The Alcedo: Wealth on Display Around the World
George W. Childs Drexel (1868–1944) was the youngest child of Anthony Joseph Drexel (1826–1893), named for Anthony J. Drexel’s close friend, owner and editor of the Public Ledger, George W. Childs (1829–1894). George Drexel took over as owner/editor of the Public Ledger for 8 years, following George W. Childs’s death. Passionate about motor cars and yachting, George Drexel ardently pursued these interests after the 1902 sale of the Public Ledger, buoyed by his family’s wealth. His steam yacht Alcedo launched for the first time from Wilmington, Delaware shipyards in 1897. George W. Childs Drexel, his wife Mary Stretch Irick Drexel (1868–1948), and family and friends enjoyed numerous trips on the Alcedo.
Read on to view selections from photo albums detailing the Drexel and Livingston family’s travels aboard the Alcedo:
The Livingston Biddle Photo Albums
Mosi-oa-Tunya (Victoria Falls) Panoramas
The Tourist’s Gaze
The Alcedo’s service in World War I
View all three photo albums to see how Livingston, George, and Mary traveled in 1905.
The Livingston Biddle Photo Albums
Livingston Biddle, Sr. (1877–1959) accompanied his Uncle George and Aunt Mary on at least two separate voyages around 1905 and later created three photo albums. Biddle’s photographs record landscapes, local people, and colonial intrusion across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The family party visited cities, rural areas, and religious sites. Travel activities include sightseeing, hunting, observing local customs and communities, and visiting American military installations. The captions handwritten under many of the candid portraits of local people comment on their dress, customs, and culture in ways that reflect the time in which they were written and the perspective of the photographer. George W. Childs Drexel is sometimes referred to as the “Boss” in captions.
Mosi-oa-Tunya (Victoria Falls) Panoramas
Many of the photographs in the albums are in panoramic format and variable sizes. While we do not know what camera Biddle used to take his photographs, there were at least two panorama-enabled cameras at the time advertised for personal use, including the Al-Vista (first produced in 1898) and the #4 Kodak Panoram panoramic camera (released in 1899).
Biddle used the wide panoramic format to capture the Mosi-oa-Tunya waterfalls (also known as Victoria Falls), between Zambia and Zimbabwe in Africa. In these photographs, one can see the large rainbows thrown into the air by the interaction of mist and light refraction. However, since the photographs are sepia-toned, and not in color—color photography was possible in the 1860s but only came into wider use with Kodachrome and Agfacolor film starting in the mid-1930s—the rainbow is only visible as a bold white arch across the image.
The Tourist’s Gaze
The photographs in the albums are organized by location. Though undated, the photographs are numbered. The albums may be arranged to follow the route of travel, at least to some extent in chronological order. The subjects of Biddle’s photography are highly varied capturing local daily life, as well as local violence and death. For example, Biddle memorializes trophies from large game hunts around Kenya, a public beheading in Shanghai, and a funeral ceremony in northern India, alongside street scenes, landscapes, monuments, and marketplaces.
The family traveled in the lap of luxury, sometimes literally carried across the terrain by local laborers. Mary S. Irick Drexel, the wife of Alcedo owner George W. Childs Drexel, was frequently photographed by her nephew Livingston L. Biddle, showing her traveling via litter, hammock, carriage, and varying local conveyance. In contrast, several pictures show local children carrying younger siblings and include captions that indicate this practice seemed foreign or noteworthy.
The left two images show members of the traveling party carried by paid attendants while the two images on the right show children carrying younger siblings. What might this tell you about the travelers’ experience?
While the wealth of the traveling party no doubt contributed to the frequency of being carried, 1949 undergraduate research paper by Dorothy S. Holverson added additional context. The paper detailed clothing donations from Mary S. Irick Drexel to the Fox Historic Costume Collection. Holverson interviewed Mary’s nephew Livingston L. Biddle, who commented that Mary—a major architect of the family’s international travels who was often included in hunting and fishing activities—injured her back while sea fishing, an event that limited her mobility intermittently in the following decades. Biddle further notes that Mary found this accommodation of being carried quite embarrassing and at least once, in Jerusalem, chose to return to the ship rather than be stared at. This additional information may change the context of the photos.
Mary S. Irick Drexel collected musical instruments on these travels and in 1938, she donated 127 instruments to the Franklin Institute. In the late 1940s, the collection was loaned to the Penn Museum. The transfer was made permanent in 2014. See below for a picture from the family’s travels showing children with instruments that look very similar to the Penn Museum’s anklung (carved and tuned pieces of bamboo played by shaking) from Mary’s donated collection.
Only once is a local person identified by name. In Volume 2, page 42, Livingston caught their guide, identified as Isiah David, in the background while visiting temples in India.
In all the ways noted above and in countless others, the traveling party was held apart from the local population. However, one must also note that they visited both large and small communities, walked among different classes, and learned about cultural and religious practices that were not in the common parlance of early-1900s American society. They visited Roman ruins, Christian churches, Islamic mosques, Buddhist and Hindu temples.
Sailing on the Alcedo, the group visited colonial functionaries and business magnates but also walked in fishing villages and market squares. Unfortunately, we cannot know how their travel experiences changed or affirmed the family’s views of the world or their place in it.
The Alcedo’s service in World War I
In an excerpt from A.J. Drexel Paul’s account of the Alcedo circa 1920, he mentions meeting up with his Uncle George and traveling aboard the Alcedo for a time:
“In the Autumn of 1906 I went round the world with Morris Gray, Jr. of Boston. When we arrived in Alexandria, Egypt, we found that my uncle George Drexel was at Port Said on yacht, the ALCEDO, and he invited us to go with him to India. We had a very interesting trip to Bombay, stopping at places we ordinarily would not have had the opportunity to see: Suakim, Jibuti in French Somaliland, Jedda (the Port to Mohommedan Mecca), and Aden.
In the autumn of 1917, the ALCEDO was the first ship in the United States Navy to be torpedoed and sunk by the Germans. Her record in the Navy was a short one of three months, and during that time I served on her as a Watch and Divisions Officer....”