The Great Eastern

by Howard Rodman

  What I wish to here set down is a brief account of my days and nights aboard this accursèd craft: all that has transpired following my “death” in London, and how I have comported myself in this, my unwilled afterlife.

  * * *

  —

  I THINK IT fitting to commence with my first morning below, and a greeting from the man who had been on land my savage captor—and was still that, to be sure!—but now was also my captain.

  “Welcome to the Neptune,“ he said. “I hope the accommodations are congenial. And of course if there is anything that would make you more comfortable, within the limitations of what might be available on a craft this small, you must let me know.” He was a brown subcontinental, yet his elocution was that of an Oxonian or, perhaps, a Cantabrigian.

  “I thank you for the water, for the food,” I said. “But what I want is neither drink nor sustenance but swift return to London. To my work. And to my life. I have, as you know, a wife, and children, and—”

  “They have already mourned,” he said. And then: “I know that this to you must seem criminal. But I assure you it was of the essence. And that were there any other way of accomplishing goals of necessity I’d not have put you, or your loved ones, through any of this.”

  There was a dire lack of connection between the elegance of his diction, the courtesy of his address, and the impossibility of the situation at hand: I had been wrenched from my life and was now forbidden to rejoin it. You will understand if I withheld gratitude.

  “Let us begin anew,” he said, “as if we were just now encountering each other. I am Captain Nemo and this is my craft. The Neptune is iron hulled, a mode of construction whose virtues you yourself have so ably championed. There are details of its build that would be of interest to you and I shall share them with you at a later time.

  “The Neptune travels on the water and beneath it. It is unlike any other ship built or imagined. You, M. Brunel, are the brightest and most practical man in Great Britain. I have studied your work and found much inspiration in it. The visionary leap of the atmospheric railway, the first of your feats to come to my attention. The wisdom of the shield for tunneling beneath a river, a feat never before tried, yet alone accomplished—and the fortitude with which that tunneling was carried out. The careful laying out of the route of the Great Western Railway, and then the bridges and tunnels, sturdy and of surpassing elegance, which that route necessitated. The Great Western, whose design inspired that of the craft that now bears us both. And of course the Great Eastern, whose destruction I attempted, and whose ability to sail unaided back to port is a tribute only to the strength and wisdom of your design.”

  I had for more than a week been reeling due to the course of events, but now my head spun even more. This man, this captain, was reminding me once more—perhaps less reminding than boasting—that he had attempted to destroy my ship! And in the process had killed several good and innocent men. Nor was this a confession extracted under duress: this was a voluntary dissemination, retailed in a tone matter-of-fact as if he were letting me know that my shirts had been freshly laundered.

  “You will go to hell, Captain,” I said when at length I had regained my voice. “You have murdered those fire-men whose only crime was hard and thankless work.”

  “Yes,” he said, “there were eight dead. No more than the number of dead in your Rotherhithe Tunnel when it suffered a breach. The digging, the stoking, these are not easy jobs, and they are not purveyed as safe. Those who take them up are decently rewarded, and part of that reward is compensation for the knowledge, freely dispensed, that at any instant the tunnel might cave, the furnace blow.”

  “You cannot make the comparison between the two,” I said. “The one was an accident. The other? A planned and deliberate act of war.”

  “It was not a war I myself declared,” said the captain. “Rather one waged upon me, and my family, and my city. A war in which I sustained the most grievous of losses: the lives of those who mattered to me more than all else. But that is prologue, and I wish to speak of the future.

  “M. Brunel. You have wisdom and knowledge unparalleled, and in so many realms.” (I here made note of the fact that he used the French “monsieur,” a nod to my heritage and schooling, but in defiance of my nationality.) “You are now a passenger aboard an example of engineering as advanced as you will find anywhere on the globe. It was built by the late H. Lal of Bombay and by me. Yet even our Neptune has limitations, ones which if truth be told are significant. The system for scrubbing the air is haphazard and precludes the longer stays beneath the seas. The auxiliaries are powered by batteries designed and built by these hands, but the span of their utility is short. And the main motive power is steam, a mechanism not ideally suited for the underwater purpose. The hull is well-wrought but for it to withstand the pressures of the depths to which I would like to take this craft it needs to be sturdier still—without added weight I might add. The propellers, following your designs, have real strengths. But I believe in my heart that there are far more efficient means of undersea propulsion. Which will be to the screw propeller as that propeller was to the wooden oar.

  “So you see, M. Brunel: these are problems which are sufficiently knotty to engage a mind the calibre of your own. And should we find solutions—practical and elegant, as has been the Brunel hallmark—why then together we shall make history.”

  Again it took a while to regain speech, due not to paralytic drug this time but rather to astonishment. “Our work together”? I would sooner open my wrists and let the blood flow out than assist this murderer, these blasphemous ambitions. And on top of it all, something worse: the presumption that “we” had something in common other than the rope of hatred that together binds captor and captive. My reply, therefore, was short, and meant to cease conversation rather than encourage it.

  “No.”

  He went on as if I’d said nothing at all: “It is only natural that you should feel the way you do now. I would have no respect for a man whose inner fibers were so limp that he bent this-way, that-way, acceding to each and every argument. But in the course of time, when you have taken pause to consider the situation, and to consider the contribution you might make to enterprise and human progress, I have hope, indeed, I have every faith, that you will reconsider.

  “In the meanwhile know that from this minute forth you have the run of the ship. You are my guest here. And there are discoveries that I have made, mighty ones, I wish to share with you. I see the protest in your eyes and the sadness as well. Believe with all your heart, that if there had been an alternative way of securing your collaboration, I would have availed myself of it. As it is—”

  “And this vessel which you have commissioned. In which I am entombed,” I interrupted. “Why was it built? And to what foul end do you traverse the seas?”

  “Toward the realization of human freedom.”

  “Even as you keep me enslaved.”

  The captain made no response. It became clear, via his silence, that the contradiction weighed more heavily upon me than upon him.

  “Where are we?” I then asked.

  “We are beneath the Thames. Within our limitations—and those limitations are severe, or we’d not have summoned you—we are seaworthy. Though most of the journey will be made upon the surface rather than below it we have the ability to get from here to there. Now I must go and attend to other matters. In the interim please make your needs known. I shall close the door for your own privacy. But I shall not lock it.” Then: “In some fifteen minutes there is something I would like to show you, and unless I am quite mistaken, it is something you, M. Brunel, would be uniquely interested to see.” And with that he was gone.

  I heard his departing footsteps, boots echoing against the metal gangway then growing more faint, ‘til all I could hear were the sounds of the ship. The thrum and clang of the engine, the susurration of steam through pipe, the movings about of the crew. Then I heard, echoing down the metal corridors, an organ, a
pipe organ! The opening phrase of a toccata by Bach! Tentative steps, octave-doubled, descending. A low note established, built upon. Resolving into D-minor chord. Then up and down in a trail of sixteenth-notes, as if illustrating the ascent and descent of a sub-marine craft.

  And as the music unfolded—up and down, single notes and clusters, flurries and sostenutos, discords and resolutions—my thoughts once again focused on the extraordinary concatenation of circumstances that had become my life.

  I spent a quarter of an hour alone with my thoughts while the organ played on—who but a madman, working within the drastically confined spaces of a sub-marine vessel, situates at its center a pipe organ? And enveloped in that music I allowed myself to shed tears, at first slowly, then in a great onrush. I felt ashamed and undignified, relieved only that my unmanliness could not here been seen or made note of. By the time the captain knocked on my door my eyes were dry and my cheeks free of trace. “You will accompany me,” he said. It was almost—not quite—an invitation. My thoughts turned from the contemplation of my own mortality to a kind of curiosity about the thing, person, or event the captain wished me to see.

  We turned right, walked down the narrow gangway which debouched onto a suite of rooms. The salon was filled with roll’d-up charts, a variety of sextants, an astrolabe. Lined up across the shelves all manner of tomes on oceana, ichthyology, atmospheric studies could be seen, as well as works of philosophy and classic literature. They seemed to be alphabetized by author without respect to language which led me to believe that our captain was polyglot, conversant not only in English, but also French, Greek, and Latin, and perhaps even Arabic. There were a surpassing number of books in Hindi, reinforcing my sense of the subcontinental origins of the captain and those who followed his directives. I was not surprised to see the complete works of Arago, but there was also much from the experimentalist Faraday, and from Léon Foucault, whose work on the rotation of the earth, and with the gyroscope, would of course be of interest here. I was vaguely surprised and to a small degree disturbed to find so many books (down here) that were identical to those I kept in my own library (up there).

  The adjacent chamber contained the pipe organ, surprisingly large in size. “Do you see those pipes?” said the captain. “They were wrought in collaboration with the extraordinary Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, whose habitual impecuniosity rendered him susceptible to my patronage. They are crafted not from any of the traditional materials but rather from the horns of sea mammals. Cavaillé-Coll and I have constructed those manuals I most treasure: the Aeoline, the Lieblichgedeckt, the Chalumeau, the Bearded Gamba. The Vox Humana. And, of course: the Clarín de Mar.

  “I aim to want nothing that the sea fails to provide. The surface of the globe is far more of water than of land, as you know, by a proportion of some three to one. Yet as a resource the seas are monstrously untapped. The keys of my little device are of sea-ivory and they are as felicitous to the touch as anything made from the tusks of elephants.”

  Particularly in a sub-marine craft, where each cubic foot of mass displaces similar quantity of air, it is strange to find that which is not strictly necessary. I could only assume that he was sustained by these objects in ways that overruled the intellect.

  On the wall opposite hung several paintings, the only one of which I recognized was a portrait of the writer Baudelaire, done by Gustave Courbet. In full confession I know this only because I saw that very portrait in a salon in Paris to which I was taken by Mary Elizabeth on holiday when she wanted to make some visitings on the Continent. I endeavored to slip away because I wanted to be alone with my own thoughts and in particular to revisit by foot and in no one’s company the streets of l’île du Palais and other loci connected in my mind to great sentiment. But the schedule that Mary Elizabeth fashioned for us did not admit of this possibility. My mind was elsewhere when I toured with her yet still I believe that the portrait that I saw on the captain’s wall was either the same painting—or perhaps one much like it with the same subject and by the same hand.

  Also in the salon was a chess table and cabinet, the pieces arrayed mid-game, with a ceramic figure whose arm, slid along by pantograph, seemed poised to make the next move. I had read of this—the “Mechanical Turk”—yet had never seen, let alone this closely, such a fine clockwork automaton.

  Perhaps even more extraordinary was a clock—large, free-standing, ornate—what is called in horological circles a bracket clock, four-sided with feet at the bottom: solid brass cubes topped with wood topped with a dark marbled rock as if it were less a timepiece than a palace. Set into the side walls of this chrono-palace were two additional timepieces, one lunar, one sidereal. And atop all of them was Earth, the planet Earth, seemingly afloat without support within brass circles horizontal and vertical, in the manner of an orrery.

  I stared at it for the longest time (enough to register the movement of the hands). Here was the planet Earth, its continents of gold, its seas and oceans of blue stone. And on the outer ring of this orrery: a tiny ivory ball, representing the Moon. I found myself increasingly entranced, ‘til I could scarce look away, at that moon, that tiny ivory ball. It had a whited translucence which I have in no other context seen, as if one were looking through as much as at. It was etched in finest filigree, a scrimshaw allowing glimpse of the still-smaller sphere within—and, perhaps, the smaller-still within the sphere within. The pull of that Moon on my inner tides was substantial—if uninterrupted I might have stared upon that Moon for a full lunar month as it circumnavigated its beautifully wrought Earth.

  “You’re wanting to know something of the clock’s origins, and of how it came to rest within the Neptune.“ It was not, as he phrased it, a question.

  “I am an engineer and as such never incurious,” I replied.

  “It was a gift,” he said, “from the nation of France to the Ottoman Empire, a thank-you for the Ottoman troops seconded to the French during the Crimean War. And so it was borne by carriage from Paris to Kostantiniyye where it was received by the Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid. As you know, I do not believe in the artificial demarcation of nation-states and so the gift from one ‘state’ to another was not by me recognized. By means of a substitution there is a now a replica in residence at Topkapi, and the real one before us now.”

  He gestured to the clock, said “it is time,” then gestured away from it toward a circular concavity set into the wall. It was covered with thin, overlapping metal blades. The captain pushed a button inlaid into the wall carving and at once there was a mechanical whirr—electrical motors?—and the curved thin blades slid as if anchored at individual pivots yet ganged so as to move in concord. The effect was that of an opening up, as the iris of the human eye when finding itself in conditions of darkness expands to admit more light: an outspreading circle of vision, from a pinpoint in the center to a circular window perhaps five feet in diameter. On the other side of the aperture was a convex window of glass with brass mullions. And beyond the glass: the inky-black water of the river beneath whose surface we at the moment were gliding.

  “You have been in a diving bell, am I not right, M. Brunel?”

  “I have.”

  “And when you were in that bell, what were you able to see of the sub-marine world outside?”

  I thought, and decided it best to give the answer straightforward. “Little, or nothing.”

  The captain seemed almost to smile. “That is only natural. The diving bell was designed for its specific purpose, which was to maintain air pressure within a vessel so that humans could be lowered beneath the surface of a river or sea. The Neptune is designed for a purpose different: that of exploration. How do we obtain knowledge? By the five senses, the most useful of which for these purposes is sight. So let me say to you, fiat lux.” And with that he pressed a second button held in the indented position by latch. Immediately there was the snap and sputter of a carbon arc—and the sea outside the viewing glass was illuminated, as bright as the day! Though the murk of the water wa
s substantial, and undissolved solids swarmed about in the swath of light occluding long-range sight, there was the ability to see into the depths as hypnotic as it was to me unprecedented. Looking downward I saw the murky bottom of the river, and then a hump, a rise, near-circular in its shape, as if we were gazing at some fantastic immobile eel. As we drew closer I could make out regular patterns upon its back—scales?—and irregularly placed lumps along its spine. I did not know whether to gaze upon it in awe or with real fright.

  The dilemma was resolved as I drew closer and saw that what I’d imaged as scales were really bricks; what I’d seen as spiny lumps were sandbags; and that what I looked upon was no monstrous sleeping eel, nay, but rather the tunnel of my own crafting! It was the Rotherhithe-Wapping tunnel, as seen from the outside!

  “I had thought,” said the captain, “that you would want to see this.” And despite my despair—and the abject nature of my circumstance—and criminal nature of my confinement—and the large distress that I can only imagine my burial had created in the hearts of my family—I was, in the moment, content. To be at that specific vantage, viewing what I’d heretofore only imagined.

  I gazed for a small eternity, examining the way the bricks of the tunnel were laid into the river-bottom silt. The curvature which the Shield system of construction allowed. The fortuity of the location of the sandbags, having landed more-or-less where we—placing them blindly and without visual confirmation—had intended. And then, around the tunnel, the varieties of flora that had already attached themselves to the tunnel wall in a manner that would create, in time, a seal tighter than any we could by hand of man have constructed. All enveloped by the thick and impenetrable Thames, conduit for all manner of human jetsam, the detritus of a large and swarming city, of its motley inhabitants, its mills and manufactories, the discards, castoffs, and wastes shat out once the beast that is London has been fed. You cannot comprehend—’less you have seen it—that slow balletic dance: the beauty, unearthly and sublime, that lives above the bed of our river, and below its surface smooth.