The Great Eastern

by Howard Rodman

  When they had gone as far as they could go—the western point of l’île du Palais, under the large and spreading tree—they bent low over the stones and handful by handful scattered the ashes and remains which settled into the river. The river carried them downstream past Le Havre and Honfleur until they were dispersed and mingled with the oceans of the world.

  That evening, Monday 30th May, Céline—having at length made her way past and around occupying troops back down to her own quartier—spent the night with her family. When she had shown up at her own door, disheveled and filthy and wounded, she had expected her father to be furious with her. Instead he took her in his arms. Her mother bathed her while her father went out and found a doctor, a medical man who could be trusted. He extracted from her arm a lead bullet, cleaned the wound, debrided the damaged tissue, sewed it up, and wrapped it in a dressing that he’d soaked with carbolic acid. He prescribed that she ingest distilled alcohol and to that end produced from the folds of his jacket a bottle of Vieux Marc. This he shared with the family, even the youngest ones. Monsieur Carbonnel asked for an accounting but the medical man just shook his head, smiled briefly and found his way to the door.

  An hour later as she was preparing for bed Céline felt a lump in her skirt and dug into her pocket, finding within its folds a small cloth-wrapped packet. At first it seemed mysterious—how did it get there?—but then she recalled she had been given it by the man in the catacombs. In her own room (the room she shared with her four siblings) and in her own bed (the one she shared with her sister Julie) the events of the day seemed both large and distant. How could so much have happened in so short a period of time? As she lay in her bed the memories had already started to recede. Trauma and Vieux Marc. All across the city, even as wounds were being wrapped, events were becoming images, images were becoming recollections, until the imagination of a free city was like a dream, the smell and feel and fine detail of which would dissolve quickly in the morning light.

  Céline unwrapped the packet. Inside was a small ivory ball, in diameter no larger than the first joint of her thumb. It was carved until it was near-hollow, with a tracery of extraordinarily thin lines holding all together. Who had the skill, or patience, to craft such a thing? There were worlds within worlds. It looked so fragile, as if the slightest pressure would reduce it to dust.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  LATEST BY TELEGRAPH.

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  OVATION TO CYRUS W. FIELD

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  Grand Reception at Great Barrington, Mass.

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  INTERESTING PROCEEDINGS, SPEECHES, &C.

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  Great Barrington, Thursday, Sept. 20.

  THIS HAS BEEN a great day here. The occasion was the reception of welcome of CYRUS W. FIELD, Esq., the world-renowned parent of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable scheme, which has been so successfully completed. Little time had been given for preparation, and there was more heart in the demonstration then sought to show itself in display.

  A dispatch had been received from Mr. FIELD on Tuesday, stating that he would arrive with Captain HUDSON, of the Great Eastern, Mr. ARCHIBALD, British Consul at New York, and Mr. EVERETT, the engineer of the Atlantic Cable Company. Captain HUDSON, however, did not come.

  At 2 o’clock a gun from Mount Peter announced that the train bearing Mr. FIELD and his friends was in sight. At that moment the platform at the station and the entire neighborhood was crowded with people to witness the reception. Mr. FIELD’S father, the Rev. Dr. FIELD, of Stockbridge, and his wife and four of his children, among them Hon. STEPHEN JOHNSON FIELD, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, President HOPKINS of Williams’ College, GEO. R. IVES, Esq., DAVID LEAVITT, SHELDEN LEAVITT, and all the principle citizens of Barrington and the surrounding towns were present.

  As Mr. FIELD stepped off the train, three rousing cheers were given for him, and the Lee Cornet Band played “Hail to the Chief.” A long line of carriages made up a procession, which escorted Mr. FIELD to the Parsonage, the beautiful country seat of GEO. R. IVES, Esq. Here a halt was made, and the party enjoyed the liberal hospitality of Mr. IVES and spent a pleasant half hour, during which Mr. FIELD received many of his old and a host of new friends.

  The Company then took their way to Brookside, the princely country seat of DAVID LEAVITT, Esq., where they had dinner. Just before sitting down to the table Mr. FIELD received and announced the contents of a dispatch from London of today’s date, announcing the first message that has come over the Atlantic Cable to Old Berkshire, announcing the end of the cholera outbreak in the East End. This happy exemplification of the great undertaking which Mr. FIELD had so gloriously consummated, yielded general gratification to himself as well as to everybody else present.

  Shortly after dinner the party took carriages and proceeded to Agricultural Hall, a large building in the close vicinity belonging to the Housatonic Agricultural Society, to which they had a large escort, where a formal meeting was to take place at 6½ o’clock, and where the people of the neighborhood had already proceeded in procession.

  The Hall was filled to overflowing. The chair was taken by DAVID LEAVITT, Esq. Messrs. GEORGE R. IVES and A. G. WHITON, the Committee of Arrangements, read sundry letters and dispatches.

  The first dispatch was from Captain HUDSON, of the Great Eastern, saying that “It is impossible for me to visit Great Barrington on Thursday next. The officers are to go on leaves of absence, the crew are to be paid off, and the ship is to be put out of commission, which I very much regret but cannot alter.”

  Gov. BANKS telegraphed as follows: “Official duties at Salem alone prevent my joining you in the reception of Mr. Field on Thursday. No son of Massachusetts has conferred more signal honor or service upon his native State.”

  The Chairman, in a brief but well-conceived speech, then introduced the business of the occasion and called upon the Hon. INCREASE SUMNER to express the sentiments of the old, warm-hearted, and exultant friends and neighbors of Mr. FIELD towards him in his time of triumph and honor.

  Hon. INCREASE SUMNER, in his welcoming speech, said in substance, that the heart of this great Republic—he might add of the whole world—was thrilled with rapture because of the achievement mainly attributable to Mr. FIELD. By his forecast and heroic energy and perseverance space had almost been annihilated between the Old and New Worlds.

  The hearts of the people of the Eastern and the Western Continents beat as under one pulsation and with kindred and parental feelings for this sublime and moral triumph, which the world, under Providence, was mainly indebted to Mr. FIELD; its results no man could estimate, but they would be mighty for peace and for good, and as they displayed themselves, the names of their originators would become brighter and brighter on the record of the future, and continue to shine, while the glories of the heroes whose laurels are sprinkled with blood, would face and be forgotten; comparing Mr. FIELD with such benefactors of the human race as CADMUS, EPERMICUS, GALLILEO, COLUMBUS, BACON, NEWTON, FRANKLIN, and WASHINGTON.

  Mr. SUMNER said that the tongue of praise never became weary, nor did honest adulation become excessive; for whatever amount of praise was given, a vast space was still left for an additional measure; oratory, poetry, minstrelsy, painting and scripture. Introducing Mr. FIELD to the meeting Mr. SUMNER said: The native boy of our sister town of Stockbridge stands before you, the foremost man of the world, for he has combined all existing discoveries relating to the working of electricity, and through the hidden recesses of the wide ocean made them subservient to human benefit.

  Mr. FIELD was received with loud and protracted cheers. Mr. FIELD spoke in reply as follows: Ladies and gentlemen, you can better imagine my feelings than I can describe them. I certainly did not for a moment imagine that I should have such a reception from you, the warm-hearted people of good old Berkshire, the friends of my youth. I had thought that some 50 or 100 of my neighbors would have been present to greet me, but I had no idea of the extent of this demonstration. I a
m indeed grateful but let me say, without any disparagement of your kindly feelings, that it is not alone on account of any merit of mine you have come here, but because under Providence I have contributed merely my share in the great accomplishment, the benefits of which have been so eloquently alluded to by my friend, Mr. SUMNER.

  I beg my friends that you will not forget the deserts of Captain HUDSON of the Great Eastern, who has done so much for the successful completion of our great international endeavor. We also acknowledge Prof. WILLIAM THOMPSON, who by virtue of his work on the telegraph is now Sir WILLIAM THOMPSON, FRS. (Cheers.) I pray you not to forget your assignment of credit to my friend near me, who has done everything so well in the perfection of the machinery by which the Atlantic Cable was laid—I allude to my friend Mr. EVERETT of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. (Loud and enthusiastic cheers.)

  Nor on this day do we the larger sacrifice still of the late Captain ANDERSON, who gave his life diving from the fore-deck into uncertain and perilous waters to rescue a fellow sailor who had fallen over-board. It is with sadness I acknowledge that neither returned to ship. Captain ANDERSON perished while placing the life of another before his own. In doing so he did show this American the true courage of the Englishman. I shall now observe and encourage you to follow a moment of silence for this sailor and hero.

  Though there was no allotment for questions, correspondents from the Massachusetts press, as well as from other journals more distant did, following the observation of silence, speak.

  Mr. BRANEGAN, of Boston, did enquire as to the reports that the Great Eastern was rent asunder by sea-turbulence. This Mr. FIELD dismissed as rumor and speculation, saying that the ship was the strongest ever built; that the seas, during the voyage, did not challenge her; and that her current drydock was routine.

  Mr. HARRISON, of Narragansett, citing first-hand accounts, brought up the reports of piracy, and of mutiny on the high seas, disputing Mr. FIELD’S account of Captain ANDERSON’S death. Immediately Mr. FIELD did sit down, and the hall rung again with the warm and earnest applause of his friends. After speeches from many other distinguished gentlemen, the assemblage, at a late hour, dispersed.

  —The New York Times.

  21st September.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  THE COURSE OF the Great Eastern herself—in the years following the grand triumph of thought-by-wire you have just seen so robustly celebrated—will likely offer, for those who have read thus far, little surprise. It was as you can imagine less a course than a descent, into pathos and decay, though perhaps not in that order.

  She was, following the cable, put up for sale. There was a mild competition between Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, who wanted the Great Eastern to ferry Americans to his Universal Exposition in Paris, and His Transcendent Highness, Sultan Abdul-Aziz of Turkey, who would outfit the Great Eastern as a floating palace.

  Bonaparte prevailed. Her cable tanks were knocked out, two boilers and a fourth funnel restored, and a steer-by-steam system installed—something that had been in Brunel’s original plans, but that Sir Daniel Gooch’s penuriousness had prevented.

  There was much use of silk and brass to restore former staterooms to their former splendor. Her first outing, from Le Havre to New York, was a red-beef-and-Champagne affair. One of those on board, M. Jules Verne, catalogued the manifest of London bankers, Chicago merchants, Peruvian aristocracy. His impression of the salon was that of “corpulent Americans who swung themselves backward and forward in rocking chairs.”

  Upon arrival in New York M. Verne cleared customs—it is possible, if nowhere documented, that his examiner at the Custom House Service on Nassau Street was Inspector No. 75, Mr. Herman Melville—and then checked into the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

  The return trip, from New York to Le Havre, was far less populated: 191 souls aboard (including our M. Verne), where perhaps ten times that number would be necessary for Bonaparte to turn a profit. He put her up for sale.

  Her next owner was the French Cable Company, which again outfitted her to lay wire on the seabed. Under the helm of Robert Halpin, a genial and portly captain out of Wicklow, the Great Eastern sailed from Brest. There were storms and squalls, calamities small and large. Deep in the North Atlantic the cable was snagged in, severed by the Great Eastern‘s propeller. Break; repair; sail on.

  Then for two days under lowering glass Captain Halpin was lost: he could see neither sun nor stars, the ship’s compass attracted more to Cable than to Pole. When the fog did lift he found himself within sight of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, France’s islands in the New World. At 2,584 nautical miles, far and away the longest yet, the French cable was a triumph, even as the Great Eastern was showing her miles.

  Mr. Field’s grande idée—a thread of thought between continents—had become less dream than budget item. For the commanders of empire in London, telegraphy had long been the bugbear. Telegraphic cable ran from Old Broad Street under the Channel to Paris, where messages often languished for days if not weeks while French domestic traffic received priority.

  From there the missives went across Europe to the Ottoman Empire, where bandit tribes murdered telegraphers for profit, and infidel messages were by officials impounded. The alternative route—Holland, Germany, the Russian State System to Tiflis, Teheran, thence the Persian Gulf—was worse. Russian relay operators spoke no English, and the garbled, unintentionally encrypted results were often published in the Bombay Gazette to give the pukka sahibs a decent guffaw over their afternoon gin.

  And so the Great Eastern set out again: down the Salvage Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast. Taking up coal at Capetown, then up, through tropical lightning, past the Seychelles to the Indian Sea. The captain had her painted white, stem-to-stern, to reduce the awful heat. When finally she was spotted, coming in on last steam to Bombay, she appeared to be a large and anomalous iceberg, or some variety of ghost.

  The workmen of Bombay, like marine workers everywhere, chanted as they hauled cable up and over and down into the Great Eastern‘s hold.

  Good are the cable-wallahs, great are their names!

  Good are the cable-wallahs, wah, wah!

  Great are the cable-wallahs, wah, wah!

  The ship set sail from Bombay on 14th February 1870, on a humid afternoon, just as the banana boats were coming in to harbor. Headed—first leg—for Aden, laying cable on the bed of the Sindhu Sagar. When London and India were by the Great Eastern connected by wire, they carried messages of grand congratulations, from the Prince of Wales to the Khedive of Egypt, from Ulysses S. Grant to the Prince. The wife of the Indian Viceroy, in London, cabled her husband, in Bombay:

  IN AVAILING MYSELF OF THE SUBMARINE CABLE I FEEL THE OBLIGATION WHICH SCIENCE IMPOSES UPON THE WORLD NOT ONLY DOES IT SERVE POLITICAL INTERESTS BUT ASSISTS DOMESTIC RELATIONS IN THUS ENABLING ME TO SEND YOU ALMOST INSTANTANEOUSLY AN AFFECTIONATE GREETING FROM YOUR WIFE AND FAMILY

  If telegraphy continued to thrive, the ship that laid the cable did not. After many false starts, failed re-imaginings, Sir Daniel Gooch gave her up in 1880. In 1884 in New Orleans a consortium of businessmen, or so they called themselves, raised capital to bring the Great Eastern to their city, where she would serve as the world’s largest floating faro parlor. They collected $15,000 from Mumm’s Champagne and $7,500 from Schweppe’s Tonic, but seemed, with hindsight, to have been less interested in the ship than in the funds that might be raised in the contemplation of it. The Great Eastern herself remained in Cardiff.

  The year subsequent she was once again put up at auction, fetching £26,200 from one Edward de Mattos, who promised, as several had before him, to return Great Eastern to her former glory, replacing her rusted plates and scraping what was now a six-inch-thick layer of barnacles from her sub-sea hull. The task of restoring her to seaworthiness proved too daunting, too expensive, or both, and she was taken to Liverpool, though not under her own steam. She was outfitted for advertising. In letters full thirty-feet high on her port hull was wr
itten

  LADIES SHOULD VISIT LEWIS’S BON MARCHE CHURCH STREET

  and on the starboard

  LEWIS’S ARE THE FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE

  De Mattos then brought onboard, for the delectation of the public, a freak show predicated on the exoticism of the African continent, featuring Bob the Missing Link. In adjoining staterooms he did install yodelers, bell-ringers, conjurors, skipping-rope dancers, each of which could be visited for a separate fee. Each evening, on deck, the citizens of Liverpool could purchase a ticket to see Knockabout Negro Comedians by electrical light.

  On 27th October 1887 the Great Eastern was sold at auction to scrap metal dealers, an act that might be seen—to any who held the longer view—as a mercy. The scrap dealers, Henry Bath & Sons, commenced by selling her anchors; brass fittings; copper fittings; and her three million rivets. Sold in separate lots and dispersed to the corners of empire. By May of the year 1889 the ship was fully deconstructed. It was only in that month that they found, between Brunel’s carefully constructed double hulls, a body, a human body, part skeleton, part long-decayed flesh.

  Popular lore has it that the body was that of a riveter who disappeared during the Great Eastern‘s construction. It is equally possible that the body belonged to our composer, the young Shropham, who at Mile End did see what should not have been seen, and then, soon thereafter, saw no more.

  FIFTY-NINE

  THE CAMERA OBSCURA of Bristol is housed in an old structure built of stone that more resembles a castle than anything else. There is a one-story building—flat, rectangular—and at the far end a tall and circular tower. The tower adds perhaps another three stories and is topped with a crenellated wall. Though it looks—with its commanding view of the river below—as if it might have been a fortification, it was in fact built as a wind-driven cornmill in 1766, then later adapted to the grinding of snuff. This it did do until late 1777 when the mill’s canvas sails were left out in a lightning storm and caught fire.