And all of these thoughts in the instant between systole and diastole, as, encased in undersea suit, moving beneath the North Atlantic, he gazed up at the belly of the ship that once he’d built, and whose launch he’d wordlessly attended, and whose current rack and ruin—a cable layer!—mirrored perhaps too closely that of its creator.
Now the two of them—the iron ship, and the man who’d built it—were, after seven years in which they sailed on separate seas, brought once more together. He was close enough that he could swim to her; and if there were not the water and the glass between them, he could smell her. He could see the fairings of her paddles, now reduced in diameter, to the large patch of thinner plates on her belly, where she’d been scraped and repaired to standards less stringent than he himself would e’er have allowed.
And even as the Captain did with a touch of his metal-encased hand guide the grapnel away from its intended target, Brunel he thought, but if she wants the cable, why shouldn’t she have it? How can I deny her anything? The grapnel now was raised up slow and empty. They gazed for a while at the reflective trembling underside of the sea.
Nemo beckoned and the two of them swam back toward the Nautilus‘s forward outer hatch. Nemo opened the hatch, ushered Brunel through, but stayed outside the craft, shutting tight the hatch from the outside. Swam swift and elegant back toward the cable. Brunel was in the chamber—neither boat nor ocean but passage between the two. When the water drained he would re-enter the ship that had been, to him, home for the longest time, and which he had part-constructed, and which bore a new name—Nautilus!—in tribute to his work. Yet he wished he were aboard that other, grander boat, the one above, the one bigger than any other ever built, forever tied to the name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
The water now did drain out, displaced by pumped-in air. But Brunel’s thoughts remained intact. Even as the helmet was removed, and the air-tank stopcock turned 90 degrees, and the sea-suit peeled off, and as he made his way back to his room, he could not stop thinking about what he had seen, and about the life of the ship he’d not seen for seven years, and about his own life, which for the same seven years had been removed from sight. And thought, also: My father was Sir Marc Isambard Brunel. Knighted. As I shall never be.
Passing through the salon, the iris full open, he saw, outside Nautilus, its captain, more than two thousand fathoms beneath, gazing up at the grapnel as it descended one more time. Pulling the grapnel’s iron teeth to the side. It was impossible to see his face, but Brunel could imagine his expression as the grapnel once more failed, with Nemo’s intervention, to find purchase.
If he were to compare his life now, to the life that was his in London, Isambard Kingdom Brunel could certainly see it as a series of subtractions. His wife and family were gone; the comforts of home and office, gone; the familiarity of the old streets and circles and parks, all gone. Would he e’er again would he have a joint of lamb and claret at his club, or fire up what had been his favorite cheroot, or discuss the shaping of lasts with his bootmaker? He recalled one particularly beautiful spring day on a family visit to London in Green Park—or was it Saint James?—when he had been five years old and the world, grayed and drearied by winter, had suddenly, as if overnight, been reborn.
If one were to make entries in the ledger, one would start with Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the fullness of his fifty-three years, and then begin to take away, and take away again, until you could, should you wish, find the subtotal that would be writ in red.
But the ledger is double columned. The pleasures of the draughting table, which had been so central to his landed life, continued here at sea, and the conundrums in whose solution the Captain had asked him to participate were no less challenging or worthy than those offered up in his former existence. He’d had to devise a way to tunnel ‘neath a river; now he was living in a moving tunnel ‘neath the sea. In Brunel’s former life, not all of his designs had been built immediately, or even built at all—one recalls the years of travail, mounting almost to a decade, that went into the Great Eastern, and the long saga of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, designed in 1831, yet not e’en begun at the time of his departure.
Here, when he sketched out something for the captain, why the captain then brought into play his carpenters, his metal-men, his lifters and carriers, his welders, his hammer-men: who worked without cease ‘til the thing were built.
And in the way that what arrives as shock can depart as habit, many of the accouterments of his new life appealed. We might, in our catalogue, include the sights afforded by continuous oceanic travel; the freedom from the obligations of the larger social comity: and perhaps, though any of us would be loath to admit it aloud, the freedom from the obligations of commerce, routine, family. So for almost each red entry in the left of the ledger, there was a companion entry, in black, on the other side of the line.
Though it would be as useless as it would be futile to seek one moment in which the stimulations of the new life overcame the sense of that new life’s cost, if there were such a moment, it likely occurred during the design of what would come to be christened the Nautilus. Brunel at first was frustrated, then triumphant, in devising a method to use the differential between the water temperature near the surface of the sea, and that of the deep below, to generate electricity, and with said electricity recharge the Nautilus‘s batteries without the need to make landfall.
And as the Nautilus continued her voyages, Brunel became more and more committed to her perfection. Circulating interior air through a bed of charcoal to filter out odiferous gasses. Reconfiguring the seals on the Marié-Davy scope that it could be turned 360 degrees without incurring water’s entry. (Often Brunel, with the Captain’s permission, would press his eyes to the ocular, then move round the pole, a circle-dance of sort, while above-sea the objective synchronously did swivel. And pausing to track the flight of a gull, or to inspect what might be a plume of smoke on the horizon.)
Perhaps more crucially, to an extent that Brunel did not himself acknowledge, his social views were in the midst of their own circle-dance. The London Brunel, an Englishman by birth and acclaim, would have assumed that his country was in all ways bringing enlightenment to the darker places of the world. The oceanic Brunel began to consider other points of view. It might be said that his good character had been rusted by his captivity, but ‘twas more complex than that.
In London he had read, in his morning Times, of the glories of the British Empire, narrated in the triumphal voice of those in whose gloved and powerful hands were held that Empire’s reins. Yet in Erromango, in the Candiotes, and in the Aden Settlement of British India, he had seen the other end of the strap: those who by the United Kingdom were cast off, or passed over, sapped for their utility without remuneration for it. Those who had been brought enlightenment yet at the expense of their freedom.
It was not a pretty sight, and the fact that most Englishmen were unaware of the source of their well-being accounted, in Brunel’s mind, for their tranquility in accepting the gift. He was unwilling to entertain the darker supposition: that were the general English populace to know of the suffering at the other end of empire, a suffering that had been kept from their view, they would not merely accept it as a cost but would endorse it, even with enthusiasm. Brunel recalled the way his French-born father was accepted in his newfound land, his accent and Continental table habits notwithstanding. And the English had, both in legend and in practice, a fondness for eccentricity. But the tolerance, the fondness, perhaps did not extend to the darker races, or to the map’s outer verge.
Still, Brunel retained his full enthusiasm for technology. As regards the cable, it must be remembered that Brunel chaired those sessions of the Institution of Civil Engineers at which sub-marine telegraphy was first, and at some great length, discussed. All his life Brunel had put shoulder to wheel in service of Progress, which in his case meant bringing far places together. He and his father, with great labor and no little bodily jeopardy, drew and then built a
tunnel to connect the Londons on either bank of the Thames. Brunel took grand pride in designing and implementing a railway system to make possible the rapid conveyance of people and goods among the various towns of the West of England. And of course the Clifton bridge was meant to re-unite two banks, separated across the years only by water and time.
If the Captain Nemo approached the cable as instrument of empire, as avatar of a future that was bound to benefit with wild disproportion that empire, Brunel’s reaction was more complex. He saw the consequence, but he also saw—in the gleam of copper, the sinuous braid, the thick, satisfying pack of gutta-percha, the lazy arc as the cable draped down from ship to sea-bed—a beauty and symmetry that appealed. It was the Way of the Engineer: in the cable he discerned the elegance of a unitary solution to so many interlaced challenges. The way it was wound, and packed, and laid—a hundred small decisions, all of them made with imagination and sound mind, each of them the residue of a ninety-nine choices inferior abandoned along the way.
And if far places could be brought together not by physical conveyance but by electricity coursing through wire—what man alive could deny the triumph? This was something he believed.
Yet here he was, aboard the craft Nautilus that he himself had perfected and built, a craft whose mission was to sever rather than to connect. How to reconcile? Within the cavern interior, the electrified cables that crossed Brunel chasm were, at this moment, beginning to touch, to short, to spark.
THIRTY-FOUR
NOW AND THEN, as yer Ahab bore witness, there was a sense that the grapnel it had got hold of something, and one bite sufficiently strong as to induce the hauler-men to pull up and see what had been caught. About a quarter to seven (Greenwich time) the pick-up engine was put in motion and to aid its feeble efforts the rope was passed round the capstan close by. It came up kindly at first, and by eight p.m., 1,500 fathoms were on board. The dynamometer, which had been registering as high a strain as 70 cwt., suddenly indicated an increase to 75 cwt., and it was clear to all that the flukes of the grapnel had at last got hold of something! Even the most skeptical aboard admitted that, if ‘twere anything, ‘twas the cable.
About eight and a quarter of the clock, just as the mirthless sun it were setting low and orange in the west, one of the wheels of the picking-up gear began to complain and very short afterward broke. Thus the work of the haul was thrown to the cable staff, pulling by hand, and singing a short-drag chantey as they pulled.
In the Black Ball Line I served my time
To me way-aye-aye, hurray-ah
And that’s the line where you can shine
Hurrah for the Black Ball Line
At Liverpool docks we bid adieu
To me way-aye-aye, hurray-ah
To Poll and Bet and lovely Sue
Hurrah for the Black Ball Line
This were not easy work, nor without jeopardy, as the line could without forewarning spring with such force as to imperil the lives of those who were near it. Now did: the wire snarled and flailed two men—unknown to yer Ahab but they were fellow seamen, and in that they were yer Ahab’s brothers—received serious blows, and were taken amidships to receive the care of Dr. Ward, a man for whom rum were the ultimate medicament, and best applied to doctor before patient.
And now we’re bound for New York Town
To me way-aye-aye, hurray-ah
It’s there we’ll drink, and sorrow drown
Hurrah for the Black Ball Line
And so the night did fall, and the air o’er the seas thickened with nocturnal haze— Yet yer Craven Anderson (despite the dark, and gloom, and without respect to the injuries already sustained by his men) pressed on, pressed on. The crew worked on, t’other captain’s spirits did rise with each fathom of the rope coiled over the drum. But, then! Of a sudden, and in one bound, the rope she sprang into air with a ringing noise, while the drum, no tension on it now, spun mad and cacophonous as if ‘twere some demonic top. And before its revolutions could be arrested by the cable staff or the hempen stops, the sea-end of the thing slipped away from them and darted down. Down, 2,200 fathoms to the Atlantic seabed.
The break, the sudden snap, ‘twere a mystery to the Andersons and Fields of the world, but ‘twere plain as yer fist in daylight to Ahab, yes! (And to repeat the phrase of which ye have begun to recite along with yer Ahab: ye already knew that.) Ahab alone were in possession of insight as to the motive cause, both of the cable’s severance, and the setbacks (ha! ha! and ha! again) encountered in the attempts at retrieval. If his deductive reasonings as to first cause needed any confirmation further, his reasonings their confirmations received with the grapnel’s every failure. And so as the officers and hands departed the gloomed foredeck, heads bent low in defeat, so did Ahab, his head bent low as well, but for reasons different. Yer Ahab, he were studying the rope-and-cable, and where it dipped into the sea, and with what support it remained fastened to the large drum. He made sure that the drum were fixed, jammed, by long staves, into unmoving state. (Why did he do this? Ye shall soon know! And ye know far better than to ask, ye pouchless marsupial! With patience all will be revealed. All, save that which cannot by human senses be perceived, or by human intellect fathomed.)
There were then a mournful party in the grand salon. One by one the dank and dour celebrants dropped away from the table, each to the privacy of his cabin, ‘cept yer Ahab, who made his way amidships, climbing the gangway ladder, striding the deck, surmounting its rail— And into one of the chaloupes did himself catapult.
“Ahab needs be taken back to the Valparaiso,“ he said and the mates, not waiting for confirmation from their own Captain—for they knew, in Ahab, a man of the sea when they saw one—freed up the oars, even as others worked the winch to lower by ropes the wooden boat.
It met the water gently and with quick moves the oarsmen freed the winch ropes from their belaying cleats. Ahab did point to the Valparaiso, the clumsy Valparaiso, laid out as if by the yard and sawed to length, with her stern-like prow and her prow-like stern. And then mates did as mates worldover have done: they put their back into it, and with each and every parcel of strength did commit the craft to the direction that Ahab did point.
And as the chaloupe made its way ‘cross calm Atlantic from the Thing That Was Not A Ship to the wooden Coming-Or-Going, as Ahab scanned the horizon from where the sun rose to where it set, as he scanned the sea for perturbation in the normal lap and flow, as he reviewed in his mind the conversation with Mr. Field, he now thought to himself those words he had, within the confines of his head, formulated, words that he knew better than to pronounce. And the things he could have said but did not were these:
“Ahab was brought on for the job: the job of finding what hath sundered yer cable, and once found, dispatching it, to hell or watery grave. Should we spend our time in lowering the grapnel that chance be lost. We make ourself ripe for plunder when we should be thin and swift. Leviathan is near. We must give chase without hesitation, and then, once he is within our sight, pursue without cease.”
And in the theater of Ahab’s mind, where I Am Ahab played nightly, with matinees on Wednesday and Saturday, Mr. Field did thus reply:
“The Valparaiso accompanies the Great Eastern. And the Great Eastern shall remain in place ‘til the cable be retrieved, spliced, perched, re-laid. If you are holding me up for money you may as well stop now. Your compensation shall not be revisited—especially not on account of an act of God.”
“What cut yer wire, that were no God,” said Ahab, staring less at the Owner than outward, through the wall invisible, toward the Audience, and thus garnering its applause. Ahab stood, tapping his Aaron’s rod ‘gainst the floorboards, doing so with vim and momentum, that the stage quiver and the deep dark note reverberate throughout the hall. When the sound and its reflections were damped, and the Audience be as quiet as a choir of churchmice, dead churchmice at that—Then and only then did Ahab continue:
“There is something, Mr. Field, what hath wroug
ht yer damage. ‘Tis the Great White come round again, no other. Nothing else will fit the facts.
“Now, ye knew yer Ahab when ye first sought him out. Ye sought him out because ye thought him of a single mind, and if ye be honest ye’d admit this. Well yer Ahab hath no thoughts preconceived, no agenda what preexists. Yer Ahab hath but one motive, one drive, one line of action: to find what sheared the cable and dispense with it. Ahab will not rest ‘til that be done. He shan’t turn back e’en if ye do. He goeth forward. To find the nemesis. To cleanse the seas. ‘Til there be nothing beneath those seas than what God there meant to be. And nothing upon the surface of those seas save the blood of those who would defy us.”
Again the crowd gave up its applause, longer and heartier, as they bent their emotions to the emotion of the man on stage. Then the crowd waited, to hear what “Mr. Field” could say, or do, in response to logic so passionately delivered, ideas so compellingly drawn.
“You were bought and paid for,” said Mr. Field, now rising, now pacing back and forth, upstage from our Captain. Were there a note of bonhomie in his voice previous, that note were now gone. It were all business, all command. “That mission consist of following Great Eastern where’er she shall go, whether to hell or Foilhummerum. And if you continue to object why then we shall seize the Valparaiso; and if you attempt to fight us off why then we shall ram the wood-hulled Valparaiso with our iron-laid prow ‘til she break up. Nor shall we offer assistance to the human flotsam from that break-up, no. Your mates, your boatsteerers, your swabbers, your carpenter, your cooper, your cook, and yes, your chanteyman, they will perish, and their mortal souls we be on your account. And when we make land in Nova Scotia we will there tell the saddest tale: of the sudden storm that did you in.”
The Great Eastern Page 24