This series of films shot by James H. White on hiis honeymoon cruise in December 1902 are of particular interest for several reasons.
The cruise itself was a relatively new phenomeoon and White was a pioneer of its use as medium for touristic cinematography. This particular cruise was one one of the new luxury cruise-ships of the Hamburg-American line, the Prinzessin Victoria Luise. It lasted for twenty-eight days and the itinerary was New York to Nassau (where tourists from the South could join the vessel), Havana, Santiago, Jamaica, Curacao, Grenada, St. Vincent, Martinique, St. Thomas, Porto Rico, Bermuda and New York. It was evidently also posible to join the ship at Sandy Hook, New Jersey which is where White and his wife went aboard.
This was a period when the US was really rather admiring of the new German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II and, in addition to other films made at this time by Mutoscope (see my review of Native Women Washing Clothes at St. Vincent, B.W.I.), White organised cruise with the Hamburg-American line both for himself and for the cinematographer A. C. Abadie (on board the luxury ocean liner Auguste Victoria, the first "floating hotel", which left New York in February 1903 for a cruise of the Middle East).
The touristic concept, although it did include one film of on-board amusements (shuffleboard), an aspect that would become increasingly importnt in "cruise" films, was essentially to make a kind of snapshot film in each port - this film in the Bahamas, a rather distant glimpse of Morro Fort in Havana, boys diving for coins in Jamaica, a panorama in Curacao, natives dancing and swiming in St. Thomas (Virgin Islands), women washing cloths in St. Vincent and scrambling for coins while, coaling a ship in St. Lucia and another panorama in Martinique.
The films have a not uninteresting "voyeuristic" effect - some are taken at a distance or at a curious angle from on board ship and, although White is not the most brilliant of cinematographers, they make, paticualrly when viewed as a series, a not unimoressive collage.
Quite apart from the touristic aspect, the cruise, and the films, weer not without topical interest. Martinique had just suffered a disastrous eruption of a volcano and another Edison operator, James Blair Smith, was there at this time to film the aftermath (while back in Nw Jersey Edwin S. Porter made some not very convincing mock-ups of the eruption using models).
Cuba had of course recently been the starting-point for US expanionism in the Pacific area (Morro fort had been filmed back in 1898 by William Paley). With the subsequent of the Philippines as a base for quite widespread imperial activities (especially in China), the straegic interest in the various islands in the Caribbean was considerably heightened and in fact the US and Germany had rival ambitions in the Caribbean. Both countries had already tried to buy the island of St. Thomas (then part of the Danish West Indies), an island that the US would finally succeed in buying in 1917 when admiration for Germany had turned to apprehension and pen conflict.
As fo the subject of this film, baby-bathing scenes were popular and a highly common trope of somewhat patronising, voyeuristic views of other cultures. See my reviews of A Hard Wash 1896 and of Baby's Toilet (1905).
Altogegether a rather suitable swansong to White's time with Edison. He retired to Britain after the trip (although he did later briefly return to the company in some kind of vague executive capacity).