—The New York Times
18th June.
FIFTEEN
IN WISHING THAT you understand my captivity, forgive me if I now—as promised at the commencement of this journal, but postponed until this instant—limn some moments lived by the younger Isambard, moments that have marked and haunted all the hours since. Events from childhood too small and interior to have been caught in the skein of history, ne’er having been conveyed to another soul, & hence would perish with me were I not to transcribe them here, on this page, in this ink derived from the blackness a cephalopod does throw out when needing to protect itself from imminent threat.
I was born in Portsmouth, the very name of which denotes shipping lanes and the might of English sea power. My father though was French, and when he’d saved up enough to do so sent me back to his homeland for, as he put it, proper education. I had then fourteen years of age and did not want to leave, nor did my mother see the necessity. The decision was neither mine nor hers. As to why my father wished to exile me, your speculation will likely be no more informed than mine own. I do know that he loved his native land but had left, in ruin, when contracted to manufacture some 80,000 boots by the military, for which boots, after Waterloo, there was no demand. He sought a new life first in New York, then London, then Portsmouth, supplying the Royal Navy with pulley blocks of his own design. There was money in it, enough to send me away.
Thus, following a sea-roiled, bilious trip across the Channel (my first experience upon the waves), did I report to the Lycée Henri-IV in the rue Clovis, hard by the Panthéon in the heart of the Quartier Latin. I’d brought what they’d packed for me: a small trunk full of clothes and a Hadley’s quadrant of ebony and brass (would that it were with me now! or I with it!) that my father had fashioned, by hand, while a naval cadet in the West Indies. It was my father’s hope that I would matriculate to one of the Grandes Écoles, thence to sea. It was not a hope I shared.
On the rare free afternoon at the Lycée, I would walk to the Seine, up the rue Saint-Jacques and over the pont au Double to l’île du Palais. It was the custom in our circle to eat bread and cold meat on the very tip of the island, past the municipal buildings, past the somewhat disreputable Place Dauphine, at the apex of an acute triangle that represented, in a sense, the phantom extensions of the Île’s quai de l’Horloge—where I was boarding at number 79 with the Breguets—and the quai des Orfèvres. The river flowed by on either side, then met up with itself. There was a tree under whose boughs one might sit and eat and contemplate. Under that tree, on the tip of that island (and here I summon the courage to set down these words) I had never felt more desolated or alone, in need of home, and of my mother. The absence would grow within me until the void was larger than my chest could contain. I would pull my shoulders down, knees in, so that none of this would be visible, while everyone else laughed or sang or played odd games with chalk. I would imagine myself not on the point of an island but rather the prow of a ship.
Yet if for a moment I was able to transform my solitude into captaincy, know that the moment did neither linger nor persist. Within three or four breaths, ten or twelve beats of the heart, I was aware once more of the prison that kept me apart from human commerce, and apart from my dreams.
I did not know that my life was not my real life until V_______e walked by. To set a line between what was past and all that was to become. I was fourteen years of age when in one stopped moment I had—with all the suddenness of a tunnel flood—a past. And because I had a past I now had something I before had not: a future. I hope these words can be comprehended by anyone who has seen, as I have, the person walking by who changes all.
When she left down Place Dauphine toward the rue de Harley I had fears larger and more pressing than all the fears of my life: to wit, that I would never see her again. ‘Twas not a vague and looming fear such as low thick clouds on the horizon of an otherwise clear sky. Rather: a stab in the chest. Let me make my admission here, and to the person who reads these words, that V_______e, or, rather, thoughts of V_______e, have been, over the years, my château d’Espagne!
When I saw V_______e that morning on the place Dauphine I knew she would be in my mind that moment and each moment and every moment afterward. How is it even possible I knew so much in one instant? An instant now become worn, polished, as rock smoothed and rounded by the currents of time. I wonder now whether my last thoughts will be of that moment on the île du Palais. And I suspect, or even know, that they shall be (just as they were when for the first time I approached my death, tunneling from Rotherhithe to Wapping, beneath the Thames).
May I speak of that now? You know of the public triumph; yet that tunnel for me had been an enterprise of continuous dread. The sewage’d water seeping in from the river without, it ferried with it the methane gas from which my father took ill, and which rendered his frame-maker hors de combat. I was pressed into service.
It was again not a decision to which my own sentiments were a contributing factor. Might one imagine a more dread-filled occupation than to descend each morning beneath the river, with nothing separating Me from It save a Shield designed by my father? Muck and gas and constant muffled noise; the stink of the river mud that ne’er went away. And the pressure, of which we were never for an instant unawares, of the river, seeking by every means and at each instant to crush those beneath it. There was nothing to do but push back. Twelve feet in a good week, eight feet on a bad one. The pushing was always a matter of inches. I was twenty-one years old.
On 12th January 1828, a cold and dispiriting morning, the river did come at us. The moment was like an onrushing doom, sensed before felt, felt before heard, heard before seen, seen before hit. And what a hit! In chest full force as if by wooden ram. My head snapped forward then back as rib and gut pummeled, my whole body tossed upside down. Then: the slowing of time, the second hand moving with the deliberation of an hour hand. And in that distended instant I did see V_______e walking on the rue Dauphine as if for the first time and with clarity that lacked all blur of memory. It was happening at that very moment. But I was also clubb’d by water and I was also dying. Is there explication, other than Fate—or, perhaps, V_______e as angel guardian—for the fact that I was carried by that fierce cataract to a place I could lay hold of the rail rope? And thence, salvation? I used the rail rope to head back down, hand over hand, and was able to grab two of my diggers, assist them back to land. Others they were not so fortunate.
But now the light in my room, via the luminescence of a glass bulb, has dimmed. I shall recommence in the morning, or whatever passes for such in our sunless realm. We are heading south now, down from the Pole, through the Bering Sea. The ocean will be Pacific; my thoughts far less so. As the giddy energy concomitant with finding oneself alive ebbs out, what is left is the dullness, and dread, and the ongoing captivity. Perhaps there is a devil’s bargain to be made: I do his bidding, assist with his infernal tasks, rebuild his sub-marine ship on some lost south sea atoll. And in return he sets me free.
E’en that seems chimera. I have never been farther from home.
SIXTEEN
The Great Eastern and the Atlantic Cable.
WE ARE AUTHORIZED by Mr. CYRUS W. FIELD to state that the announcement which has appeared in print, that the steamship Great Eastern has been sold to the French Government, is untrue. The Great Eastern was sold by auction for £25,000, her purchasers being Messrs. GOOCH, BARBER, BRASSEY and others, who have formed a company under the title of the “Great Ship Company.” This Company have chartered her to lay the Atlantic cable before the 31st of December, and if the cable is successfully laid, they are to receive £50,000 in shares of the Atlantic Telegraph Company.
Soon after the purchase of the Great Eastern, her present owners were addressed by a French firm, as to what terms she could be purchased for by the French Government. The response was that, after the Atlantic cable was laid, the steamer could be purchased for £25,000, since when nothing further had been received fro
m the French Government at the time Mr. FIELD left England.
—The New York Times
22nd May.
SEVENTEEN
I DID NOT know, at the time, that the thing was a Regalecus glesne. That taxonomy came later, when we were afforded the leisure to consult the books in the captain’s study. In the moment, though, there was less knowledge than confusion, and no small portion of the fright-unto-death. Let me recount in the order in which the events themselves did unfold.
It was my second summer aboard Neptune. I was up on deck as is my custom. (The Neptune, though outfitted as a sub-marine vessel, spends most of her time riding atop the waves, for reasons herein previously recounted regarding capability, issues of engineering, including but not limited to motive force, the crisis of dead air, &c.) The sky was a relentless blue with wispy Cirrus clouds if clouds at all, and so the various deckmen were bent to their tasks without disparity from the days before.
And yet is it not with this kind of unremarked and unremarkable routine that all tales of terror commence? Then there was a noise, a clamor, a loud Pop like the burst of a balloon: it was aft, near the engine quarters. But that Pop was but the getter of attention, ‘cause once all eyes were turned, there was a far louder Burst from the aft boilers, and with son came also lumière, in the form of a piercing flash of light from the aft. And at the same instant one of the claddings, a ferrous plate perhaps two foot square, lifted into the air. Even as it did I was in some far part of mind calculating the force necessary to raise said mass such distance, a force legibly of substantial magnitude, if one take into account the necessary shearing of the rivets. It was clear that something had gone Quite Wrong.
I was put in mind, even as the raised iron cladding commenced its downward arc, of the breach, and collapse, when the tunnel ‘neath the Thames commenced its flood. And as in that influx (though I was then a far younger man than at present) I ran toward, rather than from. So without meditation I made my way astern, but even to say, “made my way” implies consciousness, when in the instant there was none. Better to say: that I.K.B. found himself at the Neptune‘s aftmost deck, gazing through the steam at the place where the section of cladding had moments before been integrally fastened— And beyond it, to the waters abaft.
Much happened in a period of time far shorter than it now takes to set down here the description. Among the thoughts or near-thoughts that passed through my uppermost mind in that instant: we were witnessing a catastrophe. It would be revealed, likely between the tick and its subsequent tock, if this moment be the Neptune‘s last—and correspondingly, ours. So my gaze was in part involuntary—in the way one stares into the abîme—yet in other ways diagnostic, in using the perceptive powers and those senses available to ascertain the cause of the failure, and then, on the basis of that knowledge, to plot a course of action that might save us from extinction.
In this half-second it was the engineer, not the man or the prisoner, who commandeered the wheelhouse internal.
Now that all accounts have been collated, I believe that Engineer Brunel was the first to espy the efficient cause of our disaster. Because as my gaze moved laterally from deck to rent cladding to sea, I espied a fish, nay, a school of fish, following (as fish at times do) the Neptune‘s course, swimming in the wake, perhaps accepting Neptune—despite its inorganic nature and composition—as the lead fish, or perhaps merely drawn, by the movement of current and variation in the underwater pressure, into the backwash.
Nor were these fish of the kind we customarily in that wake observed: the small pilot-fish, the sardines, the occasional dolphin. No, these were long things, more eel-like than fish-like. Sea-snakes. Snakes that were somehow ocean-borne rather than wriggling sidewise on desert land, or emerging vertical from the basket of your subcontinental flautist. I now know these to be Regalecus glesne, more commonly called, “oarfish.” But in the moment, on the stern of the Neptune, I did know only three things:
• That there was a school of inordinately, nay, unimaginably long fish trailing our craft;
• That one of those fish, adjudging from the way its latter half protruded from the starboard aftward intake pipe, had clogged said pipe, preventing the ingress of air, and perhaps in doing so had provided the efficient cause of the explosion; and
• That further, and more pressingly, another of these unfathomably long fish was heading, either by its own main force or by the suction that the intake pipe did generate, into the main aft intake; and that its girth would be sufficient to clog the larger pipe, thence bringing about an explosion far larger than that which had attracted our attention in the first place!
Again what happened happened, with the action preceding the thought and absent any decision on the part of myself. I immediately (to use once again that mystifying and inadequate phrase) found myself in the water! With yet no memory or sense impression of having jumped! The one instant I was perceiving the fish, the pipe, the disaster-to-come; and in the next I was fully clothed in the equatorial Pacific, and swimming arm-over-arm astern (in this aided by the still-forward momentum of the Neptune). And in that next instant (for this was not a narrative, but rather a succession of moments! an archipelago of mind!) I was headed for, and then grabbing, the fish.
• My arms were round it, embracing.
• My full being engaged in tightening that embrace, that I might prevent its hindquarters from going where its forequarters had already gone, viz., into the pipe.
• A saline tang in the nose, salt and sharpness ascending to brain and illuming the traceries therein.
• It was not just the tide I was fighting, no, the fish, too, worked to free itself from my grasp, as if it possessed intellect, and as if, more, that intellect were pointed toward the full destruction of the Neptune and all those aboard.
• Now a glimpse of firmament, radiant, saturated, numinous. A full azure from here to the heavens. Discerned in that long moment with more clarity than in my life up to that point I had known, or known to be possible.
I was in true danger of being the drowned man, yet in the instant was of that unaware, or, if aware, unminding. And then I was pulling, at first by inch, then by foot, the long and (in this circumstance) deadly creature from the pipe in which it had become lodged. I braced feet against the hull while my arms with scant leverage did the grasping and pulling. I do not know how I did this and then it was done.
There was a noise of anti-suction as the head were freed; and another noise, from the deck, of the day crew, cheering me, and applauding me, and the captain too, though he were not clapping as were some of the others, yet gazing down with beneficence and, I took it, gratitude. It was clear that they had grasped what had in front of their eyes occurred with a perception that exceeded in those rapid moments mine own. Next I knew I was once again aboard the Neptune (did they haul me up? did I climb of my own strength and accord? was I from drowning saved, or did I from drowning save myself?) and being wrapped in coarse wool blanketry, and rubbed, and brought belowdecks that I might be dried and warmed.
As they performed these acts of rescue and remediation the crew referred to me, as were their custom, as “Huzoor”—a word that in their language means, quite simply, The Presence, but which is most customarily employed with reference to Englishmen. But in that appellation, where in my time aboard Neptune was only the stigma of difference, was now, were I hearing correctly, some measure of respect. As if in their eyes they had this day discovered that being English, and being a man of courage, were not in their entirety exclusive. By dint of birth I was, it is clear, their enemy; but by dint of behavior, a fellow sailor.
Thus: when they enwrapped me in wool, and rubbed it to erase the chill of the dark water in which I had been dipt, ‘twas not merely the efficacy of sound practice but also the affection that one man of the sea to another will display. It is not remarked, or mentioned, or anywhere writ down, yet I have seen it among dockhands, among welders. And I did today see it manifested from the crew of the Neptune t
oward its prisoner, despite the lack of common language, save the one which the sea to all who sail upon her provides.
After I was warmed and did myself rest there was a rat-tat at the door and I was summoned to the table of our captain. The table was draped in white cloth, with finer napery than I had to that moment seen aboard this craft. And the tableware were silver, and the knife at each plate (it were the two of us, and the two of us only) handled of horn or, I presumed, sea ivory, in keeping with the predilection of the captain to obtain his viand and accouterment from the oceans on and beneath which he sailed. The iris opened full; and even though the craft was sailing as ship rather than as sub-marine, it was still possible to see through the captain’s Large Glass the wash and glide of particles below the waterline. Our meal commenced with circles of white meat, pleasantly resistant to the chew yet tasty. I nodded (in thanks, in satisfaction) and asked, “Octopus?”
“Squid,” he responded. “The octopus is a creature of true intelligence—more than that of the human in some aspects. I would not capture or kill it. It would be the victory of might over intellect, and in that there be no triumph.”
I wondered, but did not state, the contradiction evident—here was a person who showed little hesitation before, nor compunction in the moment, nor remorse afterward, in my kidnapping, and in the deliberated murder of his fellow man. And yet would not (or so he proclaimed) place an octopus (such as I had eaten at the Athenaeum, and in other fine residences of London) upon his plate. That in his ethics the captain drew the line in ways jagged, curved, was not to me a revelation; yet with each example his redistricting of the moral map grew more confounding.
The knife, the ivory-handled knife in front of me, was no butter knife, no. It was pointed, and sharp, and if it was well-equipt for dispatching viand, it was also equally well-wrought for mayhem. A plunge of that knife would penetrate a man’s chest and a subsequent twist dispatch him to his doom. Why would our captain provide me, so close at hand, with the means by which I might, should I choose, send him to his Acheron?
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