In the winter of 1888, Edith Wharton, twenty-six years old, confided in a Newport friend and cousin-in-law, James Van Alen, that there was nothing she wanted more in the world than to take a cruise in the Mediterranean. Van Alen arranged for the charter of a yacht called the Vanadis, and Edith and her husband Teddy set off on the trip she would call 'a taste of heaven'.