The Great Eastern

by Howard Rodman

  And in recalling that image now there is much pleasure—as my time spent in that building was nothing but pain—but in the dream the pulverization was equable and unperturbing—as was my good man Gravatt bobbing up and down—or the Fellows at their table—

  And then through what feat of dreamer’s logic I saw myself! I was bound to a plank propped upright on the deck of the Great Eastern—perhaps my darkest hour. And then by the sort of effortless transition of dream I was not regarding myself but rather was within myself looking out, unable to move as much as eyelid as the Wave approached. As it neared it became taller yet the breadth of the base was invariant. I knew as I watched it would topple—the ratio too steep to permit otherwise. And it was then that I began to feel the fear—that I would die and nothing to be done about it—that I would in a matter of moments become entombed in water—my least favorite imagining of my own demise now come to pass. (Why is it that in dreams the worst fear becomes actualized—and repeatedly at that?) And so my heart pounded thick and fierce within my chest even as my chest was about to be trapped beneath how many imperial tons of water.

  I watched as the highest and most acute peak of the Wave began to topple forward, momentum o’ercoming structural coherence. Moving forward but also downward now with terrible force. There was no impediment to the slow but certain breaking and the cascade of death soon to come. I felt my heart pound with e’en more rapidity, more force than it would seem my chest could bear. I was about to die and did not want to die!

  Then the Wave broke upon me just like that. I breathed and what I breathed was not air but water. Stinging throat and lungs. Salty like blood or like the sea. Sharp intake of breath. And then I was dead.

  In all dreams previous that I can recall, my death in the dream was succeeded, and immediately so, by wakening, such that the death in the dream was the birth into consciousness.

  But in last night’s dream—and it flees from me even as I write, hélas!—there was no wakening. I was dead and swept up into the Wave now careening now submerging now tossed now pulled along. Yet though dead I was able to see, and also perceive sounds!

  And so the light filtered through the water in ways that had some beauty in them. The sounds were all low—muffled—slowed down. And the panic which I have here described was replaced by a calm. As if—being dead—I had been relieved of the obligation to fear. Nothing could harm me now. I was past all concern, all dread, all anticipation. Content to be flotsam, carried along, carried under.

  At some length the random to-ings and fro-ings of the Wave coalesced into motion counterclockwise. A swirl, a vortex, wide at the top, but with a downward spiral, so that with each revolution I was be carried down into a circle e’er smaller, deeper, more swift. I knew somehow that this was my Passage—from Death into some After-life. There was no vertigo but a slow, protracted calm, deepening with each turn of the funnel. And then I saw her! On the opposite side of the funnel: miles away yet sharp as if above ground and in brightest daylight. Not Mary Elizabeth but V_______e and she was there and she was spinning with synchronous velocity that we were always opposite and though all moved we were of constant aspect with respect to each other and in fact approaching—becoming closer—with each turn of the funnel. But always out of reach. It is like the first time I saw her, on île du Palais, walking back from the “prow” of my island ship—

  Abruptly I was awake in my chamber aboard the Nautilus, the ship beneath the sea and the sea beneath tropic sun, nary a cloud or so I imagine from zenith to horizon. The dream—as I had hoped or in some ways feared—did in that instant fade.

  But I recall V_______e’s face— And the weight of years, taken by the spiral of time, and from time’s maelström ne’er to be reclaimed.

  * * *

  —

  WE HAVE CHARTED, this time round, a route to the North Atlantic far more sane that the one that brought us here. We shall follow the path of the Roaring Forties (would that we moved by sail, and could take advantage), round Cape Horn, up past Trinidad, across the Equator (enriching, of course, the captain’s butts of Madeira), up the North Atlantic, then home.

  As I write we have rounded the Cape without incident and are hugging the shore of the South American continent. To our port are Salvador, Recife. The captain brought us as close to Rio as he could without risking our being sighted, then put himself near shore via skiff, as a one-man boat, a lascar at its helm, met him in mid-harbor, laden with periodicals and certain provisions. The captain wanted to reacquaint himself with the things of the world, the news of the world without touching land, without lingering any longer than was absolute necessary, that the stain of civilization not spread to his hands.

  I do know that I in this journal wrote more regularly, and at greater length, in times of catastrophe, or when in the slough of despond. And I still vow to write when occasion merits. Now, though, I am being summoned to dine with the captain, to be followed, as has become our custom, with Verdelho, then sea-cheroot. Then to bed, knowing that even in my sleep each minute brings me closer to my home. And to that moment when my life, and my afterlife, having split violent and tragic in the fall of 1859, once again converge. As the Seine meets itself at the tip of the Île. As a cask of Sercial, having crossed the Equator twice, returns now, matured and ready, to Madeira.

  I realize now that I have neglected to set down any record of our encounter with the blackbirders. (Perhaps neglected, viz., because not wanting it to be memorialized?) Of all the hours of my life, ‘tis not the one I’d want to recall when preparing for my quietus. Yet if this journal is for uppermost thoughts, I cannot escape the obligation to here set down some words.

  In naval battle, such as the world has heretofore known, the attacks they were made at night, with the advantage thereby of surprise. But now, for the first time in history as I know it or have seen it recorded, we were able to approach unnoticed in sunlight, under clear skies, as we were underneath and could not be seen from above. When we became visible, when we ascended, we were already lying abeam. The wootz of the prow and of the tower did engage with the wood of their ship, not piercing it, but conjoining our ships so that they were now, in effect, one. I stayed below, in the captain’s study, while the sturdier among the crew, and some who with the captain had served in the rebellion of the sepoy, made their way out the top hatch, up the hawsers of the pirate vessel, some armed with sword, others with pistol. If the truth were to be told, I did not see them climb the hawsers, daggers clenched between teeth. But I did hear it, and I did imagine the image that would be in concordance with the sounds I did at that moment hear, of bodies on metal, bodies on wood.

  What I find I have neglected to say, and do say now: that the captain was the first through the hatch and, I do believe, the first to board the thieving ship. As I am not a young man, and have no training in the military arts, or e’en fisticuffs, I remained with Nautilus along with a small number of sailors: a skeleton crew if you will. I was alone in the study. The iris’d window was full open, but as we were at right angles to that other ship, could see but naught.

  A quarter hour or so did pass (I know this by the clock, not by sense of time internal, as time will dilate when one is in moments of love and battle). Then I heard footsteps o’erhead, and the shouts triumphant of the crew as they commenced to return. I wanted to know many details and moments of the fight on that ship as I remained safe in this one. And also: did not want to know.

  Then came through the hatchway a sailor. I knew in the instant, by clothes and skin, he was not one of ours. I had thought that we had boarded their craft: were they now boarding ours? These thoughts were superseded by one more specific and pressing, viz., the sailor I had never seen had a long knife in his left hand, and was headed toward me. He then did lunge, and slash. Without reflection I did hold my arm in front of my chest to protect it and thus was my hand that was cut and not the body’s core. A slash, long and deep, across the flat of my palm.

  The sailor he raised his arm on hig
h to slash anew when the expression on his visage it did change. From combatant’s rage to something else. A look of odd surprise. Then within the instant he was face-down on the floor of the captain’s study, and only then did I see the knife protruding from his back. And behind him, framed in the hatchway: the captain himself. Who had saved my life. E’en as the shouts from abovedeck, in subcontinental lilt and cadence, assured me that the battle was over and had been won.

  Captain Nemo he did bind my wound himself, but before doing so did something that then, and now, I do find remarkable. He took self-same knife that he used to retire the man who attacked me, wiped it clean upon his waistcoat, and then did slash his own palm and held it to mine, that my blood (or small portion thereof) did now run in his veins, and an equal portion of his did now run in mine: the Captain’s dusky blood in the body of your Engineer. I do not know how to think of this, or of what effect it may have, upon my thoughts and actions, as I continue to live out the days that have been given to me, the beats my heart has been allotted.

  NINETEEN

  I LOOK BACK on those words above that I preprandially indited, the ink scarce dry, with a dark and bitter laugh. What madness on my part, or what stupidity (and the determination of which seems little to matter) that I did believe I was headed to port! It is enough to create in me a fury at my capacity for delusion of the self. How had I come to take his word as his bond?

  The captain it seems did in Rio come by some newspapers (in Portuguese!). And in reading those periodicals did come across mention of a certain Cyrus Field, American. A magnate of telegraphy, having presided o’er the major cables of the United States, and now, with the backing of his government (the legislators thereof being, it is said, in his pocket) commencing to set down, upon the ocean’s floor, a copper line between England and her former colony.

  I had been previously apprised of the captain’s enmity toward entities telegraphic. The cables in and among the Princely States of India were, the captain did on more than one occasion maintain, the greatest military advantage held by the British, enabling their forces to communicate in ways that the rebels could not, with the resultant victory of Crown over sepoy insurrectionaries. (Mindful of the captain’s personal journey, what with loss of wife and family, I did ne’er bring up the subject of the Mutiny, and always trod lightly when he brought it up himself.) Still: the enterprise of Mr. Field seemed at far remove from any conceivable theater of engagement.

  “Are you at war with the United States,” I asked him.

  “They—and all of civilization, to use the term they arrogate to themselves—are at war with me.” He exhaled, the smoke from his sea-cheroot sucked upward toward the Nautilus‘s much-improved ventilation. “They have made two attempts at laying such cable, and those attempts have failed. This is for them the do-or-die, and I am determined that it be the latter.”

  My glass drained, my sea-cheroot nearer stern than stem, I was about to excuse myself when the captain he commenced to take a chart-on-a-pole from the rack, smooth it out upon the table, and explain. “We are here. The cable runs, or will attempt to run, here: from County Kerry to Newfoundland. The ship that pays out the cable, the one that has just now left Ireland, that is the one we want.”

  “When I’ve reclaimed my life,” I said to him, “you may pursue your château d’Espagne, much as I shall pursue mine.”

  “There isn’t time,” he said.

  And I knew, in that instant, that I would be, will-I nill-I, subjected to any and all catastrophe the captain wished to wreak, before e’er again—as promised, as so long promised—finding home.

  Outside it had begun to rain, at first lightly, then with real intensity. The captain picked up the speaking tube, issued orders for this craft—this Nautilus—to dive beneath.

  TWENTY

  WE WENT DEEP, sufficiently so that the storms above would not perturb. (The squall lent a fine, stippled texture to the surface of the sea as seen from below—a surface that, in other atmospheric circumstance, would be as a gentle and silvered mirror.)

  But if the Nautilus beneath those storms was gently sleeping, I.K.B. was not. The tempests above were heard, and felt, with full threat and disturbance. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who writes these lines, wished to curl up, become a chambered mollusk, safe within his carapace, where roil could neither penetrate nor suffuse. But these were storms within, and from that there be no shelter.

  When I woke this morning I saw that something had been slipped under my door. It was a periodical, printed on thin and shiny paper, and in a language I took to be Portuguese. But if the words were for the most part beyond my ken, the meaning was not. It was the saga of the steamship they called o Grande Oriental, and as such was not difficult to decipher. It told her story in chapters, each complemented by appropriate gravure; and while some of these incidents were known to me in their larger contours, having been previously related third- or fourth-hand, their appearance here, in chronological order, and in a narrative designed to give to the navio magnifico the weight of history, could not to me have been more troubling.

  • The Great Eastern‘s great sidewise launch on 3rd November 1857 (failed), on 19th November (failed), on 28th November (failed), grand crowds assembled to attend the one embarrassment after the next—though the penury of Scott Russell, the cause of said embarrassments is, sadly, nowhere mentioned.

  • The explosion on her maiden outing, September 1858, the details of which need not be dwelled upon here.

  • A mutiny shortly thereafter, stemming from dispute about holystoning on Sunday. (The holystoners, as you would imagine, wished to honor the Lord’s day of rest; the captain he did not.) The mutiny was put down with two months’ hard labor for the ringleader, two weeks in the quarry for the rest.

  • Her maiden transatlantic passage in June of 1860, ten days long (not bad! not bad!) yet with only thirty-five paying passengers. As I did read this paragraph, I worked to contain choler, because the management of this ship was in no ways commensurate with the dignity of the ship herself.

  • A subsequent passage from Liverpool carrying a large freight of fish oil, and the resultant stink when the tanks split in rough weather, soaking the hold with extract of cods’ livers, and the seep through all the timbers of the ship, which was, in some respects, good for the wood, but whose odor did with time turn only more pestilential. (A good laugh, despite myself.)

  • A docking in New York in 1861, where the ship’s owners hoped that its sheer size and reputation would attract paying sight-seers, and drinkers too (the ship’s bar, in the sixty-two-foot-long salon, was to be the locus of profit). Perhaps due to the Great Eastern‘s novelty having been exploited the year previous, and perhaps due to the distraction of the great Civil War, scarcely a soul, drunk or sober, set foot upon her decks. (Again, the choler rose, as she was built to transport, not to be gawked at; and the bar was there to service her passengers, not city dwellers in search of floating inebriation.)

  • A mutiny in early 1862 when, what with most able-bodied men having been conscripted in America’s war, a crew of undesirables was crimped into service—with predictable results once the ship left the Americas, and a passenger committee hastily formed to protect the women aboard from the black gang, less interested in stoking than in breaking into the liquor stores.

  • The captaincy of Walter Paton, a “passenger’s man” charming to the gentlemen and even more to their ladies, who with silk tongue did the travelers enchant, but whose inability to anticipate and navigate round a squall resulted in the ship’s being left without screw, paddle, rudder, helpless in the becalmed North Atlantic, and at length limping by sail back to dock in Queenstown, County Cork.

  • The fitment in Queenstown of new steering tackle, and new paddlewheels—four foot smaller in diameter than the ones original to her! (And wished that droit morale, which in France gives painters perpetual say over their art, applied to those whose artistic medium is the steamship!)

  • Her encounter with
a submerged and unseen rock while rounding the Long Island of New York; and the subsequent heroic repair—via evacuated caisson! below the waterline!—as due to its size, no drydock was possible for her. (The rock, formerly unnamed, is now called Great Eastern, in honor of the vessel she quite nearly sank.)

  Throughout all of these, and in accounts interstitial, it was possible to trace a history of Great Eastern after she and I did part ways. ‘Twas not the history I would have imagined. Her fall from grandeur seemed at once steady and precipitous: from Miracle to Anomaly, stopping, en route, at the ports of call Grand Steamliner; Notsogrand Steamliner; Nearempty Vessel; Common Cargo Carrier; Old & Patched-Up; Laughingstock.