YACHTING’S GOLDEN AGE: 1880-1905, by Ed Holm, Alfred A. Knopf, 208 pages, $65.00.
When tackling this project, the author could have devoted himself solely to the topics the title immediately conjures up–the era’s great steam yachts, magnificent racing yachts, and exclusive yacht clubs. Be grateful he was more ambitious.
Topics such as the America’s Cup receive their due attention, but author Ed Holm (a former editor of this magazine) also examines the less expensive but equally attractive world of smaller boats and smaller yacht clubs. He also covers the people who inhabited both worlds –wealthy yacht owners, a group of convivial San Francisco yachtsmen, huge racing yachts’ hardy crews and wily captains, two women in a catboat, and a solitary cook in a steam yacht’s galley. The result of this combination of stunning period images, a tightly written text, and informative captions is a broad, intriguing, and refreshingly honest picture of late nineteenth-century yachting, a picture in which contemporary sailors, armchair and otherwise, will find much that is familiar–and surprising.
As Ken Burns’ documentary film Baseball demonstrated, the changes in a seemingly innocuous pastime reflect changes in the entire nation. Yachting’s Golden Age deftly shows how that holds true for yachting. For example, Holm describes the 1903 America’s Cup defender, the Reliance, as “a virtually invincible combination of technology and talent,” brought from concept to reality due to “unlimited financial resources.” The means by which the United States will rise to a preeminent position in the world are thus foreshadowed.
This book cannot have been an easy project–just the idea of culling through the thousands of available images is daunting. But I am glad the author made the effort because Yachting’s Golden Age is one of the most broadly satisfying books about American yachting in the nineteenth century–indeed, in any period–that has been published in some time.
Scott E. Belliveau is a former editor for the United States Naval Institute. He is currently director of communications for the VMI Foundation in Lexington, Virginia.
