Mabel Loomis Todd (1856–1932)

I read Corona and Coronet for two reasons. The yacht Coronet is currently being restored at the International Yacht Restoration School (iyrs.edu/our-boats/coronet/) in Newport, Rhode Island; and I just finished reading Christopher Benfey’s The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. Mabel Loomis Todd is a wonderful writer; and, since she evidently led an extraordinary life, her travelogue of an 1898 voyage to Japan to observe a total solar eclipse is a fine piece of writing. While my reprint of this book is the only one on Librarything.com, it is readily available on Google Books as a free electronic edition.
Twenty years earlier, Lady Annie Brassey wrote A Voyage in the Yacht Sunbeam: Our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months. If Mabel Todd did not read this best seller, she certainly represents the Americanized version of a way of life that was favored (was invented?) by British aristocrats and wealthy Gilded-Age Americans.
Since we currently live in an age shaped by identity politics, internet trolling and pervasive ad hominem attacks, Mabel Todd can be read these days as an example of the privileged elites who prevailed 120 years ago.
The yacht Coronet was the Learjet of its day. It was a symbol of arrival in the wealthy class. Coronet was fast (for a sailboat), luxurious (in the fashion of Captain Nemo), and capable of sailing anywhere in the world. Todd pairs the Coronet with another contemporary symbol of wealth: the private railcar. While we can get from New York to Tokyo on a 14-hour flight, Todd needed a week to cross the continent in a private railcar and another three weeks to cross the Pacific on the Coronet. She was no shrinking violet. And she had lots of wealthy friends.
Mabel Todd was nobody’s victim. But 120 years later, we are compelled to apply the litmus test of political correctness and lash out at her with tweets denouncing her tendency to racism and casual use of now prohibited vocabulary. But I love her nonetheless, and I would enjoy sailing with her.… (mehr)