The Great Eastern

by Howard Rodman

  In case yer Ahab were dense, he then payed out the same thought, but in different dressing: “I speak not to cause but only to itinerary. The where-we-go-from-here. All else is history or speculation.”

  Mr. Field he then turned to the paid-and-bought Anderson. “Is there any means or mechanism by which we might retrieve the water end of the cable, haul her up, make a splice?”

  “The splice, she be easy,” said Anderson. “The haul-up, that be hard. We are now beyond the Shelf, and when we fixed depth this morning, we were at just shy of two thousand, two hundred fathoms. ‘Tis a long ways down. There be far more ocean-bottom than there be cable, and the distinction between the two be impossible to make from our vantage up here. Descent with the grappling hook or grapnel is possible, and we’ve on occasions previous retrieved cable from that depth or better. But the course of our work be trial, and error, and trial again.”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Field. “So without regard to what is past, or passing: what, for us is to come?” He looked not at Ahab, who had some distinct thoughts on the matter, but rather to Anderson the Miserable. Who replied in a manner that will surprise no one who hath been following this tale.

  “I recommend,” said Captain Anderson, “that we return to Foilhummerum. Begin anew. I put it to you that our time best be spent in transit, rather than in efforts toward recovery. Which efforts will be dispiriting at best, futile at worst, with the latter outcome far more likely.”

  “And how long to return?” asked Mr. Field.

  “Four days. Perhaps five,” said Captain Anderson.

  “And to make the new splice?”

  “It is the work of a morning,” said the captain.

  “And to set out again, ‘til we get to the place we are now?”

  “Four days, if the seas be with us,” said the captain.

  “Nine or ten days, to set this right?”

  “Nine or ten days,” said the captain. “Shall I give the command to turn round?”

  Mr. Field held up his hand and puffed again upon his pipe. He did not speak for the longest moment, during which we heard the sounds of the sea lapping against our doubled hull, the sounds of the crew going about their work. Somewhere on deck a binnacle was being polished, teak was being swabbed, lines were inspected for fray, pulleys oiled. Down here, just Mr. Field and his lucubrations.

  And then he spoke.

  “We will deploy the grapnel and we will do so until we have retrieved the severed end. Then the wire-man shall splice it together, each strand to corresponding strand. And when the two cables are one again, we shall pack it with perch, lower it gently back to its rightful place upon the floor of the North Atlantic. And ‘twill be the stronger for it, like a bone broke then knit.

  “This is, beyond all question, the best way now to economize the affairs of all the companies embarked in this. If the prospect of success is, as Captain Anderson has said, but fair, to return to shore would incite a chain of events that would cause failure catastrophic. And I dare say were we to return, we would not, given the circumstances, again have the wherewithal to depart.

  “Convey then the message that Mr. Field is buoyant and hopeful. We shall at once go at the picking up. We shall start now, and we shall persist.”

  “Sir,” said the awful Anderson. And gave a nod of acknowledgement, assent, obeisance.

  Mr. Field did now turn his gaze to yer Ahab who, it must be said, had sat silent and uninterrupting through his employer’s disquisition. “You will return now to the Valparaiso and make your crew available to Captain Anderson should he need assistance with the grappling.”

  Now yer Ahab is a man who keeps his silence, to be sure; but yer Ahab is also not a man who holds his tongue. He will contradict the mighty as oft as he will the weak. He payeth no heed to rank, only to his god, his one ecstatic deity: the truth. So ye who know Ahab know that he could not leave that tatterdemalion ballroom without voicing what needed be voiced.

  “Sir,” said yer Ahab.

  “Yes?” said Mr. Field.

  “Yer logic with respect to yer financial partners is impeccable; still ‘tis all for naught or worse. For if we stay in place, unmoving, while the grapnel we lower and raise and lower and raise, perhaps for weeks— Why we make of ourselves a fat target for the Leviathan beneath.

  “And let us speak of Leviathan. Ahab he doth know him as ye do not. By floating in one place, bobbing up and down, becalmed, we will give him the opportunity. Yer backers may flourish but we shall die. To pursue the course which ye propose— ‘Tis selbstmord, plain and simple. Our main chance, and our only one: to search out the Leviathan: and the Leviathan to destroy.”

  Mr. Field now looked at Ahab direct. “I have some knowledge of your history. It is a history of passion and pursuit and there is courage in it. It was because of said history, rather than in spite of it, that I took you on for this task. Were it clear to me that we were under attack there be no other man on land or sea to whom I’d entrust the task of safe passage. You have the hand, you have the eye, but more, you have the stuffing, to meet all foes and having met, vanquish.

  “Yet there are three factors in my calculus. Bear with me, Captain, and do me the courtesy of considering what I here have to say, even while being mindful, of course, of your obligation to do what I say regardless. Are we clear?”

  Yer Ahab he said naught. There were a shift of his chin, down and up, that might be interpreted as assent. And might be not.

  However Mr. Field took the response, or lack thereof, he went on. “The first is, despite your knowledgeable and perhaps imaginative extrapolation, from gold-hued flame to sub-surface monster, I am not convinced that the evidence is singular or that the chain of logic is ineluctable. You may disagree, but I think as well you can fathom how other eyes might see different. I am familiar with your Occam of Orange and, if I may indulge in metaphor, it is with his razor that I shave most mornings. Yet I do not see how the harpoon-jawed monster with a taste for eel to be the simplest and most elegant explication for what has befallen our enterprise.

  “The second factor be one of engineering. I know that you have grand and tragic experience with what the maw of a sea mammal can do to wood-staved boat. But this is not your boat of yore. Our hull is made of iron, a material so sturdy you yourself use it to tip your weapons. The Great Eastern, she were built by Brunel to have not one hull but two, independent, so that if the first be breached, the second will still hold. And we have a choice of motive power, the sail and the steam, so that if we need move, and move rapidly, we are not dependent—as you have been for most if not all of your seafaring life—on the vagaries of wind and current. Were there—and I use the subjunctive, condition contrary to fact—were there a meeting of ship and monster, why ‘tis the mandible that would break and not the hull. And should it come to a chase, why we can move as swiftly upon the waves as any creature can beneath them.

  “The third is a question of economics, as simple as it is pure. Our enterprise is subvented by a consortium of investors. They knowingly take on risk that they may share in reward. Yet as you know money is not silent. Even where it has no expertise it has opinion. If money is anxious it will seek calm, and money that is panicked will seek safe harbor. This construction of this ship itself was started, stopped, commenced again, having less to do with the ocean’s tides than with the influx and outflow of capital. So as with the previous attempts to lay this cable, were we to encounter a monster we might be damaged. But were the investors to lose confidence, we would be sunk.

  “This voyage be the last, best essay at achieving the dream. A dream of mine longstanding, but truly, a dream for all. Dreamed by the century itself, with me the servant or vessel. A dream of poetry by wire, of the ability to trade the thought as well as the crate. To move the product east to west, and the capital west to east, without dock, crane, boat, storm, boat, crane, dock. A movement instantaneous with joy spreading in the moment from there to here, and capital, too, flowing back and forth without the b
arrier of time.

  “You have seen a feather drift downward in a column of air, wafting beautiful and slow; and perhaps you have seen, too, that feather in a column from which the air has been evacuated. It falls with the same rapidity as a ball of lead shot. What we are doing with this cable, Captain—” And here he addressed solely yer Ahab, as if the craven Anderson were not even in the room. “—is to remove the air. And by doing so: to eliminate friction between worlds old and new. That weighty commerce, and feather-light philosophy, might travel without bruise or chance or impediment. What leaves there, arrives here, and in an instant, sans damage, sans loss— Direct. As face-to-face as two men speaking chair-to-chair.”

  Did he wait for yer Ahab to be converted by what he held to be the compelling truth of his words? He did. Was yer Ahab by those words converted? Listen, me lads, and ye will soon know (ye that do not, from yer connaissance of Ahab, know already!). Are ye following the mind of Ahab, even as he takes in the three-pronged stab of Mr. Field’s argumentation? Good. Then sit ye down, for yer Ahab is about to reply.

  “No,” said Ahab.

  “Are you telling me you will not agree, Captain?” Field held pipe in hand. “Or are you telling me you will not obey?”

  Yer Ahab he thought long before making his response. Yet by the beat of the clock in that great ruined room, ‘twas but tick and no tock. Inside was yer grand and leisurely lucubration; outside, as seen by Mr. Field’s eyes, Ahab’s words were the work of an instant.

  “I am yers,” said Ahab. “That is the way of command. Yer holy stoner answer to yer watch-men, yer watch-men to yer officer, yer officer to me, and me to thee. And if thou in turn answer to capital, that be neither my business nor my concern. Thou hast outlined a plan by which we work at every hour to retrieve the cable’s fag end. And Ahab, he will work with thee, without shirk or slack, and those whom Ahab commands, why those men will work with thee, too, strong of shoulder and singular of mind.”

  Mr. Field allowed a small cumulus of smoke from his pipe to rise, to float, to disperse. Then, as if to prove that he, too, could be laconic when the occasion suited, said but one word. Ye know the word, but Ahab he doth set it down here that there be no ponderments, nor scratchings of the head.

  “Good,” said Mr. Field.

  With that yer Ahab he did then arise from his chair, and yer Monkey-See Anderson he did likewise. And so did the three men quit the chamber, Mr. Field to return to his stateroom, his charts, above all, his ledgers; Captain Anderson to the foredeck of the Grand Excrescence. Where the sit-in-the-water waste-o’-time follies were soon to commence.

  And so yer Ahab he watched, and listened, as the fixes were made, and the calculations run, the commands given, the commands received. The Ferrous Folly‘s navigator placed the ship in lat. 51°25’, long. 39°6’, course 765 S, 25 W. She’d run 1,062 miles from Foilhummerum, and were now just 606 from Heart’s Content. (So near and yet so far! said Ahab, but not, ye know, aloud.) Nothing could be more beautiful than the weather or more favorable for carrying out Mr. Field’s (misguided, forlorn, delirious) hope.

  THIRTY-ONE

  NEMO, AT HIS table, among his treasured objects, his large glass iris’d full open, did now ponder, aided by the thick coffee he’d himself concocted. He’d spent three cups in contemplation of the iron steamship and what might be transpiring among its command. By now they had certainly ascertained that the cable had been severed. Were there any aboard of enquiring bent, they could in short order ascertain that the cable had been sheared rather than snapped. But it was not clear to Nemo how this would dictate their tactics as they proceeded.

  Nemo knew full well that the laying of this cable was a commercial venture, and as such, those who laid it were less concerned with the elegance of the thing, or the science of it, than with its capacity for generating revenue. Hence they’d be balancing the time and expense of returning to Foilhummerum versus what might be gained by yet another expedition. Nemo thought it likely that after all these failures they’d turn west-to-east and seek port. These were not men of principle. These were businessmen and as such were subject to prediction. Their greed could at all times be turned against them.

  The alternative would be to lower the grapnel and attempt to retrieve the sea-bed line, that it might be raised and spliced. Still, even if the grapnel yielded naught, and they turned tail in failure, Nemo felt it provided him with better outcome to sink the large ship in its entirety rather than simply scupper this particular mission. He wanted to put paid to this voyage, of course, but also to any voyage subsequent. Not just this length of severed cable, but the ambition itself should be left to rest on sea-bed, there to gather silt. Lost to rust, lost to decay, fed on by Semibalanus balanoides, hidden by sea anemones, crusted with cirripedia—until the very notion itself was gone, elided from memory and imagination, ne’er again to cross the mind of man.

  THIRTY-TWO

  THE GRAPNEL—AN ANCHOR, cast of iron, man-tall, weighing three cwt. or more, with five very strong flukes—was brought up from the stores and bent onto the wire rope (of which they had a supply of five miles on board) as yer Ahab watched and worked to restrain his tongue. The G____ E______, under nominal command of the captain Anderson, now steamed to the place where, far as could be surmised, the cable parted. The grapnel was let go at 2.20 ship’s time on its deep-sea fool’s errand. Her small engine was set going, her wheels and drums revolved at a terrific pace as the wire rope went down, buckets of water thrown on the drums to keep them cool. Yer hissing clouds of steam arose.

  Down, down went the wire rope, and one began to realize at every turn of the drum what a grandeur there be in the depth of this mighty ocean. At five p.m., intimation was given that the strain was becoming gradually less; and, in a few minutes more, the man-high grapnel had arrived below, two thousand two hundred fathoms, having taken just shy of three hours in its journey from North Atlantic sunshine to the inky depths.

  From five until quite dark the cablemen, with able-bodied assists from the deck crew, vigorously engaged in getting one of the huge buoys over the port bow. The lower-and-grasp it were reminiscent of the carnival game, in which young children are parted from their money in quest of the gaudy bauble, which always lies just out of reach or insusceptible to the claw.

  THIRTY-THREE

  MOHAN FOUND NEMO in his chamber and alerted him that the large ship was attempting to raise the severed end of the cable. In hypnopompic state, where dreams were fleeing the grapnel of consciousness but were not yet altogether irretrievable, Nemo was in Orchha Palace, where he had spent the night. It shimmered, danced, before his eyes— Then was gone. Nemo was awake.

  “Let me suit up,” he said. And then: “Prepare a suit as well—”

  “For myself?” asked Mohan.

  “Not at this moment,” replied the captain. “This is something,” he said, “I would like Huzoor to see.”

  And so Huzoor was summoned; and so did Nemo explain to him that they would be making an excursion. And so were they wrapped and fastened into suits of waxed canvas and brass; and so were forty pounds of gold coinage from the ship’s ballast placed into purpose-sewn pockets to weight them down; and so were the round helmets, with thick re-enforced glass, lowered o’er their heads and clamped in tight; and so were the cocks at the neck of the suits’ tanks of air turned from stop to go; and so were the two men escorted to the hatch; and so was the hatch fully battened behind them— And so were Captain Nemo, born Prince Dakkar, and Huzoor, born Isambard Kingdom Brunel, in water submerged.

  It was hard for Brunel to see, to feel the rise of water in the chamber’s narrow confines and not be brought back, in gut as well as mind, to the Thames tunnel. In this world he was in an enclosure that led from Nautilus to the sea; but in every other aspect he felt ‘neath the Thames between Wapping and Rotherhithe. He recalled when that tunnel collapsed, leaving him stunned by the influx of water, crushed by its weight, left with scant ability to breathe. Now the chamber within was full of wat
er from without, and so the hatch was opened. Nothing between Brunel and the sea. He took his first step into the realm beneath the sea, illumed by Nautilus‘s arc lights. At once he saw the full awe of the ocean-beneath, nothing between him, and it, but the faceplate of his diving suit. He felt a moment of full awe; yet even within that moment, that he was once more one swift tick away from his own death. The rhythm of his heart was loud in his ears, displacing all other sound.

  His breathing was slow, tempered—Would this breath be his last? This one? This one?—but soon found a less conscious tempo. To glide within the water and yet by that water not be drowned or crushed was something of a revelation. But the shock of underwater mobility was nothing compared to what came next. There was the cable: lying down on the floor, an undeviating line (with some small sinuosity here and there) leading straight back, one must assume, to Foilhummerum. There was the end of the cable, severed, by the Captain or one of his men. There was the grapnel, lowering now from the cable-ship, seeking—blindly, as there was no method for those lowering, up there, to see their grapnel, down here—the cable, to grasp it, hold it, bring it back to surface. But then there was— The mass. The round, elongated mass, floating dark. Only one ship that big. Only one ship, in all the oceans of the world.

  He knew it: oh yes he did. He knew the stem and the stern, the port and starboard of it. He knew the plates and knew the rivets. The paddles he knew, and the screw, and the boilers that drove the paddles and screw. He knew her draught and all below; he knew her waterline and all above. It was his ship and it was a magnificent ship and it was his Great Eastern.

  He thought of his children, and what their faces might look like, and where they’d been schooled, and what were their ambitions for life. And whether his son, like his father, and his father’s father before him, would take up the profession. And whether the Hadley’s quadrant that his father had so precociously and accurately constructed, which had been handed from Marc to Isambard just before the Thames Tunnel project, and last seen in his office in London—Whether that quadrant would now be on his son’s desk, gazed at, forgotten, rediscovered, touched, held in hand, the weight of the ebony wood, and the weight, too, of his heritage. Would the lad remember his father?