PHOSPHORESCENCE ON THE SURFACE OF THE SEA.
A French author thus describes the effect produced by the molluscs known to scientists as Pyrosoma, on a voyage to the Isle of France. He says:—“The wind was blowing with great violence, the night was dark, and the vessel was making rapid way, when what appeared to be a vast sheet of phosphorus presented itself, floating on the waves, and occupying a great space ahead of the ship. The vessel having passed through this fiery mass, it was discovered that the light was occasioned by organised bodies swimming about in the sea at various depths around the ship. Those which were deepest in the water looked like red-hot balls, while those on the surface resembled cylinders of red-hot iron. Some of the latter were caught; they were found to vary in size from three to seven inches. All the exterior of the creatures bristled with long thick tubercles, shining like so many diamonds, and these seemed to be the principal seats of their luminosity. Inside also there appeared to be a multitude of oblong narrow glands, exhibiting a high degree of phosphoric power. The colour of these animals when in repose is an opal yellow, mixed with green; but on the slightest movement the animal exhibits a spontaneous contractile power, and assumes a luminous brilliancy, passing through various shades of deep-red, orange-green, and azure-blue.” A ship plunging through these phosphorescent fields seems to advance through a sheet of white flame, a field of luminous silver, scattering a spray of sparks in all directions.
CHAPTER IX.
Davy Jones’s Locker.—Submarine Cables.
The First Channel Cable—Nowadays 50,000 Miles of Submarine Wire—A Noble New Englander—The First Idea of the Atlantic Cable—Its Practicability Admitted—Maury’s Notes on the Atlantic Bottom—Deep Sea Soundings—Ooze, formed of Myriads of Shells—English Co-operation with Field—The First Cable of 1857—Paying Out—2,000 Fathoms down—The Cable Parted—Bitter Disappointment—The Cable Laid and Working—Another Failure—The Employment of the Great Eastern—Stowing Away the Great Wire Rope—Departure—Another Accident—A Traitor on Board—Cable Fished up from the Bottom—Failure—Inauguration of the 1866 Expedition—Prayer for Success—A Lucky Friday—Splicing to the Shore Cable—The Start—Each Day’s Run—Approaching Trinity Bay—Success at Last—The Old and the New World Bound Together.
In the year 1850 a copper wire, insulated with gutta-percha, was submerged between England and France, and that connecting link between the two greatest countries of Europe was the first considerable success of its kind. To-day Great Britain is connected with the European continent by a dozen cables, and there are over 50,000 miles of submerged wires silently conveying their messages over the face of the globe. Thirty years of practical scientific labour has united the whole world. You can telegraph or “wire” your commands to distant China or Japan; you can ask the market rates of wheat in the farthest west of the New World; you can correspond with your wife in England if you are at the Antipodes. Puck’s idea of putting the “girdle round the earth” has been more than accomplished. The story of the successes won at the very bottom of the ocean would take long to tell; here we can only follow the story of one of the grandest—that of the Atlantic cable.
In the month of November, 1819, a noble American, whose career deserves to be put on record, first saw the light. Cyrus W. Field has deservedly earned an honourable and honoured name in two worlds for indomitable perseverance and pluck.[31]
The New Englander has to-day, and has always had, many of the best qualities of the Old Englander. In Field they were conspicuously displayed. In his “bright lexicon” there was—