The youngest Romanovs, nine-yeor-old Anastasia and seven-yeor-ald Ale. vis, cavort far the camera in the children's dining roam during a 1910 cruise.
For Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family, the 420-foot royal yacht Stondart provided an escape from the routine cares of monarchy—and even more from threats of assassination in the early-20th Century atmosphere of palace intrigue and revolutionary fever. Every June, the Royal Family cruised the Baltic, taking tea in wicker chairs under white canvas awnings, worshipping in the yacht’s chapel and reading in mahogany-paneled drawing rooms. They enjoyed an easy informality with the crew; often the yacht s officers joined the family at the imperial dining table.
Although the Czar barred all government ministers from the yacht, affairs of state could not be fully fended off. Daily courier boats brought dispatches from St. Petersburg. And the ever-present escort of naval craft, as well as a platoon of marines aboard the yacht, was a constant reminder of lurking political peril.
In a 191-1 photograph taken by /Mexandro, Nicho/ns II is resplendent in nova) uni/orm. He ivas devoted to yachting despite recurrent sensirkness.
Czarevitch Alexis nearly always ware a Hussion sailor’s uniform in the summer, whether aboard Standart or ashore.
The/our Grand Duchesses—from left, Mario. Olga, Anastasia and Tatiana— assemble for an impromptu portrait during a cruise aboard Standart in 1909.
The Royal Yacht Squadron's castle served as a temporary naval base, and 34 members’ yachts were designated as naval vessels. Most of them did patrol duty; one sank a German submarine. Sir Thomas Lipton’s Erin, escorting his fourth America’s Cup challenger to the United States when war broke out, ducked into Bermuda, then accompanied the racing vessel to New York and returned across the Atlantic. Lipton lent Erin to the Red Cross, and she ferried doctors and nurses to the Austrian front. Later the Admiralty took her over and put her on patrol duty. Erin was sunk by a U-boat while she was rushing to the aid of a torpedoed cruiser in the Mediterranean.
The British royal yacht Britonnio was laid up for the duration. The Czar’s Stondort took the Romanov family, then cruising off the Finnish coast, home to Russia—and to their deaths in the Russian Revolution. For years afterward there were rumors that Nicholas and his family had escaped aboard a ship, presumably Stondort, and were cruising the White Sea, endlessly awaiting a call for return of the monarchy. Stondort wound up as a Soviet minelayer. As for the Kaiser’s Hohenzoilern, she sat out World War I and was broken up for scrap in 1923. In 1913, Wilhelm had ordered a new Hohenzoilern even larger than the first. Her unfinished hull lay in a Stettin shipyard during the War, and it too was dismantled in 1923.
When the United States went to war in 1917, so did many American yachtsmen. Commodore Vanderbilt’s great-grandson Harold Vanderbilt commissioned a patrol boat, was put in command of her by the Navy and went searching for enemy submarines. J. P. Morgan Jr. sold his father’s third Corsoir to the Navy for one dollar. Her paneling was stripped away, and enough bunks were crowded into her once commodious staterooms to take care of 12 officers and 122 men, most of whom were young naval reservists from Princeton. She was armed with depth charges and deck guns and sent off across the Atlantic on convoy duty. At Saint Nazaire, France, Corsair joined a small fleet of other converted yachts that had been assigned to patrols. She later recrossed the Atlantic a number of times on convoy duty, and was credited with rescuing crewmen from several torpedoed ships. At the end of the War, Corsoir was returned to Morgan. He then restored her yachting comforts and converted her coal bunkers to oil tanks—in time for her to serve as flagship of the New York Yacht Club. The junior Morgan, like his father, had been elected commodore.
Sir Thomas Liptan joins six Red Cross nurses Jar a patriotic picture (tap) after turning his luxury steam yacht Erin into a World War I hospital transport. An irrepressible partygiver, Liptan hosted a masquerade during one Mediterranean passage, and the nurses dressed as members of a Turkish harem fbottam).
The New York Yacht Club had reacted to World War I by canceling the honorary membership they had given the Kaiser. An American yachtsman named Wilson Marshall also did his part when he donated to the Red Cross a cup that had been awarded by the Kaiser before the War. In a series of auctions, it brought some $125,000 from patriotic purchasers, who then returned the cup to the Red Cross. A final fund-raising event was held in New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Before an audience that had paid five dollars each for admission, and with President Woodrow Wilson in attendance, yachtsman Marshall dramatically shattered the Kaiser’s cup with a sledge hammer. The trophy turned out not to be solid gold as the Kaiser had claimed, but thinly gold-plated pewter worth about $35.
World History
