by Jean Strouse
At nineteen Pierpont had outfitted his student rooms in “royal splendor and eastern magnificence”—qualities he found everywhere in Sicily. Returning to the cathedral early the next morning, he was taken into the sacristy to see more carvings and a screen embroidered with “real pearls and a ruby of rare color and size.” From there he went to the royal palace, where he singled out another “rare old chapel,” with solid porphyry columns, walls “emblazoned with the most perfect old mosaics similar to those in St. Marks, Venice,” and marble wainscoting inlaid with mosaic—the most highly valued of Middle Byzantine art forms. That afternoon he drove out to Monreale to see its Byzantine church, which he considered “if possible, superior to St. Marks.” He spent two hours examining the mosaics, and would gladly have stayed until dark, but fear of local “brigands” dictated an early return: “we arrived in Palermo all safe, without having to pay any ransom for any of the party.”
He was in high spirits. What this apostle of America’s economic future most wanted to do, once he got free of professional and familial obligations, was to immerse himself in the cultures of the past. He had been looking at European art for nearly thirty years, and though he would never be an intellectual aesthete on the order of Henry Adams or Henry James, these letters show him making more discriminating observations than he had before. What they convey above all, however, is his energy for exploration. He took a quick side trip to Mount Aetna with Mary and the Clarkes, then waited for the others at Messina, telling Fanny, “My next letter will go from my beloved Egypt.”
At Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo five days later, he announced in mock solemnity: “Man intends, woman expects, but the elements frequently interfere.” His promise of daily letters had failed to “appreciate the fact that one cannot write very well when one is flying around like a jack out of a box.” Pandora had left Messina on a calm afternoon, steaming between Calabria and Sicily “with Mt. Etna rising in all its grandeur” and the mountain range “tinged with that pink light so common in these latitudes.” The first dinner bell at 6:30 sent everyone belowdecks to dress. Before the second bell the yacht rounded the southern tip of Italy, “and the vessel began to pitch around in the most extraordinary manner.” Only the writer and Mrs. Balfour made it to dinner—“the others were seen no more that night.” Pierpont spent most of the next twelve hours “holding on with both hands, for fear of being propelled” into a collision from which “either my body or the sides of my state room would suffer.”
In all his ocean travels he had not imagined “any vessel could fly about so easily” as Pandora did on the Ionian Sea. He had a specific interest in her performance: before leaving New York he had taken an option on a yacht of his own. This crossing convinced him that “there is no limit to the gymnastics which a ship may go thro’ and still be entirely safe.”
At Alexandria port officials gave an elaborate welcome to the Morgan party. Egypt was in acute political turmoil that winter. Its debt had soared in the sixties and seventies as the country Westernized, expanded its cotton and shipping trades, and encouraged foreign capitalists to build railroads and the Suez Canal. By 1879 the government was bankrupt, and its European creditors forced the ruling Khedive to abdicate in favor of a puppet regime headed by his son, Tawfiq. At the time of the Morgans’ arrival in January of 1882, Egyptian nationalists were in open rebellion against Tawfiq and foreign dominion. Most tourists stayed away. Cook’s steamers had carried eight hundred foreigners up the Nile in 1881; in the winter of 1882, a journalist saw only three privately rented boats at Luxor, all American—“it would seem that the English are very much scared.” Pierpont’s letters from this trip (or the portions Fanny transcribed) do not mention the political situation.‖
The travelers stopped at Alexandria for lunch, then went on to Cairo, reaching Shepheard’s—a rambling Victorian palace with pharaonic aspirations, built in the 1840s—late that night. Pierpont’s companions called him an “Egyptomaniac” as he showed them citadels, minarets, mosques, and bazaars. One day he organized a picnic expedition to the Pyramids at Giza, securing the use of a house that had been built for the Empress Eugénie. After lunch some of the party climbed the Great Pyramid, built by the Old Kingdom Pharaoh Khufu, known to the Greeks as Cheops. Those who made it to the top, led by Pierpont, descended to see the Sphinx and its temple on the other side. He reported his friends delighted with the excursion, though “by to-morrow, when they try and walk, they may not be so joyful.”
Though these tourists were more intrepid than most in a politically turbulent year, they shared the colonial view of Egypt as exotic spectacle to be taken in with little sacrifice of Occidental custom or comfort. On Sundays they attended Cairo’s English Church, although Pierpont found the music and sermons “fearful.” After dinner one evening with the American consul, he professed “great relief” that the man had “a European cook and mode of serving, so that, instead of being obliged to eat Arab dishes, with our fingers, we had knives and forks and passable food.”
At the Boulaq Museum, founded by the French in the late 1850s, they saw objects from the time of Rameses II—part of a cache of royal mummies and burial equipment that had been recently discovered by Gaston Maspero, director-general of the Antiquities Service and the museum. Rameses the Great, who ruled Egypt from about 1290 to 1224 B.C., was then widely thought to be the Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus, and had built some of the most impressive monuments in the Nile Valley—the temples at Abu Simbel, the Hall of Columns at Karnak, the great forecourt at Luxor, the Ramesseum, and a glorious tomb for his wife Nefertari in the Valley of the Queens. Morgan declared these finds more important than anything the museum had had before: “I put my hand on [Rameses’] skull,” he told Fanny, “his hair is still attached.”
The Morgan party sailed up the Nile in February, going straight to Luxor and the Valley of the Kings. Pierpont showed his friends “glorious” Karnak at night—as they wandered under a full moon among the ruins and columns of the Great Hall, “I almost wished that I myself had never seen it before.” Across the river the next day the group lunched in the Temple of Rameses at Medinet Habu, toured Tombs of the Kings in windswept cliffs above the plain, then headed back downriver.
On reaching Cairo, Junius and Alice Mason took a couple of days to recover, but Pierpont wanted no rest. He had arrived in Egypt during Ramadan, the holiest of Muslim holidays, honoring the revelation of the Koran to Mohammed. Processions and music filled the streets as thousands of people streamed back into Cairo after making the pilgrimage to Mecca. One night Pierpont drove out to see the crowds on the outskirts of the city, and several days later he attended the ceremony marking the end of Ramadan at the foot of Citadel Hill. He described fifteen thousand Egyptians “of every conceivable color” thronging into the square, along with “distinguished notables,” royal harems, “dervishes of all kinds … yelling and dancing, crying Allah, Allah.” Cannons fired throughout the city as the Khedive arrived to receive a holy carpet from the pilgrims in “one of the most gorgeous and imposing spectacles I have ever seen.”
Some of what drew Morgan so powerfully to Egypt was his fascination with sacred places and objects—from the rituals and pageantry of contemporary Islam to remnants of Coptic Christianity, Old Testament landscapes, and the ancient religious cultures of the pharaohs. In mid-February, his party returned to Pandora and made a holy pilgrimage of its own.
Disembarking at Jaffa on February 17, the travelers set off in open wagons for Jerusalem. Pierpont thought he spotted the house of Simon the Tanner and the place where David fought Goliath. He reached the entrance to the Holy City after dark. “I must leave you to imagine, for I cannot describe the sensations with which I entered that gate,” he told Fanny. “I shall not soon forget it.”
Early the next morning he made his way to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. “As you enter the door, directly in front of you is a slab of marble covering the stone said to be the one upon which the Saviour was anointed for burial, after the Crucifi
xion,” he wrote. “Turning to your left you ascend stairs and you find yourself in a vaulted Chapel, built upon what is supposed to be the summit of Calvary. A death like silence pervades, the distant sounds of an organ in a distant part of the Church are heard. Awestruck and impressed you stand almost breathless upon what must always be the most sacred spot on earth. I cannot attempt to describe my feelings. Words fail me entirely. I could only say to myself, It is good to be here.”
Descending to the church, he wandered through chapels built by Greeks, Catholics, Armenians, and Copts until he found himself under a large dome with a small chapel in the center. “Entering through a door about four feet high into a vestibule,” he continued, “you pass through another door and you are in the Sepulchre of our Lord. There is the slab on which He was laid. Impelled by an impulse impossible to resist you fall on your knees before that shrine.”
The Morgans returned to London in early March, and from there Pierpont cabled New York that he would buy the yacht he had optioned—a 185-foot black-hulled steamer called Corsair. She and a twin vessel, Stranger, built by William Cramp & Sons in Philadelphia in 1880, were the largest, most technically sophisticated yachts in the United States, with schooner rigs, graduated screw propellers, compound two-cylinder engines, raked stacks, and elliptical sterns. They were also the most elegantly appointed: the main saloon in Corsair’s forward bulkhead had black and gold silk upholstering, quilted plush divans, twin sideboards, and a tiled fireplace. In March of 1882, Pierpont ordered Corsair fully commissioned and ready for his use by June: he would keep her staff of officers and crew.
The Laniers and Eglestons met him in Paris in May. His bill for a party of five staying eight days at the Hôtel Bristol, including meals, came to 1,900 francs—about $380. He sailed for home from Liverpool at the end of May, having been gone since December; on the passenger list of the White Star’s Britannic are Laniers, Eglestons, and, mysteriously, “Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan and Friend.”
Morgan joined the New York Yacht Club shortly after he arrived, and built a large L-shaped dock into the Hudson just below his country house. He wrote in the Cragston guest book on June 17: “Steam yacht Corsair left 23rd St. N[orth] R[iver] @ 2:30 p.m. Saturday June 17, 1882 and arrived at Cragston dock at 6 pm. against strong ebb tide.” He spent most of his free time that summer cruising the East Coast with parties of friends. Fanny went to Europe with the girls.
Yachting became extremely popular with the American gentry in the early 1880s. A few members of the New York Yacht Club sailed their own boats, but most hired skippers and were drawn to this pastime for other reasons, including the example of aristocratic Europe and the extravagant competitions of the Gilded Age. Corsair, when Morgan acquired her, far surpassed her nearest rivals in size—the 146-foot Jeannette, owned by the playboy proprietor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, Jr. (who was a sailor), and the 145-foot Sappho, successful 1871 defender of the America’s Cup, belonging to William Proctor Douglas. In 1883 Bennett raised the bar by building a 226-foot steamer called Namouna, with interior work by Stanford White: “Fairylike in form, Oriental in the splendor of her decorations, and cosy and comfortable as an old English home in the plan of her appointments,” this yacht required a fifty-man crew and $150,000 a year to run. Bennett’s Herald staff dubbed her “Pneumonia.” Not to be outdone, Jay Gould launched a 230-foot, white-hulled, three-masted floating palace called Atalanta in 1883; the New York Yacht Club refused to admit him, citing his “robber baron notoriety.”
As Morgan’s wealth and renown increased, people began to credit him with oracular remarks, the most famous of which, on the subject of how much it costs to own a yacht, is “if you have to ask you can’t afford it.” Recorded instances of what he actually said are less breezily succinct, the two most likely being “You have no right to own a yacht if you ask that question” (to oil baron Henry Clay Pierce) and “If it makes the slightest difference to you what it costs, don’t try it” (to W. P. Bonbright, head of a New York securities firm).
As to the actual costs, Morgan sold the first Corsair for $70,000 (cash) when he built a larger yacht in 1891, but there are no accounts recording her annual upkeep. His own yacht proved well worth whatever she cost. After 1882, Corsair served as his second summer home, liberating him from railroad schedules, an inquisitive public, and family obligations. He often spent nights on the yacht as she lay at anchor off West 23rd Street, away from the heat and noise of the city. Between April and November he conducted meetings on board and took friends cruising, with total jurisdiction over accommodation, itinerary, and cuisine. Ocean travel had always relaxed him and improved his health. Early in 1883 he organized a Corsair Club of six men (including Lanier, Egleston, and Fred Sturges—the number later expanded to twelve) who sailed with him in the summer and met for dinners during the winter.
The yacht had public benefits as well. In London in the 1850s George Peabody had burnished his reputation with elaborate banquets and large acts of unofficial diplomacy. On the other side of the Atlantic thirty years later, the black-hulled Corsair, immediately recognizable as Mr. Morgan’s, testified to healthy profits, princely privilege, and safe navigation through turbulent economic seas.
In the summer of 1882, while Pierpont worked and tried out his yacht, Junius spent most of his time at Dover House. One night in July he gave a small dinner for the British Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone. His guests included Alice Mason, Sir John and Lady Rose, Fanny Morgan, and her brother, Charley Tracy. Gladstone, reported Fanny, saluted his host’s good looks, keen insight, and “great decision of character.”
Junius, almost seventy, was winding down. Though he continued to tend his transatlantic business, he had begun to cede authority and to rely with expansive affection on his son. “I can’t tell you how much I have enjoyed your visit,” he told Pierpont one spring in the early 1880s: “It has really ‘set me up’ & I feel more like myself than I have done for a year past.”
Powerful men are often so preoccupied with their own affairs that they pay little attention to their sons. Not Junius Morgan. He had assiduously drawn Pierpont into his world from the start, teaching the boy about business, helping him with homework, monitoring his reading habits and pocket change, imparting first glimpses of European history and culture, ordering up the acquisition of foreign languages, standing militant watch over the shaping of his character. He had chosen Pierpont’s teachers, employers, associates, partners—even, in effect, his first wife. From London Junius had dictated the terms of New York deals, and called his son to task for every minor infraction as well as for major lapses in judgment.
Pierpont, taking all this paternal surveillance in stride, had never been cowed by his father’s or anyone else’s rebuke. On the contrary, he displayed high confidence in his own abilities and prerogatives, and an astonishing lack of self-doubt. The speculations of his early twenties that had outraged his father and his repeated attempts to quit Wall Street in his thirties were the only signs of conflict over whether or not he would fulfill the paternal decree. Though occasionally distressed by Junius’s hectoring, he seems in the end to have shrugged off its negative content and derived strength from the searchlight trained at all times on his performance. If there was something hollow in being valued so exorbitantly as the consummation of paternal ambitions, it showed chiefly in his disinclination to father his own son.
He never directed that kind of heat and light at Jack. He had complained to Governor Hoppin that Fanny would not let the boy out of her sight, but Jack did leave home at thirteen—for St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and bitterly missed his mother. Long after he had adjusted to being away, in the spring of his junior year, he begged her: “Please come up as soon as you can for I … want you very badly,” and the following fall, “O you dearest I keep thinking all the time that so many minutes or hours have gone by and that there are only so many more before I see you again and it makes me feel nice all over.” Writing to Louisa, he imagine
d “How nice it must be to be a girl and be educated at home.”
As Fanny moved further to the margins of her husband’s life in the 1880s—the miscarriage seems to have marked a definitive turning point in their marriage—she drew her children close around her, especially Jack. He responded to her moods and anxieties like a tuning fork. Gallantly solicitous, he warned her not to go to Cragston alone (“you will be so blue and lonely that you will be sick”), and begged her to take good care of herself (“I wonder why I should be so foolish and nervous about you but it cannot be helped”). When she seemed happy he hoped “the cheerfulness is not put on to comfort me and keep me from feeling anxious about you,” and when she did not he offered to take her sadness on himself: “I hope you’ll keep cheerful while Papa’s away but if you’re blue remember that you said one could get cheerful by cheering up someone else who was blue.… I will promise to be as blue as I can when you come up.”
This last gesture was only partly a joke. Like both of his parents, Jack suffered from depression, and he told Fanny: “The most peculiar thing about it is that when I am not blue I wonder how I possibly could ever be troubled that way, and when the disease comes on I don’t see how anyone could ever have been cheerful.”