Native Women Washing Clothes at St. Vincent, B.W.I.

I have seen the same very unsatisfactory fifteen-minute glimpse of this film taken in Saint Vincent and it is a reminder - if reminder were needed - of what an unsatisfactory view we get of the films (and particularly the proto-documentary films) of this period from the few miserable bits and pieces that are available for us to see.

1902-1903 was the last year during which the Canadian James Henry White was in charge of production at Edison's. He got married on 30 November 1902, and, after working with Edwin Porter on The Life of an American Fireman, retired in 1903 and moved to England.

During that last year, he did a great deal to help broaden the Edison repertoire, by shooting major linked series of films with several different cameramen (Porter, Abadie, Blair Smith), including those of the Pan-American Exposition, of the McKinley Funeral and of that year's Americas Cup race), by buying in films on "foreign" subjects (from Britain, Germany, France), by buying in the work of free-lance film-makers (a long series of "western" films shot in the Yukon, then Seattle and Colorado of which virtually none seems to be available were shot by a photographer who may have been Walter Parker) and encouraging Porter to make multi-shot docufictions (Life Rescue at Long Branch, Execution of Czolgosz, the Life of an American Fireman).

It was a period when the US was really rather admiring of the new German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Films of the pom and circumstance dear to the new emperor were made for Edison by the German Eberhard Schneider. The Kaiser's brother, the naval officer Prinz Heinrich, visited the US in January 1902 and made a big hit with the US public while White organised a very full coverage of the visit (promptly also copied by Lubin). In February, he also filmed the launching of the Kaiser's new yacht Meteor III, designed and built in the US and then arranged for extensive film-journeys on the new luxury cruise-ships of the Hamburg-American line, the Prinzessin Victoria Luise, the first custom-built cruise ship, which started its midwinter cruise of the Caribbean from Sandy Hook in New Jersey and the luxury ocean liner Auguste Victoria (leaving New York in February 1903.

The Auguste Victoria, known as the first "floating hotel" took the cameraman Alfred Abadie (apparently an American of Lebanese origin) to Italy and then Egypt and Jerusalem (at least two of these films are readily available)while White himself, along with his new wife, went on the cruise-ship for a working honeymoon in November-December 1902. In the course of it, he took films in Jamaica, the Bahamas, the Virgin islands (St. Thomas), Curucao and glimpses from the ship of Martinique (where James Blair Smith had been sent a few months before to film the aftermath of the disastrous volcano) and Cuba.

So this series was both swansong and honeymoon for White and it is a great shame that more of it is not available (other films do survive. It could also be said to have been honeymoon and swansong for US-German relations. Both the US, a significant imperial power since the acquisition of the Philippines and the de facto colonisation of Cuba, 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) and US admiration of the new German navy would soon turn to apprehension and fear, and become a very important motive for the US involvement in the First World War. St Thomas was successfully bought by the US in 1917.