History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce, Volume 4 (of 4)

by W. S. Lindsay

CHAPTER XIV.

Commencement of launch of the Great Eastern, November 3rd, 1857—Christened by Miss Hope—Comparative failure—Renewed efforts scarcely more successful—Hydraulic ram bursts—Floats of her own accord, January 31st, 1858—The whole scheme of this launch a thorough mistake—Difficulties of the company—Offer to Government wisely declined—Further proposal to employ her as a cable layer—Makes her first sea trip, September 9th, 1859—Accident off Hastings, and the opinion of the pilot—Reaches Holyhead; and details of her voyage—Makes her first voyage across the Atlantic, June 1860—Second voyage, May 1861—Third voyage to Quebec, July 1861—Fourth voyage, September 1861—Heavy gale off S.W. coast of Ireland, and compelled to return to Cork—General remarks on the sea-going qualities of different ships, and on the effect of wind in causing “rollers”—Real truth about “momentum”—Very large ships not so safe as smaller ones, as their damages are less easily repaired—Chief later use of the Great Eastern as a cable layer, but, not even here, remunerative—Concluding remarks.

Commencement of launch of the Great Eastern, November 3rd, 1857.

After various unavoidable delays rendered necessary by such an unexampled experiment, the day for the launching of the Great Eastern was fixed for the 3rd of November, 1857.

A vast concourse of people assembled on land and river to witness the launch. Crowds of naval and scientific men from all parts of the world were there, and, in spite of the inclement season of the year, numerous members of the aristocracy came to see this marvellous feat; nor indeed was royalty, itself, unrepresented. Probably no such multitude had on any previous occasion congregated on the banks of the Thames. It was a magnificent sight, but one, also, the practised eye could not survey without apprehension of danger. The preparations for her launch were, it is true, made with the object of lowering the vessel slowly into the water by means of cradles erected on the launching ways, but if the huge mass had received the impetus which in all similar cases is given to vessels when the retaining and supporting shores are removed, the cables, though of unusual strength, would have proved altogether insufficient to restrain so ponderous a weight when once in motion; they must have snapped asunder like hempen cords, and, considering the number of small boats and steamers full of people at the time on the river, and the crowds on its banks, no one can contemplate without a shudder the loss of life which, under such circumstances, would have probably occurred.

By reference to the following illustration the reader will better understand the nature of the danger apprehended, and, also, see at a glance the position of the great ship as she lay on the cradles ready for launching.

Christened by Miss Hope.

The ceremony of christening the vessel was performed by Miss Hope (now Duchess of Newcastle), daughter of the Chairman of the Great Eastern Steam Navigation Company. When the moment for launching arrived, the interest of the vast assembly of people who had gathered together to witness the operation became intense, increasing as the shores were one by one struck from under her and the last cable fastenings loosened. But the leviathan did not seem to move, and it was, only, when the stationary engines tightened the chains which passed from the vessel to the opposite shore, that any motion became perceptible. A tremendous cheer then burst from the excited multitude. Immediately afterwards, however, there was a pause: silent suspense again prevailed, with increased anxiety blended now with evil forebodings. A whisper passed along the dense crowd that the slide down the inclined plane of 3½ feet at the stem and 7 feet at the stern thus effected, was of an alarming character. It was one, too, which had not been anticipated; and, when it became known that the rapid revolution of the drum and fly-wheels caused by the sudden motion of the vessel had seriously injured several of the men employed upon these ponderous machines, there were grave apprehensions of further danger.

Comparative failure.

Some delay in the operations now necessarily occurred, but, at a quarter past three P.M., the time of high water, when the engines were again set to work, expectation was once more raised to the highest pitch. Every eye was now directed towards the cradles, but this time they did not stir an inch, and, as the chains tightened it became too apparent that if the vessel was not forced towards the water they must break. At length, subjected to a strain greater than ought to have been applied, the ponderous chain attached to the fore part of the vessel snapped asunder, and then all hopes of launching the leviathan were ended for that day. It would be superfluous to dwell on the many speculations as to the cause of this failure; certain it is that it was great and lamentable, and, as it was impossible to repair the injury the launching machinery had sustained, in time for further operations on the following day, no time was, then, fixed for resuming action.

However, on the 19th of November, these operations were again begun, the alleged object on this occasion being to move the great ship 40 feet lower down than the position she then occupied, so as to be ready for launching when the tide suited; but this effort equally proved abortive. The immediate cause of this second failure is accounted for by the abutments of the piles, against which the bases of the hydraulic rams rested, yielding under the enormous pressure exerted between them and the ship’s cradle, in many cases giving way or breaking down altogether.

Renewed efforts scarcely more successful.

Most of the subsequent operations of the company were kept as far as possible secret, and the presence of the public, which had been courted to witness an anticipated triumph, was now as studiously avoided, under the prudential plea of avoiding accidents, involving loss of life, by the too rapid motion of the ship towards the river. But a fresh experiment, after prodigious efforts, and the snapping of one of the 3-inch chains, proving likewise unsuccessful, the report of it soon got mooted abroad, and the public, always fluctuating between extremes, now began to entertain serious doubts whether the Great Eastern would ever get afloat.

Hydraulic ram bursts.

A third attempt, on Saturday, November 28th, proved however more successful than the previous efforts. On this occasion the Great Eastern was gradually lowered down the launching ways some 25 feet in a slow but satisfactory manner; while, on the 1st December, when the tedious process of moving the gigantic structure was recommenced, she moved steadily, for a time, at the rate of half an inch a minute, but, suddenly, soon after slipped 5 inches forward and 9 inches aft, to the terror of every person engaged in the operation; and, when renewed efforts were made in the course of the afternoon, one of the ten-inch hydraulic rams burst, as might have been anticipated, under the tremendous pressure of 1300 pounds to the square inch of its cylinder: consequently, the work of launching was suspended for that day.

Six weeks elapsed ere the operations were resumed, and, this time, with the most sanguine hope on the part of Mr. Brunel that the great ship would reach her destination by the spring tides of the 28th or 30th of January, 1858. On this occasion the plans could not be kept secret. Crowds of people were again in attendance, among whom were the Duchess d’Orleans, the Comte de Paris, and various other distinguished personages, as well as many men of science. The Great Eastern was, indeed, not merely the wonder of this age, but she created more sensation among men of scientific and maritime pursuits in all parts of the world than any vessel had ever done in any age. Nor was she an object of much less interest at the time to the general public, while the difficulties of her launch and the appliances for this purpose were freely discussed, often in no friendly spirit, at the meetings of the learned institutions, as well as in the gay gatherings of Belgravia, and in the more humble homes and workshops of Mile End and Poplar. The subject was one of hardly less interest throughout Europe and the United States. But shrewd practical men, while envying the superabundant wealth of the shareholders, and admiring their boldness in investing in her as a commercial undertaking with so questionable a chance of profit, quietly sneered at the futile attempts to launch the leviathan. Though of unusual weight and size, they said, that had the ordinary process been adopted, she would have found her way to the water with as much ease and safety as a vessel of ordinary dimensions. There was no need, they remarked, to launch her broadway to the Thames, as, in their opinion, she might have been so built that when started from her ways she would shoot either up or down the river, as hundreds of vessels launched from the banks of much narrower streams had done before her.

Floats of her own accord, January 31st, 1858.

However, on this occasion, the efforts at launching were so far attended with success, an average advance of 20 feet having been obtained in the course of the day, so that when the tide reached its height, the monster was 7½ feet in the water; but the only distance accomplished on the following day, was one solitary slip of “2½ inches,” and in this state she lay until Tuesday, the 31st January, when the great ship quietly floated of her own accord, the tide having risen sufficiently high to lift her from the cradles on which she had so long lain.

The whole scheme of this launch a thorough mistake.

The struggle of hydraulic power with the monster the company had created, and other appliances proved most expensive, the launch of this ship having cost no less than 120,000l. when 10,000l. or even 5000l., it was said, might have sufficed;[426] nor, indeed, is it easy to understand how, with all the data before them, the tons weight to be lifted, the angle of inclination, and the well-known rate of friction, dynamic science could not have calculated with the utmost accuracy the amount of force requisite to move the Great Eastern on her launching ways. No adequate consideration, however, seems to have been given to these important matters, for additions were made, day by day, to the force applied, and these, too, experimentally, and not, as might have been expected, as the result of careful, previous calculations. No doubt the chief cause of this expensive failure is attributable to the fact that Mr. Brunel (it was well known at the time that Mr. Scott Russell strongly opposed Mr. Brunel’s plan of launching) was permitted to try the almost insane experiment of launching the ship on iron instead of wooden ways, as has, hitherto, invariably been adopted in the launch of all other vessels.

The expenses attending the launch exhausted the funds of the Great Eastern Company; and brought it to the brink of dissolution. Nor was this the only trouble to which the Great Eastern was exposed. On the 5th of April, 1858, a sharp north-easterly squall, which swept the river with considerable violence, subjected her moorings to a strain so severe, that one of the chain cables on the port-bow parted about 20 feet below the hawse-hole, and for a time exposed the vessel to great danger; fortunately, however, this unfair weight snapped, also, the second stern-chain, and thus allowed the vessel’s bows to swing in towards the Deptford shore, thereby saving the Great Eastern from more serious loss.

Difficulties of the Company.

Offer to Government wisely declined.

The difficulties, however, in which the company were involved had now become a matter of public notoriety; the more so, that the vessel remained for more than a year equally unfinished as on the day she launched herself, and was in fact nothing more than a vast iron hulk lying on the waters of the Thames. Ineffectual efforts were made to induce the public to come forward and subscribe the extra capital requisite to complete her, but the launch, and other circumstances, had increased the doubts long entertained by men of business with regard to the prospects of the ship, as a commercial undertaking; hence, the public could not be induced to re-invigorate the exchequer of the company with sufficient money to equip her for sea. The various suggestions made to persuade the shareholders of the company to come forward with additional capital, were of no avail and they all, alike, failed in raising the requisite funds. A negotiation was even opened with the Government with a view to the purchase of the vessel, the press, all at once, teeming with articles to the effect that, whether important or not as a mercantile adventure, the great ship, as a vessel of war, would be “almost invaluable.”[427] This discovery, it is true, had been previously overlooked, but it soon became the theme of general discussion.

The difficulties of the existing means of oceanic communication it was said, compelled Government to maintain larger forces at all points of the empire, and at the same time, than were actually requisite; consequently, it was argued that, with two or three such stupendous vessels as the Great Eastern, such a necessity would be obviated, and Government would really have increased strength, even though her present military establishments were greatly reduced. It was, further, urged that continental nations were well aware that the secret of England’s weakness, as a military power, is not so much from the smallness as from the wide dispersion of her army. Once shown that means exist for obviating this necessity, and that she is able, in a few days, to transport an army of 10,000 men to any part of Europe, and England’s position, as a military empire, would be established. It was asserted that the political results, accruing from any Government having at its disposal such a class of ships, would be equally important; while the facility provided for the transportation of large numbers of soldiers across the seas would necessarily consolidate more closely the power of Great Britain with that of her distant possessions. The revolution a squadron of such vessels would effect in war would be as great as their results in commerce; moreover, for the first time, steam would achieve on the ocean what it had already achieved on land.

But the arguments employed by the negotiators, backed as these were by suggestions artfully thrown out by a portion of the public press, to the effect that foreign powers might become possessed of this invaluable ship to the prejudice, disadvantage, and dishonour of Great Britain, terminated in failure. Government decided against the proposal, and no alternative remained, but to wind up the affairs of the existing company and to endeavour to make some arrangement whereby fresh capital could be raised to complete the vessel.

Further proposal to employ her as a cable-layer.

The Atlantic cable, which was to form a telegraphic communication between Europe and the United States, was completed in the summer of 1858, and the vessels of war employed in laying it across the Atlantic having made an unsuccessful voyage on the first occasion, it was strongly urged upon Government[428] that the Great Eastern should be fitted up by the Admiralty for the purpose of laying it down, as the whole of the cable could be contained in this one vessel, thus diminishing the risks of failure necessarily inseparable from employing two ships, each starting in opposite directions from the middle of the Atlantic. But the prevailing opinion then was, though it changed a few years later, that the Great Eastern from her height out of the water was unadapted for such a service, and, further, that there were no public grounds on which the application of the necessary sum from the Exchequer to assist the operations of a private company could be justified: therefore, Government distinctly refused to entertain the proposal.

Renewed endeavours were now made to reorganise the undertaking, and after much difficulty the affairs of the original company were wound up, the sum of 160,000l. having been accepted for the sale and transfer of the vessel to a new company, which came into possession of her in the beginning of the year 1859.

Makes her first sea trip, September 9th, 1859.

Somewhere about 300,000l. having been subscribed for the new undertaking, which received the name of the Great Ship Company, the directors, after paying for the ship, had 140,000l. left to equip her for sea; but it was not until September 1859 that the Great Eastern was sufficiently complete to make her first trial trip. On Wednesday, the 9th of that month, she took her departure from the Thames under the most favourable circumstances, the weather being very fine with a light breeze of wind and blue sky overhead. Starting with four tugs, two on the bow and two at the quarter, to guide her through the narrow parts of the river, she, after some delay and a few slight mishaps, reached Purfleet, where she anchored for the night. At daylight, on the following morning she started for the Nore, where she arrived about noon, having obtained a speed of “13 knots” an hour, though only at “half-speed”, her engines making not more than eight revolutions a minute.

From the Nore the Great Eastern proceeded successfully to Whitstable, where she anchored, getting under weigh, thence, at a quarter past nine on the following morning with a fresh breeze. After passing Margate she encountered a stiff gale, where, as represented in the following woodcut, she appears “quite at ease,” when “large ships were under double reefed topsails” and small vessels were obliged to “lie to.”

Accident off Hastings, and the opinion of the pilot.

But an unfortunate accident occurred to her, when off Hastings, through the explosion of one of her funnel-casings, causing the death of six men employed in the engineering department, injuring various others, and destroying nearly all the mirrors and other ornamental furniture in the grand saloon. Though appalling enough at the time, no injury was done to the hull or machinery of the vessel sufficient to prevent her proceeding on her voyage to Weymouth, which she reached without any further misfortune on the afternoon of Friday, within the time anticipated for her arrival.

S.S. “GREAT EASTERN,” UNDER FULL SAIL AND STEAM, PASSING DOVER.

Reaches Holyhead; and details of her voyage.

On her arrival, the pilot who had been in charge of the Great Eastern from Deptford to Portland (Weymouth Bay), made an official report of her performances to the company,[429] confirming, in some measure, the glowing accounts in many of the public journals and realising the sanguine expectations of the directors, though their hopes of profit had been somewhat damped by the accident which, apart from the loss of life, entailed an outlay of 5000l. The necessary repairs having been completed, the Great Eastern proceeded from Portland to Holyhead, but without passengers as originally contemplated. Starting at noon of the 8th of October, she made the run to Holyhead in forty hours at an “average speed of close upon 13 knots or more than 15 statute miles in the hour,” having on some occasions attained a speed of 15 knots an hour, the engineers and other experienced men on board feeling “thoroughly convinced that, when in the condition which the company has a right to expect, she will make easily 18 knots or 21 miles an hour.”

The paddle-engines, during one portion of the passage where a careful record was kept, appear to have made from 8¾ to 9¾ revolutions per minute, and the screw from 32 to 33½ revolutions in the same time, the pressure being 20 pounds per square inch in both cases with the throttle-valves half closed and both engines working on the second grade of expansion, giving an average speed of 12 knots an hour, but with an outlay of “10 tons of coal per hour.” On another occasion when the sails were set, and the weather more favourable, she is said to have attained a speed of 15 knots, with the screw making from 38 to 40, and the paddles from 10½ to 11 revolutions per minute, and, at this rate of speed, the screw boilers consumed on the average at the rate of 170 tons per day, and the paddle-engines on the average 110 tons, giving a consumption of 280 tons of coal each day under favourable circumstances. During the highest rate of speed the engines made 11 revolutions for the paddles per minute and 43 for the screw. A special trial gave the speed of the ship under paddle-wheels alone 7¼, and under the screw alone 9 knots an hour.

Makes her first voyage across the Atlantic, June 1860.

Having made the trial trip to Holyhead to the satisfaction of her directors, the Great Eastern left that harbour shortly after noon on the 2nd of November for Southampton, but did not leave that port on her first voyage across the Atlantic until the morning of the 17th of June, 1860, reaching New York on the 28th of that month. The greatest speed attained during the passage was 14½ knots an hour, and the greatest distance run in any one day 333 knots.[430] Only thirty-six passengers were found bold enough to accompany her on this voyage, besides two of the directors. But the Americans gave her a warm and hearty reception on her arrival at New York; hundreds of small vessels crowded with people having gone out to meet her and bid her welcome, the scene in the North River, where she moored, being described[431] as a “perfect ovation.”

In the report which the directors issued to the shareholders[432] shortly after the Great Eastern returned to Milford Haven (where she was placed with great skill on a gridiron and had her bottom cleaned and painted) they state that 14,000l. had been remitted from the agents at New York, and, though they had not then furnished their accounts, the directors expressed a hope that the receipts would cover the expenses of the trial trip to America without trenching on the capital; they, however, stated that heavy outstanding claims remained unsettled, and that they would require, to meet these demands and put the ship into good working order, an additional capital of from 30,000l. to 40,000l.

Second voyage, May 1861.

The requisite sum having been provided, the Great Eastern left Milford Haven on her second passage for New York on the 1st of May, 1861, with 100 passengers. On this occasion she consumed from 159 to 295 tons of coals per day; the entire distance (3093 miles) being accomplished in ten days, though the wind, by her log, appears to have been ahead during a considerable portion of the voyage. In one day, she accomplished a distance of 348 nautical miles, her greatest speed being 14½ knots an hour, or one half knot per hour less than the average speed anticipated on a voyage to India.[433]

Third voyage to Quebec, July 1861.

On the return of the Great Eastern to England in the following month of June, the apprehension of war with the United States occasioned by the Trent affair induced the British Government to engage her, with other steamships, to transport troops and munitions of war to Canada. But those embarked (or rather, for prudential reasons, allowed to embark) fell far short of the number her designers had contemplated; they had estimated 10,000, but the Government wisely limited the number to 2079 men, 46 officers, 159 women, and 244 children, besides 40 cabin passengers who were civilians. Having landed her troops at Quebec, she left that place on her return to England at four o’clock on the morning of the 6th of August, and, though detained twelve hours in crossing the bars in the River St. Lawrence, she arrived at her moorings in the Mersey on Thursday at 8.30 P.M. of the 15th of that month.

Fourth voyage, September 1861.

Heavy gale off the S.W. coast of Ireland, compelled to return to Cork.

Early in the course of the following month, the Great Eastern sailed from the Mersey on her fourth Transatlantic voyage with 400 passengers of different classes for New York. On this occasion she encountered, on the 12th and 13th of September, a heavy gale of wind when about 280 miles off Cape Clear, and sustained so much damage that she was obliged to put back and seek shelter in Cork Harbour. Various accounts of this disaster appeared, at the time, in the daily journals. Her paddles, it would appear, were seriously injured, and her rudder “rendered useless.” Nor do the writers of these accounts speak very highly of the anticipated superior sea-going qualities of the great ship, or of her freedom from that violent motion in a gale, to which ordinary vessels are subjected. Indeed, one of her passengers on this occasion, in a letter he addressed to the Times, gives the most melancholy account of her, but this description of the disaster and the imminent danger to which her passengers were exposed, is probably exaggerated.[434] Landsmen in a gale, especially when anything goes wrong, generally, take the most gloomy view of matters; they picture to themselves dangers which have no reality, and, when they see the seamen hurrying to and fro to rectify, as far as possible, any damage the ship may have sustained about her spars, rigging, or bulwarks, they too frequently give themselves up for lost.

So long as the hull of a ship keeps sound the action of the ocean, however disturbed, does not, materially, affect her safety, but, in this action, the landsman, too frequently, sees just that kind of danger which the sailor is said to have dreaded during a gale on land, from falling slates and broken chimney-pots, congratulating himself that he was at sea and not on shore in the midst of the storm.

General remarks on the sea-going qualities of different ships,

On the other hand, the anticipated ease and safety of the Great Eastern during a gale was about as much exaggerated, as the discomforts and danger the narrator of the gale has described. One enthusiastic writer, among numerous others equally sanguine, in his description of what might be expected from the great ship in a storm, remarks “she will set circular sailing at defiance,” as if circular sailing has anything whatever to do with the sea-going qualities of a vessel. He then exclaims: “The line which in a tornado is said to make a steady but resistless run of 20 miles will be counteracted by the ‘wave line,’ which Mr. Scott Russell has adopted as the principle on which she has been built. Storms and tempests will be looked upon as merely sublime phenomena, in nowise menacing peril as things scarcely affecting the ship, but to be gazed upon out of snug cabin windows as interesting episodes of the voyage.”

and on the effect of wind in causing “rollers.”

So much for the two extremes, but from these glowing anticipations on the one hand, and the exaggerated account of the actual event on the other, some lessons may be learned. The wave line (whatever may be its advantage, if any, over the lines usually adopted by shipbuilders) can produce no sensible difference in the violent motions of a ship at sea, even if it tends to promote greater speed. Waves are of greater length and height, according to the force of the gale and its extent of sweep over the ocean.[435] In channels, where broken by projecting points of land or promontories, they are short and disturbed. When crossing the whole breadth of the Atlantic during a westerly gale, they are long, and, as they roll between the headlands forming the Bay of Biscay, they are also disturbed, rendering a voyage across that part of the ocean a proverbially unpleasant and, with deeply laden and badly found ships, a somewhat dangerous one. To insist, therefore, as some writers appear to have done, that the lines of a ship should be in conformity with the length and action of the waves, or that, by a careful study of the law of fluids, they can be so drawn as to render, under all the varied circumstances of a long voyage, one ship more easy or even more swift than another, is, I fear, attributing to science more than it can reasonably claim; for though, by its general application to the models of ships, great improvements have of late years been made, I can hardly suppose that lines, based on the action of fluids, which must be more or less disturbed by the weight and velocity of a vessel passing through them, and by the action of the winds on their surface, do really possess any superior advantages so far as regards greater ease, speed or safety.[436]

Nor had the idea, which prevailed at the time, that a ship of the vast dimensions of the Great Eastern would bid defiance to the danger of the ocean, much more foundation in fact. No doubt a vessel of 1000 tons is a much safer mode of conveyance across the Atlantic than one of 100 tons, and a vessel of 2000 tons may be still more so, but not to either the same degree or extent. Moreover, a ship of double that size, or say 4000 tons, is no safer, though she may be more comfortable, for various self-evident reasons, such as being less liable to receive on deck the crest of the waves, or by affording more space and better ventilation in her cabins; but anything beyond that size will, assuredly, not realize much greater speed, though she may afford greater comfort.

Real truth about “momentum.”

A vessel of 100 tons is lifted by every large wave, and, consequently, the distance she has to traverse is increased. As the size is enlarged this particular description of motion diminishes, in proportion to the length of the vessel. But there is a limit to this advantage, as there is to most other things, and a vessel of 5000 tons and 400 feet long, will be, similarly, borne on the crest of two or more of the largest waves as a vessel 700 feet in length, and, therefore, would lose nothing in speed from the ascending and descending motions: this fact has, indeed, been satisfactorily proved, as the ships of the Ismay, Cunard, Inman, Allan, and other lines of steamers employed in Transatlantic voyages have made more rapid passages than ever the Great Eastern did.[437] Speed, beyond a certain size, is determined by the model, and the power of propulsion, due regard being had to the weight to be propelled and the resistance offered by the depth and extent of immersion. The momentum, about which a great deal was said and from which so much was expected in the case of the Great Eastern, though of some importance, when vessels of 100 tons are compared with those of 1000, is of much less consequence in the case of vessels of unusual weight and dimensions. It is at best only transitory, while, to drive a vessel of 20,000 tons through the water at the rate of 15 miles an hour, somewhere about four times greater power would be necessary than to secure the same speed in a vessel similarly constructed, of 5000 tons, although less power in proportion to tonnage would suffice in smaller vessels.

Very large ships not so safe as smaller ones, as their damages are less easily repaired.

But, with regard to the first and by far the most important consideration, the safety of a vessel at sea, I am disposed to think, though contrary to the generally accepted view, that ships of vast dimensions are less safe, in exceptional circumstances, than those of ordinary size. Take for instance the case of the accident to the Great Eastern, to which I have just referred, in which she lost her rudder, or when, at all events, it was so seriously injured as to be rendered inefficient. I need say nothing of the difficulty, or it might be of the impossibility, of providing a temporary mode of guiding a vessel of such huge dimensions. The loss of the rudder of any vessel in a gale of wind is no doubt a serious matter and one which must ever cause peril, but that peril increases with the size of the ship, for, when thus rendered helpless, the greater the bulk, the greater is the resistance offered to the action of the waves as they strike her sides. This is exemplified, though to a far greater degree, by the fact that a strong ship, on which the beating of the waves in the open sea would make little or no impression, would be dashed to pieces by the same waves if she was stranded on a lee shore. A large ship without rudder and, consequently, helpless in the hollow or trough of the sea would offer resistance to the stroke of the wave in proportion to her weight, and the wave would, consequently, strike with the greatest force on the body of the greatest weight. This, in some measure, and not without reason, accounts for the alarm created in the mind of the passenger on board of the Great Eastern during the gale he so graphically describes.

Chief later use of Great Eastern as a cable layer, but not, even here, remunerative.

From the time of this disaster, the movements of the Great Eastern are not of much historical interest, so far as regards merchant shipping. It is true, that she proved of great value and importance in laying the Atlantic telegraph cable during the summer of 1865, and, in the very skilful feat of picking up from the depths of the ocean the broken ends, and in laying another Atlantic cable during the summer of 1866, when no other ship of sufficient dimensions could then have been found to perform that difficult and hazardous undertaking.[438] She has also proved very useful since, in other similar operations, in India and elsewhere; but, for ordinary commercial operations as various persons predicted,[439] when she was first projected and long before she was sent to sea, she has been a ruinous, though not a lamentable failure.[440] Even the work of laying cables was not remunerative, for, by a report of the directors issued in March 1869, it appears that the great ship had been arrested for a debt of 35,000l., that the current expenses had, considerably, exceeded the receipts, and that there were other claims which had to be met, before she could again proceed to sea. These difficulties were, however, overcome. The debt of 35,000l. was settled for the comparatively moderate sum of “4000l.!” and the other demands, though not nearly so extortionate, were amicably adjusted. In 1868 the Great Eastern was again chartered by the Telegraphic Construction and Maintenance Company, for the purpose of laying a telegraph cable between Brest and Ducksburgh near Boston; and for the same company she laid a telegraph cable between Aden and Bombay in the spring of 1870.[441] In 1873 and 1874 she laid other two cables between Valentia and Heart’s Content in Newfoundland; and on the 25th of July, 1875, she completed her charter (20,000l. per annum), and was handed over to her owners. Since then she has been placed upon a gridiron to have her bottom cleaned, and I daresay her owners are now at a loss to know how she can be profitably employed.

Concluding remarks.

But it will hardly be gainsaid, that the building, launching, and navigating such a ship are events in the history of merchant shipping, sufficiently important to justify the extent of space devoted to her in these pages; and, should my imperfect record survive for the next hundred or fifty years, there may be found in these pages a collection of facts relating to a ship, more marvellous than that of Hiero, King of Syracuse, or of the Penteconter of Ptolemy Philopator. Perhaps, too, this record may contain more details of value, than the historians of those ships have handed down to posterity, for it may be that, a hundred or fifty years hence, the maritime commerce of the world may have grown to an extent sufficient to justify, with reasonable prospects of profit, another ship of the dimensions of the Great Eastern. I can only write of the past and the present, leaving the future to be dealt with by those who may follow me, and, perhaps, all that posterity will be able to say against the enterprising promoters of the Great Eastern may, hereafter, be condensed in the flattering eulogium, “their ideas in regard to dimensions were in advance of their age—they were only before their time.” Though far from realizing the expectations once entertained with regard to speed and small consumption of fuel, her failure is, mainly, to be attributed to the fact that, at the time she was constructed, there were no lines of traffic on which a vessel of such huge capacity could procure, with despatch, the amount of freight or passage money necessary to insure a profit. But, from first to last, even when the failures of her launch had become too apparent, the people of England were proud of her, and this is not surprising, for no other country could have raised, by voluntary subscription, and without any aid from Government, the capital requisite to construct and equip this monster ship for sea.

That their pride should have found vent in numerous paragraphs in the public press is only what might have been expected, for, though shrewd men shook their heads, and cautious men declined to invest their capital in the ship, she was a marvellous piece of workmanship, even the Americans admitting, that England might well feel an honest pride in having produced such a triumph of mechanical skill, and welcoming her as they did to their shores, as a characteristic evidence of the genius, energy, and pluck of their fatherland.

Although I have not hesitated to expose the want of forethought, which rendered the Great Eastern a commercial failure, and the grave mistake in her launch, I cannot refrain from admiring the extension of the spirit of national pride to private undertakings such as these. Much has been learned and much has still to be learned from her. Various mechanical contrivances, now in use, were first adopted in this great ship. In herself she indicates the most astounding progress. Indeed, when I consider that only forty years had elapsed since the small engines of the Comet which, though they puffed and strained, and made noise enough to frighten the people who watched the little vessel in her progress down the Clyde, were the finest of the period, and compare them with the vast engines of the Great Eastern, working in their combined action without the slightest jerk, and almost noiselessly, my mind is lost in wonder at the prodigious advance made, within my own time, in this mighty civilizing instrument.