest books on sailing ships ever created and a wonderful record of more than a century of racing yachts.