The Great Eastern

by Howard Rodman

  If there were any solace at the heart of this maelström, any shard on which to cling, it was that the wave, the wall, the bore—whatever it was—was larger, and more powerful, than human motive could combat or impede. It would do what it would, and the men knew that they would die, and if they did not die it would not be through any agency of their own. The thing cared not if you were resourceful or witless, rapid or somnolent, had led a life of rank depravity or one of impeccable grace. It continued to lift and hurl and break, implacable, without malice or design. And it was not over in a minute, the longest minute of the world.

  Men on deck—first to starboard, then to port—most of them went overboard. Men belowdecks most of them were trapped, speared, broken up. The stokers were tossed against, and into, their infernos. Still there were those aboard the Great Eastern who by happenstance survived. In retrospect, Mr. Field would come to understand that it was only the links and cleats and chains securing him to the salon’s floor and wall—‘twas only those!—what saved his life.

  Yet even as wreck and ruin unimaginable were being visited upon the Great Eastern, Mr. Field did not think of final things. He had never before thought—and in that moment did not begin to think—that his own death were possible. Instead his mind was filled with images of the telegraphic cable, a single singing span, undersea from Foilhummerum to Heart’s Content, thence overland in either direction far beyond. It would be thought of, now and forever, as Mr. Field’s cable.

  All of the untoward events—up to, and including, the rack and devastation to which the cable ship was even now being subjected—none of these had availed to bend the iron will of Mr. Field, whose triumph, as he would later tell it, was that of mental energy in the application of science.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  THEN WE WERE raised on high. We were lifted up on a wall of glass. A curved wall with a smooth curve. Taller than any thing. No bump or jerk. Just smooth rise from the level of the sea up into the sky. Pulled up smooth into the sky.

  Up here you could see everything. Above us the sky was blue and the clouds were near. Quite near, low and fluffed. The white of an egg dropped into low-boil water. The blue sky was a dome we could almost touch. And the higher we were raised the farther we could see. The edge of the dome grew wider as we grew nearer the heavens. Below was the ship, yes, the ocean, yes, but we could see too how the Earth she were curved. Edge sharp and clear. Ice, blue-white ice, across the top.

  Time it was slow. Was slowed. Was it the work of a minute to be lifted atop? Did that minute take an hour? How many chimes of the clock between each beat of the heart?

  We were none of us thrown off. Or e’en thrown to the side. Just the long slow glide up. On a wall of water so smooth as to be glass. Smooth and curved as a wave of frozen ice. I looked to my Ahab. He was still with straps from him to the gunwale, and wrapped round cleats, and the lance in his right hand. Raised right hand. Against the wave, the lance was as mosquito to Behemoth. Everything we had e’er done, were doing, would e’er do, was as a mote of dust in the eye of god.

  Ahab’s face was tight with cheek and lips pulled back. I’m going to stand in a sea of glass. Hold the wind! Don’t let it blow! In a state of high excitement he was. But also a calm in the eyes. He was looking out, looking down, and he could see the world or half of it. Down there the Great Eastern was small. Small against the sea. Against the angry sea and on it she was as jetsam. Tossed and turned and wrecked and wracked. Expelled. It were hard to tell if Ahab he grin in fear or triumph. But I know him well and I think was not the one or the other. I think he knew his time had come round. And in that found some solace. I had often tried to smooth his brow, to grant him calm. This I tried and could not do. Perhaps Langhorne was not the man who could do it. Perhaps it could not be done. But here at the top of the world I believe he found some peace. After long and wracked life, some peace at the top of the sea.

  Then the heart beat and we did commence to descend. Slow at first then fast. Now it was as if we had been dropped from on high. The wall was curved and we had been on the edge of that curve. Precipice. The wall was curved away. At its edge there was naught below save air, and way down low, the sea. Hold the wind! Don’t let it blow! And as we screamed we fell.

  The drop was fierce and it was the work of a moment. We were up there and now did plummet. Hats flew off. Men flew off. Ahab floating above the chaloupe. (The leather straps they strained and snapped, just like that.) And me I was floating too. Did not know it until I looked down and saw my feet. Standing on no thing. When we were on top of the wall, looking down at the oceans of the world, and for the longest time, there was no noise. There was no sound. Just the high lullaby of lofty winds. Now as we were dashed down we could hear only roar. The loudest roar. The tortured souls of all the world and they were singing to us in chains. Each voice low but together loud. Drowning loud. And then we hit. Were smashed and were shattered. The staves of the steam-chaloupe splitting and tossed apart. The furnace up then down into the high-chop sea. Me I reached for Ahab. But he was already in the air. Out of reach from these arms or any other. Dispatched by the sea and in long arc. A rainbow. One end here in the chaloupe. (What was left of the chaloupe.) The other end at Great Eastern, now listing on her side. Forty-five, fifty degrees. I clung to a stave. Other men were dead. Already gone and I do not know, and cannot speak, as to why I was not among them.

  Then Ahab hit the sea, right up against Great Eastern‘s great wheel. On the port side. And it was still turning oh yes. Scooping up water and scooping up air. And now scooping up my Ahab. Once more he was raised on high, not by sea, no, but by the work and craft of man.

  And behind the sidewheel, at the aft of the ship, where the cable she payed out, the cable was taut now. Not the long and low and lazy loop, nay: a straight line. From the back of the ship to the sea and into the sea. Pulled, as if from below. Because now the stern of the ship she was pulled into the sea, and the prow did lift. She was a heavy ship, heavier than any ship built by hand of man. Of men. And yet her prow did lift.

  FORTY-NINE

  IT WAS OF some interest to observe the effects, beneath the surface, of the perturbation on and above it. It is self-evident that when a large solitary wave—a mountain of water, in effect—is raised high above the sea, the water comes from somewhere; and logically the only source is by siphoning—borrowing, if you will—the waters of the deep. Thus, while the wave presented to viewers on the surface an extraordinary sight as it proceeded on its path across the Atlantic, the disturbance below was equally profound, and extended as deeply below the surface as the wave extended above it.

  The currents of water, greater in magnitude and speed than those typically found, induced a variety of effects. The Nautilus and Great Eastern, which before the wave’s advent had been perhaps three-quarters of a mile apart, were, with the evacuation of the intervening seas, abruptly shoved up near-’gainst each other. And the steam-chaloupe, which had been between them, was—with equal abruptness—nowhere to be seen. Either plunged swiftly down to a depth below what was from here visible; or, alternatively, lifted up upon water’s wall.

  The cable that depended from Great Eastern‘s stern, braided and with gutta-percha packed, not in most circumstances possessed of any great flexibility, did now blow and thrash and twist like hair in the wind. From here—and I was now some hundred yards from my craft—I watched as the loose and dangling end of the cable did whip Nautilus, lashing at and around—and, within moments, had coiled herself about Nautilus thrice. Thus there was a line of cable, the one end round Nautilus wrapt, the other wound tight round a spool within Great Eastern.

  As the rush and eddy pushed the ships further apart the line grew e’er more taut. The up- and down-drafts surrounding me were fierce and I possessed—if compared to either the sub-marine vessel or the iron ship—comparatively little mass. Hence it was impossible to keep from being tossed this-way-that-way, and difficult to keep my orientation toward the ships. But with rapid motions of my ar
ms and legs, and some astute countercurrent maneuvering, I was able to keep the ships largely in view. What I saw was, in essence, a tug and a battle. The wilder currents were drawing Nautilus deeper down, toward the bottom; and with the Medusa cable snared around her she thus pulled on Great Eastern with considerable force. I saw the prow of Great Eastern raise up, out from the waves, as the line pulled steadily and forcefully at her stern.

  If you consider the force—mass times acceleration—necessary to cause so large a displacement in so massive a ship, then you will have some idea of the strength of the currents pulling Nautilus downward, ever downward.

  You know that I have seen much in this life, upon land and sea; you know that I am a man of equanimity, to whom little is “remarkable”; and you know, as well, that I am not prone to the lie or the exaggeration. With that in mind, I must now tell you that what I saw was something I did not—nay, could not—expect to see. Yet this was the product of neither savage poetry nor opiated dream: what I am about to relate is that which could empirically be observed, by these eyes, and through the glass port of my undersea helmet.

  The first event was a tearing-away of the metal plates surrounding the Great Eastern‘s cable hold. Though water be a denser medium than air for the propagation of sound waves, and though I was encased in suit and helmet, nonetheless I could hear—or, more accurately, feel—the low and wrenching sounds as the tug of the cable did pull—something—’gainst the cable-hold plates. The question that at first presented itself was this: given the mass of the plates, the sturdiness of the welds, why were the plates loosing, rather than the cable simply breaking off? The answer, I think, lay in the braided and coiled construction of the cable itself, lending it significant tensile strength, especially along its longitude.

  As the plates continued to be pulled outward I could now from my vantage point see what was from the inside pressing upon them. It was the spool of cable. A large, nay, gigantic spool, most certainly the largest e’er constructed on land or sea: for it had to have the capacity to contain a single strand of cable capable of stretching transoceanic from Foilhummerum to Heart’s Content. Thus some 1,900 miles of cable were girdled round the spool—perhaps more if they had made prudent allowance for play and drop, minus what length had already been spent.

  One can only imagine the spool, with Herculean hub, and flange as wide as the ship would accommodate. The full mass of that spool, together with the mass of an oceansworth of cable, did now lean and press against the rearmost plates. The more the cable was tugged upon the more the ship did tip; and the more the ship did tip, the more gravity did align with the spool to increase the pressure on the plates from within.

  There was a fascination in the watching of it, to see such large and terrible damage playing out in slow deliberate cadence. Then at once all changed. The spool it had breached the hull, and with loudest reverberation—a sad and deafening noise even within the helmet—began its descent to the bottom of the sea.

  The plummet of reel-and-cable was extraordinary to behold. One wanted to look away but one could not. The spool was as wide as the Great Eastern‘s beam, and the Great Eastern‘s breadth was larger than most ships’ length. From where I observed the spool looked to be some eighty-foot in diameter. I began to calculate the weight of wood, the weight of metal, but was distracted from my figuring by the impossible spectacle of the spool’s descent. The fall in water is nowhere near as rapid as the fall in air; and as we go deeper beneath the waves the pressure perforce does increase, increasing with it the density of the water and the resistance it offers to a falling object. Thus a projectile falling from the sky—a shot from a cannon let us say—will ramp up in momentum as it nears the earth. But a projectile falling from ocean’s surface to the bottom will, owing to the resistance above cited, fall at a far steadier pace, her acceleration well-damped.

  Thus the eighty-foot spool of cable did descend slow and torpid to the ocean floor. That languor will at times seem oneiric, for where else do we see such unhurried and deliberate descent save in our dreams?

  One might expect the cable to unreel as the spool she sunk. But it did not. Accordingly, to the observer the spectacle of the cable was as thus:

  • The wrenching exit of the spool from the rear of the Great Eastern, as if the ship itself had given birth;

  • The slow descent, in the initial phases of which the taut cable became slack;

  • The moment where the spool was of the same depth as Nautilus, and the umbilical connecting them low and curled;

  • The spool’s continuing descent, pulling at the cable, and rendering it once more taut; and then the movement which I should have anticipated but in all honesty did not, whether due to failure of intellect or the Mesmeric qualities of the sub-marine ballet unfolding before my eyes—

  • The spool, descending, pulling Nautilus down with it.

  I watched: in awe, in horror, and with shock’s odd detachment. As the enormous reel—tethered to my vessel by a length of telegraphic cable—took my Nautilus to the bottom of the sea.

  As she fell I saw, through the water’s shimmer, tableaux that will stay with me for as long as I shall breathe. The slow rock, stem-to-stern, of Nautilus as she settled down. The implosion of the Large Glass, as the water pressure became too great for the iris’d structure to withstand. The compression of her hull, denting and caving as if it were a tube of paint in the hands of a profligate artist.

  Objects from Nautilus were now expelled—some sinking with her, some rising as jetsam to the surface. I saw the Turk, that marvel of gears and rods and escapements, float out and away, his porcelain face turned toward me, nodding in lifeless farewell. (And was reminded, too, of Mr. V. K. Singh, without whom all the Turk’s movements were but mechanical. Singh! We are close now, very close.) The books of course, the books of my beloved library, each volume now splayed, pages ruffling slow in the deliberate sea, swaying like Hexacorallia actiniaria anenthemonae. The navigational charts, billowing out wide and thin in the manner of deep-sea mantas. The device I fashioned for the extraction-by-steam of roasted-coffee elixir. The Courbet portrait of Baudelaire. The musical notations that had been perched on the lid of my Cavaillé-Coll organ, now mutely exiting, never again to guide these fingers into ecstatic or mournful dance.

  And I am compelled to state that among those objects were human bodies. Souls, now floating free of Nautilus, commingled with the objects of my salon, exiting through the aperture where moments before the glass had all outside forces contained. I saw my lascars—my Hindoos and my Sikhs and my Mussulmen, my Dacoits, my Thugs. Men whose fathers had served my fathers in Orchha Palace. Men with whom I had gone into battle gainst the Company in Jhansi and Satara, in Jaitpore and Sambalpore, in Nagpore and Tanjore, in Arcot and Oudh. Men who stood at my side as together we pondered the bloody frescos of Cawnpore. Men who in Bombay did labor day and night in Neptune‘s build, and men who with equal diligence did of our Neptune fashion our Nautilus. Men with whom I had descended beneath and through the Pole; men with whom I had sailed on and below the seven seas of the world. Men with whom I had idly conversed, whose lives and families were shared in story and song.

  And of course M. Brunel who, for all his panic and treachery, remained an architect of ideas unparalleled in imagination and grasp. In the eye of my mind M. Brunel and I were again sharing Madeira and sea-cheroot. And before me, not in memory but beneath the very real sea, I watched the mortal remains of the Engineer, shrouded now by one of those ghost-white creatures. One of those ghost-white creatures with purple veins, which had now wrapped itself around him, like a leaf round the filler of a cigar. Thus wrapped he did float upward toward the sun. Did these creatures, ghost-white and golden, have their own sentience, agency, mission? Brunel he was floated slow upward even as Nautilus she went the other way. I saw it all with the clarity of a dream, yet was in no way asleep. Ah Brunel! Ah Nautilus!

  Looking below, I did now recall my sub-marine’s ballast: of bullion, of gold coins fro
m the Bay of Vigo. They were meant for the rebels of the Candiotes, fighting against the Ottoman Empire, and of course for those in India still engaged ‘gainst the British. Gold coins to buy iron guns, iron guns to shoot lead bullets. But now the Vigo gold taken from the bed of the sea was to the bed of the sea returned.

  The last object to free itself of my beloved Nautilus as she was pulled down was the cabinet clock. Nautilus tipped on her side and the clock slid out, then fell—upright!—to her new home on the seabed. Where her one remaining bent and mangled hand would continue to tell the time, her orrery chart the movements of heavenly bodies, until that moment where there was tick— But no tock. A bowed my head in farewell to Breguet’s masterpiece. I alone knew its origin, its link to my younger self: a tale held dear and close, when I did return to India, and when I did go to sea. Even a prince has the right to a secret.

  It was only as the clock she settled into the silt that I recalled the ivory ball, no longer the moon to Breguet’s Earth but rather in my pocket, abstracted from the clock before I left the salon, taken without real consciousness but as odd reflex. I was glad that it was with me—e’en as I watched my objects, my men, my ship, my memories—it was a wonder that I be still alive. What use if any to make of that fact was beyond my capacity to ponder, imagine, desire.

  As I ascended toward the surface I could now see through the faceplate of my suit, the sea-bed entire. There was the eighty-foot spool of cable canted in to the sea-bottom silt. There would be neither grapnel nor salvage nor recovery and in that there was some satisfaction. Curling outward from the spool was a length of cable, now tangled and sinuous, extending from spool to Nautilus, around which the end of the cable was still thrice-wrapt. Nautilus her glass was staved in, her metal crushed, her rooms and gangways and cabins filled with sea. What began as a dream of a nameless Mussulman in Gwalior was now lying in repose, on the sea-bed, well-nestled into the silt.