The Great Eastern

by Howard Rodman

  But maybe— Just maybe— Because of the Leviathan. Can ye do against the Leviathan? Is there agency, against the Leviathan? Mayhaps. And if there be anyone who can, why then, it’s Ahab. Aha! And so Ahab helms the ship next to the ship that lays the cable. And ye be here with me, only belowdecks, and eating pemmican. I’ve smelled it down there. Smells like shit. No. Smells like salt. Here e’en shit smells like salt. Heaven save us all.

  As to the Why of this ye already know. Yer Ahab has been paid. He hath been compensated to be yer captain. Yes, compensated! Dost thou think thy Ahab labors for the emolument of his own joy? Dip thy wick in a vat of lye. He is paid to watch for Leviathans and when seen to kill them. So that the outward tranquility of the cable-laid cable, and the electric turbulence within, shall continue unperturbed. That an eructation in Ireland will by electricity be known in Newfoundland e’en before the smell leaves the room.

  And so we sail, and so we labor, and so we watch. And so we breathe the salted air and eat the salted meat, cracking our teeth and drying our souls, ‘til we are as dry inside as wet out. And so we take a thick portion of our God-given days and hand them over to Mr. Field. Those of us whose home is on land, we yearn for home; and those of us of no fixed abode, why then, we curse the sea. We quarrel over matters small and ne’er speak of matters large. We haul the lines and trim the sails and watch the northern sun dip below the rim of the gray sea as each sundown follows the one before. And if we are so fortunate as to encounter the Leviathan why then we all shall die. And all in service of a fart in Foilhummerum.

  Let us now review. Should it be the random fault— Should it be the currents— Should it be the bottom of the sea— Then we’re here for naught. The cable, it’ll hold, it’ll hold not. Matters not what we say. Matters not what we do. But! Should it be the whale, the white whale, the great white whale— Then we all shall fight it to the death. So. We be without purpose, without use, taking the time allotted to us and pouring it down the sinkhole. Or. We be with purpose and be doomed. Those be yer choices. End of first day’s lesson, ha!

  Now let’s eat some salt and shit some salt. Have ye e’er drank blood? Yer own blood, or the blood of others? Blood of others is sweeter of course. But what does blood taste like? Like salt. Like salt water. Like the sea. What is a body, what is a human body? A nice little boat made out of ocean. Once ye know that— Aha. Ye know all.

  Ahab lied. When Ahab said we all would die? Ahab lied. Well in a way Ahab did not lie. Because we’re all going to die. Hell we’re dying now. Each breath is one subtracted from the number granted. Each beat of the heart one less before that poor muscle says no mas. (Yes and Ahab he doth speak Spanish too ye landbound blubberwub!) So that’s been settled afore we were born.

  But the lie— The lie was this. I said that should Leviathan be out there we would all perish. Yes and no. Most of us will perish. Die in bad ways. Salt water in the lungs. ‘Til ye be dead of thirst in the middle of an ocean. But not all of us will die. Exempli gratia: Ahab shall not. Ahab shall not perish. Twice before Ahab hath met this beast. Twice before the beast almost got the best of Ahab. Note that word. Almost. Denotes what? Triumph! Had the Leviathan triumphed would ye be hearing these words? No ye would not. Unless this conversation be conducted in Hell.

  So: ye may die but Ahab will endure. ‘Tis what Ahab does. And this time mayhaps Ahab shall stab the Leviathan in the head and pull the blade down and across and up and across and down again. ‘Til oil and life come gushing out and flooding out and slicking the sea with oil and blood and entrails. Until the Leviathan troubles the waters of the earth no more— And Ahab sails home.

  But!

  Home hath Ahab not!

  So we sayeth instead: And Ahab sails on.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE CAPTAIN NEMO he was in his salon among his things. The purpose-built organ (on which he had, just moments ago, been playing Bach’s Pastoral in F-Major); a Niépce photoplate, coated with bitumen of Judea, on which one might, in certain lights, see an etched depiction of a woman with her children, one boy, one girl: positive, now negative, floating just above the polished surface, all that remained of family. The iris’d window; the mechanical Turk; the clock whose orrery contained a specific ivory moon, one that had traveled long to arrive at this place, and to whose microscopic crenellations adhered a lifetime of emotion.

  What occupied him now were the charts upon his chart table, each on a long wooden stick, unrolled now near-flat. The Nautilus was in the North Atlantic and the charts reflected that. They were detailed in latitude and longitude, marked on by hand with the deeper currents, with outcroppings of rock and coral. Nemo’s own charts were now augmented by plots that laid out the more common shipping routes; several Lists of Lights, giving the locations of known lighthouses; tide tables, and a tidal stream atlas; and various ephemerides, as an aid to celestial navigation (including the Alfonsine Tables, and the Prutenic Tables that succeeded them).

  His most prized chart was by the king’s hydrographer, a position established after Admiral Cloudesley Shovell died off the Scilly Isles in October of 1707 following the collision of his ship with a hitherto-uncharted reef. The King decreed that such a loss would never again occur, appointed a Hydrographer Royal. And to this day the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office charts the seas and what lies beneath them with unparalleled precision and reach.

  As Nemo pored and perused he was animated by a sole desire: to extrapolate from what was known the present position of the cable ship; to chart a course intersecting; to sever what cable payed out behind, so that the current endeavor, like so many before it, would be declared failure; and, if possible, to sever the cable in deeper seas, beyond the coastal shelf, so that any subsequent attempts at salvage would come to naught. It would be preferable to sever the cable and have the ship return home in defeat; if that not be possible, Nemo would then prevent the ship from returning.

  He knew even as he studied the plots and tables that were he to sink the cable ship he would be causing loss of life and not in insignificant measure. But this was not a factor in his calculations, nor did it trouble his moral sense. The murder of his children, the death of his wife, the annexation of his state, the slaughter of his countrymen, all of them weighed so heavily upon his balance that no matter where the fulcrum were placed a few English or American lives could scarcely cause disequilibrium. A life, a hundred lives, a thousand lives, were as the twinkling of distant celestial bodies, had all the weight of starlight. He was determined that the cable enterprise fail, and with such resonance fail that it would be attempted ne’er again.

  His first encounter with the world of telegraphy was one of cryptographic tenderness: a message from Madhya, encoded from prying or intervening eyes via the Hoe & Co. telegraph chart, of which chart more shall be said anon. Later, when the Prince was in Cambridge, he did again correspond with Madhya via telegraph, using other shorthands of their own devise. His missives would be taken to a telegraph office and from there transmitted in turn to London, to Paris, thence by rail and other conveyances overland to Geneva, Milan, Zagreb, Plovdiv, Ankara, Baghdad, Tehran, Karachi. They would take weeks or even months to arrive, and at times the missives would, due to the travails of the transit, be lost in entirety. Other times the transit would be by sea, from London to Bombay, thence by train or carriage. This was a more certain route but could be delayed by vagaries in the weather, and by stops en route necessitated by commerce.

  To the young Prince the telegraph was an instrument for conveying, over long distance, love’s exquisite sentiments, its longings, its gratifications. The idea that the telegraph might be purposed as an instrument of commerce, empire, dominion occurred to him secondarily, if at all.

  The full force of telegraphy would hit him only later, in the 1850s, when the Honourable Company began its annexations. It was as much conquest by wire as by militia—an insight rendered acute when, in 1857, the Company offered £20,000 a year for a cable, spanning the Red Sea, from London to India. The p
rince realized that with one swift clip he could do as much damage to empire as with a regiment of fusiliers. Accordingly, when the Neptune departed Bombay on her maiden voyage, she headed west into the Erythraean Sea, across Sindhu Sagar, around Aden, and up into the Red Sea. The cable, he had been told by sympathetic lascars, ran from Suez to Kossier to Suakin to Aden, with a supplementary run from Aden to Karachi via Hallani and Muscat. The undersea run from Suakin to Aden was not the shortest or most direct route across the Red Sea route but was the one, given the colors of the map, deemed by the Company the most geopolitically feasible. It was not hard for Neptune—even within her limited capabilities—to submerge, approach the cable underwater, and then, with pantograph arm, in several places to sever it.

  The proposition seemed simple to him. Wherever the spider of empire sought to weave her web Nemo would snap it. Wherever news was conveyed more quickly than a man could carry it, Nemo would slow it down. He knew from the battles in his own land, he knew from efforts of the Candiotes against Ottoman rule, that rapid communication could only aid the overlord. If you kill an Englishman, another grows in his place. But if you keep the Englishman here from making known his wish to the Englishman there, you’ve won a battle without shot being fired.

  In Nemo’s mind, there was even more to it. What made Bundelkhand its own world was its distance from other realms. His palace was not just nine miles from Jhansi, it was three hours. Jhansi was not just 650 miles from Bombay, it was nine days if you did not for a moment cease your walking, two or three times that if you paused for rest and sustenance. Imagine, Nemo thought, if the news (good for the Habsburg Netherlands, bad for Spain) appeared at Aix the very moment it transpired in Ghent— The rebellion would have been over before it had scarce begun.

  And if the Atlantic were no longer barrier between there and here? If the Pacific could be spanned in moments? If each toll of the Lutine Bell were heard not only in the Underwriting Room of Lloyd’s, but all over London, and the Continent, and down to Bombay, and across to Boston, and in Peking and Djakarta, and Osaka and Auckland, the second toll rung before the first had ceased to echo?

  That would be a world in which empire would ne’er again be defeated. Worse: a world in which all habit, custom, distinction, cuisine, language, visage, sport, pleasure, devotion— Musical scales, decorative jars, the clouds that scud, the clouds that linger— The feel of sisal fibres on the rug that leads to the bedroom— The sound the Betwa river makes when its banks o’erflow, and the sound the Betwa river makes in drought, when it is all but dry— The high musk that seeps from beneath various bedchamber doors, only years later associated with sex— The dull clang of large pots as they are being washed just outside the Palace walls— The hot and foetid breath of the cow when it yawns— The Jermyn Street cologne worn by officers of the Company, designed to convince them they’d not left home, when every sight and smell and sound that hypothesis would contradict— The place visited with a trusted childhood friend, small and dark and damp, that was known to no one else, and never would be, under oath and on pain of death— The aroma of your amah’s kitchen, which is all we know of home.

  Could ne’er again be sacred.

  These were Dakkar’s memories but surely each of us holds on to a thought, a notion, a thing—a badge of time and place—whose meaning would be lost were it to be worldly shared. Whatever, for you, be the flower that only in the Andes blooms, and even there but once in each fifteen years— In this world we have tiger here, and lion there; the elephant here, and rhinoceros there— But in the telegrapher’s kingdom all beasts would be Company beasts; all places would be Company places; and all time, too— Until noon in San Francisco were as midnight in Bombay.

  And soon all of it, rolled up in one large tarpaulin, as big as a map of the world, as big as the world itself; and all people places things bound up in it, and the whole thing tied together—tight, knotted, inescapable—with thick winds of copper cable. No. That was not the world Dakkar grew up in and not, were he to have a say in it, the world that would inherit this one.

  The depredations of his own time were bad enough. He’d make it his ambition—his life, really—that when the sun set upon this century and rose upon the next, there would be as much spirit, variety and distance as there were in it this very evening, here, beneath the waves of the unanimous sea: the sea that separates, better than all else, that land from this one. He knew, our Prince and Captain did, and knew deep: that where missionaries landed, soon would come rum merchants, and soon after the slave traders. Let them ply their evil if they might. But let them do it in person, where they’d not be immune to slaughter or revolt. They should not have the ability to enslave by wire.

  And so when Nemo’s time on this planet came to end, when he was laid down in his watery grave—for there was nowhere, not e’en the Betwa River where it flows beneath the Orchha Palace in Bundelkhand, that he could now call home—he wanted to descend in peace, knowing that what was cooked by amahs in the palace of his childhood gave out tastes and smells that were, in their precise mix and pungency, elsewhere unknown. That to eat the food of Devi’s kitchen one would have to journey by sea and rail and horse and foot. And that once eaten, the tastes and smells, they would be transported, if at all, by memory alone. The traceries of mind within the cerebella of those who’d had the good fortune that unique ambrosia to eat. And if you had not been there, all you would know would be the fine and distant song, passed from mouth to ear to mouth to ear, o’er space and yes, over time— The way it should be. And the way it would remain, as long as Nautilus sailed, as long as Nemo were alive.

  The mechanics of Nemo’s quest for the cable were neither abstruse nor difficult—a matter of applying compass and straightedge, then some basic calculations. This is where the telegraphic cable has been, is; therefore, this is where it will be. This is where Nautilus is now, and this is where it needs to go in order to be where the cable boat will be then.

  His thoughts now turned to what he thought of as the Other Question—should the large ship not be deterred, how to take her down. Can the Nautilus‘s serrated prow pierce the Great Eastern‘s underbelly? What are the weaknesses of that craft, the ways in which, by odd design or by time’s depredations, she might be vulnerable? What are the strengths of the ship—and how can those strengths be used ‘gainst her?

  In most questions of engineering the captain would of course consult Huzoor, whose mind was more nimble in these aspects than that of anyone on the waves, or e’en, perhaps, the planet entire. Nemo had conversed with Huzoor in the past, once Huzoor had got past the willed silence of captivity. E’er since Nautilus was Nautilus, Huzoor had been of invaluable assistance in matters nautical, and, on one or two occasions, matters tactical. (The captain did believe that he’d even got Huzoor to remember that his own heritage, and a vital chunk of his youth, were not English but French. And for a Parisian to take up ‘gainst an Englishman—why that was not a unique occurrence.)

  But there was an added difficulty here. That being: they were not, here, engaged in abstract aid to the Candiotes rebels. They were not, here, plundering some ship anonymous on high seas. The cable-layer in this instance was no broke-down tramp of little name and less distinction. Rather it was the Great Eastern. The captain did not spend overmuch time taking into consideration the feelings of other men. But he could certainly see how Huzoor might be reluctant to assist in any attack upon that large and ferrous masterwork.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THERE’S A BOAT and there’s a ship. Boat’s a little thing. Ye could sit in it. Stand up in it have ye the balance. What do boats do? They rock. Pitch. Yaw. Boat floats on the sea. Sea gets troubled, boat is troubled. Sea is calm and boat just glides. But! More likely yer former. Why? ‘Cause the sea’s the sea.

  Boats are what we lower from a ship.

  What’s a ship? Ye ask twenty men ye get forty different answers. But ye asked me, so ye will get my answer: Ship floats on the water and is propelled by the wind. That’s
a ship. Doesn’t float? Then: not a ship! Not propelled by wind? Then: not a ship. This case is closed.

  But— But— What to do about this ship? Not the one Ahab is on, the Valparaiso. Ahab did not build her. Ahab did not name her. Had Ahab named her she would have had another name. But they built her in Chile and named her after the city where she were built. Tant piss.

  Is the Valparaiso a ship of greatness? That she is not. She has a stern that could as well be a prow, a prow that could well be a stern—She’s a seafaring palindrome. Masts straight up. Deck flat from stem to stern, or stern to stem as case may be. Wheel fixed by shaft to the tiller, that the helm itself slides, side-to-side, as the captain wills his ship. Ye know not how to ride the wheel, ye’ll be leaving great lazy Ss in yer wake.

  Is this the once-great Valparaiso, now on in years, and slowly gliding toward her final dry dock? No, she not be that. Yer Valparaiso, she was rot-bucket built and rot-bucket remains— And rot-bucket will be until the seas dry up and Mankind, what’s left of it, walks on dry cracked kelp. Valparaiso‘s pumperman works around the clock to keep her from taking on more water than he can expel. A ship fit for Ahab? Ahab he doth want to hear the chorus of no, he doth want to hear it loud and uniform, no and no and no, all in cadence, with harmony if ye will, but above all, no. And if there be among ye one who is silent on this question, let me have thy tongue, that thou shalt be silent evermore.

  The ship that Valparaiso escorts— Why that ain’t really a ship, is it? It is big, we will give her this. Ye could fit six, eight, ten Valparaisos in her hold. Her boats, as big as my ship. But is yer Great Eastern as big as the Leviathan itself? The answer is no. Nothing is as big as the Leviathan itself. But! This ship was called the Leviathan. When they were building it. Not no more. Now she sails as Great Eastern. No improvement if ye ask yer Ahab.