"The depth of water is sufficient for the largest vessels. The tide rises seven or eight feet, and the bay terminates in a beautiful sand-beach. The shore is clothed with dark green fir-trees, which, mixed with birch and mountain-ash, present a pleasing contrast. The land rises gradually from the water all around, so as to afford one of the most agreeable town sites in the island. You ascend only about a quarter of a mile from the water, and there are no longer trees, but wild grass like an open prairie. Here are found at this season myriads of the upland cranberries, upon which unnumbered ptarmigan, or the northern partridge, feed.
"The raspberry, bake-apple berry, and the whortleberry are also common. Numerous little lakes may be seen in the open, elevated ground, from which flow rivulets, affording abundance of fine trout. After ascending for about a mile and a half, you are then probably three hundred or four hundred feet above the tide, and nothing can exceed the beauty of the scene when, at one view, you behold the placid waters of both Trinity and Placentia Bays—the latter sprinkled with clusters of verdant islands.
"You can now descend westward as gradually as you came up from the Telegraph landing, to the shores of Placentia Bay, where there is an excellent harbor and admirable fisheries, skirting the shore, and the accompanying road of the land Telegraph line leading from St. John's westward through the island, to Cape Ray. At this season of the year game is very abundant. Reindeer in great numbers, bears, wolves—others very numerous, the large northern hare, foxes, wild geese, ducks, etc.
"About four miles southward of the entrance of the bay of Bull's Arm, on the shore of Placentia Bay, is situated the extraordinary La Manche lead mine, the property of the Telegraph Company, already yielding a rich supply of remarkably pure galena. The place where the cable is landed is memorable in the history of the island as the naval battle-ground between the French and English in their early struggle for the exclusive occupancy of the valuable fisheries along the coast."
[B] This is an error, as we learn on the high authority of Professor Thomson himself. It was defective insulation, not any "want of continuity," that caused the weak signals. Want of continuity would have stopped the signals altogether, and given quite different indications on the testing instruments from those he observed.
[C] The Niagara had sixty miles farther to run than the Agamemnon, to land the cable at the head of Trinity Bay.
[D] A name that occurs several times in this history, and one never to be mentioned but with honor. The Knight of Kerry was Lord of the Isles on that part of the Irish coast; and from the beginning showed the deepest interest in this enterprise; and by his generous hospitality to all connected with it made many friends by whom he was gratefully remembered on both sides of the Atlantic.