On May 6th, Mr. and Mrs. Field were members of a large party which left New York for California, and on the 12th, at Omaha, Canon Kingsley and Miss Kingsley joined them. The journey was a pleasant one, but uneventful. Friday, May 22d, he writes:
“After breakfast I sent a telegraphic message to Dean Stanley, informing him that Canon Kingsley was well and would preach for us in the Yosemite Valley on Sunday.”
In his sermon on the afternoon of Whit Sunday, Dean Stanley alluded to this message.
Early in June he sailed for England, and of his journey to Iceland, undertaken during this summer, Mr. Murat Halstead writes:
“My judgment is that your father had no business reasons for going to Iceland. Really the trip was a sentimental adventure. Mr. Field had been a profound student of the North Atlantic, and was familiar with the fact that Iceland is but nine hundred miles from Scotland and Norway and three hundred from Greenland. ‘It seemed so near, and yet so far.’ ... In the spring of 1874 Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus W. Field visited Cincinnati, and at a reception given by Mr. Probasco Mr. Field said to me: ‘Come and go with me to Iceland; it is the millennial year of the settlement of the island. It would be very interesting. The King of Denmark is to be there, and the whole affair will be extraordinary.’ I asked how one could get to Iceland, and Mr. Field had evidently made the subject a close study. He said there were monthly boats from Copenhagen touching at Leith, the port of Edinburgh, and we should sail from Scotland, and Iceland was about a thousand miles from Scotland.
“Mr. Field must have gotten his impulse to go to Iceland from his familiarity with the North Atlantic during the anxious years he spent in studying it with reference to the cable. He was struck by the narrowness of the ocean between Greenland and Norway, with Iceland between just below the arctic circle. He had, of course, contemplated a cable by way of Greenland and Iceland to Scotland if it should be found impracticable to cross the Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland. When it became known that Mr. Field was going to Iceland there were conjectures that he thought of a cable to the island; but that was a mere fancy. There was not a chance for business over the line. There would be no news except of volcanoes and the price of codfish. If there should ever be a cable connection with Iceland it would be for the weather reports.
“I was thinking of a trip to Europe in the summer of 1874, when Mr. Field spoke to me, and a few weeks later decided to go. Mr. Field was going earlier than I could, and just before he sailed I telegraphed, asking on what date it would be necessary for me to meet him in London in order to go with him to Iceland. His reply was, ‘July 9th.’ On my arrival at Southampton by the Bremen boat I remembered the day was the 9th of July, and that night about ten o’clock I found Mr. Field at the Buckingham Palace Hotel, and he said he had been expecting me, and was waiting to see me before going to bed. That, I suppose, was a joke, but it was not all a joke. I found in London Bayard Taylor, going to the Icelandic millennium for the New York Tribune, and Dr. I. I. Hayes, the arctic explorer, going for the New York Herald; Dr. Kneeland, of the Boston Institute of Technology, and Professor Magnussen, of Cambridge University, an Icelander by birth. I resolved to go, and we chartered the steam yacht Albion, Captain Howland, sailing from Leith. Mr. Field and I made a tour through the Highlands, and, passing Balmoral and the Earl of Fyfe’s hunting and fishing lodge, found the rest of the party at Aberdeen, where it was necessary for us to enlist as British seamen, and we were paid a shilling each for our services during the voyage, which was one of great interest and considerable hardship. We halted at the Orkney, Shetland, and Faroe islands, at the latter place falling in with the king’s fleet. Our Icelandic experiences are familiar, as Mr. Taylor and Dr. Kneeland published books on the subject. Mr. Field’s Iceland party, for he was our leader, attracted much attention—almost as much sometimes as the king’s procession. We rode across the lava beds to the geysers, saw Mount Hecla—and the Great Geyser would not spout for the king.”
It will have been observed, in the course of this narrative, that with Mr. Field, so inexhaustible was his energy, rest was only a “change of motion.”
When he sought relaxation from exhausting business cares he found it in fatiguing journeys, and he preferred that these should be as difficult and adventurous as possible. This was the case in his journey to the Andes with Mr. Church in his earlier manhood. It was the case with the excursion in ripe middle age beyond the “furthest Thule” of the ancients. He was now again, thanks to his own exertions, and after years of struggle and of doubt that to others meant despair, independent in circumstances, and, as it seemed, beyond the power of fortune, and he was nearing his sixtieth birthday. Most men would have regarded this condition as an occasion to “rest and be thankful.” But it was in this condition that Mr. Field undertook a new and arduous enterprise, for which he had had little specific training. It is evident that its very difficulty, as in the case of the Atlantic cable, was to him an element of attractiveness. But there was this difference between the Atlantic cable and the elevated railway system of New York. He was the pioneer, the projector, of the former. The latter had already been undertaken, and practically, it may be said, to have failed. Indeed, there was no “system” of elevated railways. The fragmentary roads that were in operation or projected were unrelated to each other in ownership, management, and traffic. Financially and practically they were languishing. It will be seen from the letter which will presently be given that the company with which he proposed to ally himself, the New York, which possessed the franchise for Third Avenue, had been so far from successful that sixty cents on the dollar was held to be a fair price for its securities. It may fairly be said that the elevated “system” is due to Mr. Field. Whoever remembers the conditions of transit in New York before 1877, and indeed for some years after, must own that the creation of this system has constituted a public benefaction. Many millions have been transported, with a loss of life that has been infinitesimal in comparison with the volume of the traffic, at a cost no greater than that of the conveyances which the system has superseded, and at a rate of speed that has built up the new and large cities, one on the east and one on the west side of Manhattan Island, which before it went into operation were outlying districts, practically inaccessible to busy men for purposes of residence. It was on May 16, 1877, that Mr. Field made this entry in his diary:
“Bought this day a controlling interest in the New York Elevated Railroad Company and was elected president of the company.”