Newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. knew how to use his yachts for business as well as for pleasure, and especially for promoting himself and his Paris and New York Herolds. His most dramatic maritime stunt was to bankroll a probe of the Arctic by the yacht Jeonnette.
Bennett purchased the steam yacht in 1877 and promptly donated her—along with funds for a crew of 33—to the United States Navy as an exploration vessel. After voyaging around the Horn to San Francisco, Jeonnette set sail for the edge of the Arctic ice pack on July 8, 1879; from there the exploration party was to go overland to the Pole. The New York Herold periodically reported sightings of the yacht as she made her way through Bering Strait. In early September she was seen near an island north of Siberia. Thereafter, nothing was heard of her for more than two years.
As it turned out, Jeonnette became locked in Siberian ice just four days after the last sighting, and she remained embedded for 21 months. On June 13, 1881, she sank after cracking apart, and the crew set out over the ice pack for the mainland some 600 miles away. Eight men drowned en route and 12 died of exposure before the refugees could make their way home, not by ship but overland through Russia. The Herold, more dutifully than pridefully, reported the disaster. But Bennett himself remained uncharacteristically silent, even during a subsequent Navy inquiry.
As caricatured by the mogazine Vanity Fair, a dapper James Cardan Bennett Jr. reposes an o trunk labeled with the parts afcoll ojhis aceangoing yachts.
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With /eannelle encosed in the ice. her crew members explore the surrounding floes. To ougment their supplies, they hunted polor beors, seols ond wolrus.
Departure of the Steamer Jeannette from San Francisco
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Bennett publicized Jeonnette's deporture in huge heodlines. cloiming thot 10,000 Son Franciscans swarmed to watch her departure/or the Arctic.
Her maiden voyage were occupied by the family physician and a chaplain and their wives. Vanderbilt’s captain was a clipper-ship veteran, Asa Eldridge (who also brought his wife). Many of the members of the crew were volunteers from New York’s wealthy families, eager to take part in the adventure. Deep in North Star’s hull was a gang of professional coal stokers. Their reaction to the yacht’s magnificence was not much to Vanderbilt’s liking, however; an hour before time for departure they struck for higher wages.
Vanderbilt fired all of them on the spot, and instructed Captain Eldridge to comb the waterfront for anyone who could wield a shovel. Eldridge succeeded in recruiting a new engine-room crew, and on May 19, North Star dropped her lines from her East River pier. Her paddle wheels churned and she went thunking into the harbor, where she promptly ran aground.
A passing steamer helped haul her off, and the yacht was towed to a navy yard for repairs. Soon she was moving grandly down New York Harbor again, then out into the Atlantic, bound for England. Day after day, with or without wind, she moved steadily northeastward, averaging 13 knots and burning 42 tons of coal every 24 hours. The chaplain, John Choules, kept a journal, obsequiously praising Vanderbilt’s “fine tact” and “dignified self-control.” An incident Choules omitted, however, occurred one evening when Vanderbilt offered his son William $10,000 if he would quit smoking. “Oh, father,” his son replied, “you don’t have to bribe me. Your wish is enough.” The Commodore responded by blowing a mouthful of cigar smoke into his son’s face.
For 11 days North Star’s passengers promenaded the yacht’s spacious decks, dined grandly and gathered after dinner in the main saloon while the ladies serenaded them and the chaplain led them in prayers, to the accompaniment of the rhythmic swish of the tireless paddle wheels. On June 1, North Star passed between the shores of England’s south coast and the cliffs of the Isle of Wight—and ran aground in the Solent.
A rising tide freed her, however, and she swept into Southampton to be greeted by cheering crowds. Like Crowninshield, Vanderbilt welcomed the thousands who swarmed aboard to marvel at the yacht. The city fathers entertained him at a banquet, and the Commodore responded by inviting 400 officials and merchants aboard the yacht for a sail around the Isle of Wight. The excursion ended with Vanderbilts and guests waltzing on North Star’s deck, and the departing Britons raising three cheers for their host.
But, again like Crowninshield, Vanderbilt failed to attract any of Britain’s royalty aboard his yacht. Some of the press compared him to the Medicis; the royal family, however, evidently was sensitive to the point that one newspaper voiced politely but patronizingly: Praising the Commodore as a self-made man, the editor suggested that “it is time that porvenu should be looked on as a word of honor.”
Vanderbilt’s ego was finally assuaged when, after a short call at Copenhagen, North Star put into Kronstadt, Russia. The Grand Duke Constantine, High Admiral of the Russian Navy, came aboard, accompanied by numerous admirals. To the Commodore’s delight, the Grand Duke was so impressed by the yacht that he asked permission to have some of
A si/ver trophy donated to the Neiv York Yacht Club by James Gordon Bennett Jr. is adorned ivith steam yachts and mermaids. /lihough the club sponsored a few races /or steam yachts, contests/or sailing yachts remained the chief sporting/are.
His officers study and sketch her. While Russian engineers and artists swarmed through the vessel, Vanderbilt visited The Hermitage in St. Petersburg. North Star had scarcely set out again across the Baltic when Czar Alexander ordered a steam yacht of his own.
For Vanderbilt the remainder of North Star’s cruise was something of an anticlimax, marred also by tragedy: In the Bay of Biscay, en route to the Mediterranean, a quartermaster named Robert Flint, one of the well-bred young volunteers, fell overboard and drowned. Two weeks later, off Leghorn, the voyagers were forcibly reminded of Italy’s war of unification when gunboats suddenly came out to surround the yacht. It developed that the local authorities had become alarmed at the sight of the large vessel looming offshore, and suspected North Star of ferrying revolutionaries to attack Italy’s Austrian rulers. “Austrian imagination," wrote Choules, “could not conceive of such a ship being the ocean home of a private American merchant.”
By this time the American merchant was getting restless. It did not help matters when North Star's papers turned out not to include sufficient documentation to satisfy the suspicious port officers at Civitavecchia and Naples, with the result that no one was allowed to go ashore. Vanderbilt went on to Malta, but did not stay there long enough even to accept the British Governor’s invitation to a reception. The summer was waning. Vanderbilt had been away from his office for more than three months. After making a quick stop at Constantinople, North Star turned toward the west.
Cibraltar, Tangier and Madeira were touched only briefly on the way home. And on September 23, 1853, North Star raced into New York Harbor without even waiting to pick up a pilot. Back in the business world, Vanderbilt quickly saw that two of his partners had double-crossed him during his absence by forming their own shipping line to Nicaragua. He declared his intentions in a terse note: “Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. G. V.”
Vanderbilt dissolved the partnership. Deciding that he had had enough yachting, he cannily sold North Star to the new line. Then, using his influence with the Gentral American governments, he strangled his former partners’ line and put them out of business.
Vanderbilt plunged back into his own multifaceted business for the rest of his life and never went cruising again. When he died in 1877, he was worth more than $100 million.
Cornelius Vanderbilt had done his part to popularize the steam yacht. And the Civil War speeded up the development of the steam vessel. In fact, when the members of the New York Yacht Club voted at the outbreak of the War to volunteer their sailing yachts for naval service, only two were accepted—an indication of the increasing importance of steam. By 1870 the New York Yacht Club had four steam yachts in its fleet; by 1880 the number had risen to 20; by 1890 there were 71.
One of the most ardent proponents of steam was James Cordon Bennett Jr. It was no easy task to outdo Cornelius Vanderbilt in seagoing luxury, but Bennett succeeded.
On (he foredeck of James Gordon Bennett Jr.'s Numouna, Qivnings protect the passengers from the Adriatic sun while the yacht cruises off Venice in 1890. Bennett, in three-piece suit and straw boater (left), talks to one of his many lady guests.
Bennett’s father was an austere Scot who had made his fortune in a most unlikely way: He published a scandal-mongering newspaper, the New York Herald. He was a pariah to New York’s social elite and once said that “American society consists of the people who don’t invite me to their parties.” His son was more acceptable. Handsome, bright, rich and daring, he exuded charm. He became a member of the New York Yacht Club at 16, and in the course of his colorful yachting career he would be twice elected commodore.
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He started in schooners. His Henrietta—a swift vessel rated at 158 tons—was one of the two sailing yachts accepted by the Union Navy. Young Bennett himself was commissioned a lieutenant in the revenue cutter service (in return, it was said, for his father’s support for the Union cause in the editorial pages of the Herald). The new lieutenant offered so much unsolicited advice to his superior officers, however, that his resignation was accepted after a few months. His doting father gave him a job at the Herald, a large allowance and, a year after the end of the War, the paper itself.
Bennett Jr. proved to be as dynamic a newspaper publisher as his father was, making the Herald—and, not incidentally, himself—world-famous for such exploits as sending journalist Henry M. Stanley into Africa to find missionary David Livingstone (who did not consider himself lost). In 1882 he built the 227-foot Nomouna for $200,000. Her massive boilers, supplemented by the sails on her three masts, could speed her at 14 knots on the frequent transatlantic runs between Bennett’s offices in New York and those of another Herald that he established in Paris. Namouna was an English mansion afloat, with cabins and staterooms paneled in oak, maple, cherry, chestnut and teak. Bennett’s huge cherrywood bed alone cost $1,000. The yacht’s staterooms were positioned toward the bow—a reversal of sailing-yacht practice but a sensible arrangement in a steamer, since the funnels often coated the afterdeck with soot. Some of the bathrooms showed still further design innovation: a tub sunk beneath a trap door, providing more floor area. The yacht was jammed with expensive clutter, like every Victorian parlor; inNamouna’s case, there were Oriental rugs, plush furniture and an elaborate mantelpiece in the main saloon hung with figurines, plates, a sword and—evidently Bennett’s evocative contribution—a human skull of unknown origin.
Fifty officers and men staffed Nomouna. Upkeep and the salaries of the crew cost Bennett $48,000 a year and, with Namouno’s appetite for coal, helped run her annual overall expense up to $150,000. But Bennett made extensive use of the yacht—to the rue of some of his associates. Members of the Herald’s staff, who were frequently summoned aboard, gave Nomouna the nickname Pneumonia, unaccustomed as they evidently were to life at sea. Bennett could be mischievously eccentric. He particularly hated playing cards. At his orders, the crew’s and his visitors’ baggage was gone through for such contraband. His retaliation when he discovered a pack of cards was ingenious: He tore up the four aces and then returned the pack to the unsuspecting victim’s luggage.
Considering Bennett’s predilection for entertaining female guests aboard his yachts, it seems odd that he named his next one after Lysis-
Trata, the ancient Greek heroine who—as recounted by the playwright Aristophanes—led a boycott of marital relations that persuaded Athens’ fighting men to end the Second Peloponnesian War. Bennett’s Lysistroto was a proud beauty. The ultimate for her time, she was unmatched for personal appointments by anything in the United States or Europe. She was designed and built abroad—conceived by Britain’s preeminent yacht architect, George Watson, and constructed in Dumbarton, Scotland, in 1900. She was 314 feet long and cost more than $600,000, a nearly unheard-of sum even in the splendid age of palatial steam yachts. Lysistroto had huge reception rooms and cabins for dozens of guests. There were so many staterooms that Bennett could reserve for himself a suite on each of the three decks. Among Lysistrota’s amenities were a Turkish bath and a padded cabin for an Alderney cow, which was kept content by an electric fan; she provided fresh milk for Bennett and his guests with the aid of an electric milking machine. The guests included Bennett’s many mistresses (“There were curious tales concerning his fancies,’’ recalled Gonsuelo Vanderbilt, the Gommodore’s great-granddaughter). All this floating hospitality required a crew of 100.
As master of Lysistroto, Bennett proved more eccentric than ever. When an acting troupe came aboard during a visit to Amsterdam, Bennett found their performance so pleasing that he sailed off with them and would not put them ashore until they had completed their entire repertoire. Then there was his paranoia concerning beards. Gonvinced that the Royal Navy’s preeminence on the sea could be credited to its cleanshaven officers and crewmen, Bennett would allow no bearded man on his yacht. One stubborn Herald staffer, James Creelman, refused to shave when he was summoned from Paris to meet Bennett for a conference aboard Lysistroto in Leghorn. Greelman was not permitted aboard. When Lysistroto sailed, Greelman followed her from port to port. Bennett refused to relent, and finally Greelman gave up and returned to Paris. Eventually he quit the Herold and joined a competing paper.
Another Herold employee, an editor, was given a uniquely demeaning assignment. He happened to be aboard Lysistroto one day in a French port when it became necessary to replace the yacht’s cow (history does not record what happened to it). Bennett grabbed the editor and drove off across the French countryside in search of another prime specimen of Alderney. At last one was found; Bennett bought it, instructed the editor to walk it to the yacht, and drove off. Understandably, Bennett was unpopular with most of his employees. One of them, correspondent George W. Hosmer, no doubt summed up their feelings in his assessment of Bennett; “When sober he displayed the worst qualities of the Scotch and when drunk the worst qualities of the Irish.’’
In the end, Lysistroto helped bring him down. Beguiled by his life of floating luxury, Bennett devoted less and less time to the Herold. The newspaper’s fortunes faded as his profligacies increased. When he died in 1918, at the age of 77, he was nearly broke, having squandered an estimated $40 million. Yachting had been a means of self-gratification as epic in scale as the energies of the land that produced him. Despite Hosmer’s assessment of his Scottish or Irish qualities, Bennett’s willfulness was unmistakably American.
World History
