Part 16 (1/2)

The electricians, too, were elated, and with reason, at the perfection of the cable as demonstrated by every hour's experience At intervals of thirty ht, tests were passed froht of all, instead of finding the insulation weakened, it steadily iht into contact with the cold depths of the Atlantic

All noell till Saturday, the twenty-ninth, when a little after noon there was again a cry from the shi+p, as if once more the cable ounded and in pain This time the fault was rave, for they had struck ”dead earth,”

that is, the insulation was co into the sea

As the fault had gone overboard, it was necessary to reverse their course, and haul in till the defective part was brought up from the bottom This time it was more difficult, for they were in water two miles deep Still the cable yielded slowly to the iron hands that drew it upward; and after working all the afternoon, about ten o'clock at night they got the fault on board The wounded li the parts that hole, the cable was ain Thus ended a day of anxiety The next , which was the second Sabbath at sea, elco after the suspense of the last twenty-four hours

On Monday, thein huge piles upon the deck, were subjected to a rigid examination, to find out where the fault lay This was soon apparent

Near the end was found a piece of wire thrust through its very heart, as if it had been driven into it All looked black when this was discovered, for at once it excited suspicions of design It was re of workmen were in the tank as at the ti sent for the h with the wire, asked them how it occurred Every n_, even though they accused the theuilty of such devilishhad been done before in a cable laid in the North Sea, where the insulation was destroyed by a nail driven into it

The man was afterward arrested, and confessed that he had been hired to do it by a rival coation in the English courts In the present case there were ht prompt to such an act The fall in the stock on the London Exchange, caused by a loss of the cable, could hardly be less than half aHere was a temptation such as betrays bold, bad men into crime However, as it was i was proved, and there only reainst this it was their duty to guard

Therefore it was agreed that the gentle watch in the tank It was very unpleasant to Mr Canning thus to set a watch onexpeditions, but the best of theer as hi them

But accident or villainy, it was defeated this tie Not the slightest check interrupted their progress for the next three days, during which they passed over five hundred reatest triumph They were in the e had been a complete success The shi+p seereat work of civilization The paying-out apparatus was a piece of ineer, so smoothly did its well-oiled wheels run The strain never exceeded fourteen hundred-weight, even in the greatest depths of the Atlantic And as for the cable itself, it seemed to come as near perfection as it was possible to attain As before, the insulation was greatly i league it grew better and better It seems almost beyond belief, yet the fact is fully attested that, when in the middle of the ocean, the communication was so perfect that they could tell at Valentia every time the Great Eastern rolled[C] With such omens of success, who could but feel confident? And when on Monday they passed over a deep valley, where lay ”the bones of three Atlantic cables,” it ith a proud assurance that they should not add another to the nuht a sudden termination of their hopes They had run out about twelve hundred miles of cable, and were noithin six hundred miles of Newfoundland Two days ht them into the shalloaters of the coast Thus it hen least expected that disaster caiven in feords In thewatch in the tank, with the sa of rating sound was heard, as if a piece of wire had caught in the machinery, and as passed up to the deck to look out for it; but the caution seems not to have been heard, and it passed over the stern of the shi+p Soon after a report ca-room of ”another fault” It was not a bad one, since it did not prevent coht have been saved had a e been sent to Ireland that they were about to cut the cable, in order to haul it on board But small as the fault was, it could not be left behind Down on the deep sea-floor was soth h Of this ht in truth be said, that it was like the law of God in de absolute perfection To offend in one point was to be guilty of all

This new fault, though it was annoying, did not create alararded thee Had the apparatus for pulling in been complete, it could not have delayed them more than a few hours But this had been the weak point of the arrange--the _bete noire_ of the expedition The only htly named,) which puffed and wheezed as if it had the asthave out for want ofup, which caused the Great Eastern to drift over the cable, by which it was badly chafed, so that when it was hauled in, as the injured part was corasp, suddenly it broke and plunged into the sea!

It ca So unexpected was such a catastrophe, that the gentleone down to lunch, as it was a little past the hour of noon But Mr Canning and Mr Field stood watching the cable as it was straining upward fro of that cord, which broke so ined than described Says a writer on board: ”Suddenly Mr

Canning appeared in the saloon, and in a manner which caused every one to start in his seat, said, 'It is all over! It is gone!' then hastened onward to his cabin Ere the thrill of surprise and pain occasioned by these words had passed away, Mr Field came from the companion into the saloon, and said, with coh his lip quivered and his cheek was blanched, 'The cable has parted and has gone overboard' All were on deck in a lance revealed the truth”

At last it had come--the calamity which all had feared, yet that seemed so far away only a few hours before Yet there it was--the ragged end on board, torn and bleeding, the other lying far down in its ocean grave

In A could be known of the fate of the expedition till its arrival on our shores But in England its progress was reported from day to day, and as the success up to this point had raised the hopes of all to the highest pitch, the sudden loss of communication with the shi+p was a heavy blow to public expectation, and gave rise to all sorts of conjectures At first a favorite theory was, that conetic stor theas to be alive of their presence No clouds darken the heavens; no thunder peals along the sky Yet strange influences trouble the air At this very hour, Professor Airy, the Astrononetic storm of unusual violence Said a London paper:

”Just when the signals froular violence had set in Unperceived by us, not to be seen in the heavens, nor felt in the atmosphere, the earth's electricity underwent ainstrudom, everywhere testified to the fury of this voiceless tempest, and there is every reason to suppose that the confusion of signals at e and unusual earth-currents ofwildly across the cable as it lay in apparently untroubled waters at the bottom of the Atlantic”

Said the Tinals, up to nine AM, were coularity, but about that tinetic storm set in No insulation of a submarine cable is ever so perfect as to withstand the influence of these electrical phenomena, which correspond in some particulars to stor from east to west Their action is immediately cole set up between the natural current and that used artificially in sending raphic station in the kingdom At some the wires were utterly useless; and between Valentia and Killarney the natural current toward the as so strong along the land lines that it required an addition of five tinetic storm, which ceased at two AM on Friday, was instantly perceptible in the Atlantic cable”

But these explanations, so consoling to anxious friends on land, did not comfort those on board the Great Eastern They knew, alas! that the cable was at the botto could be done to recover it

Now began a work of which there had been no exa declared his purpose to grapple for the cable!

The proposal seemed wild, dictated by the frenzy of despair Yet he had fished in deep waters before He had laid his hand on the bottom of the Mediterranean, but that was a shallow lake compared with the depths into which the Atlantic cable had descended The ocean is here two and a half miles deep It was as if an Alpine hunter stood on the summit of Mont Blanc and cast a line into the vale of Chae? The expedition was not to be abandoned without a trial of this forlorn hope There were on board some five miles of wire rope, intended to hold the cable in case it became necessary to cut it and lash it to the buoys, to save it froht on deck for another purpose ”And now carapnels, two five-armed anchors, with flukes sharply curved and tapered to a tooth-like end--the hooks hich the Giant Despair was going to fish fros, -irons were firht to the bows and thrown overboard One splash, and the whole has disappeared in the bosooes--deeper, deeper, deeper still! For two full hours it continued sinking before it struck the earth, and like a pearl-diver, began searching for its lost treasure on the bottom of the sea What did it find there? The wrecks of shi+ps that had gone down a hundred years ago, with dead ht for soeold

The shi+p was now a dozen miles or so from the place of accident The cable had broken a little after noon, when the sun was shi+ning clear, so that Captains Anderson and Moriarty had just obtained a perfect observation, from which they could tell, within half a one down To reach it noith any chance of bringing it up, it would be necessary to hook it a few miles from the end It had been paid out in a line from east to west To strike it broadside, the shi+p stood off in the afternoon a few rapnel was thrown over about three o'clock, and struck botto back on her course All night long those iron fingers were raking the botto the long rope quivered like a fisher has seized the end, and the head of the Great Eastern began to sway from her course, as if it felt soan to haul in, the rapidly increasing strain soon rendered it certain that they had got hold of _so_ But what could it be? How did they knoas their lost cable? This question has often been asked They did not see it How did they know that it was not the skeleton of a whale, or a ment of a wrecked shi+p? The question is easily answered If it had been any loose object which was being drawn up froht would have diminished as it came nearer the surface But on the contrary, the strain, as shown by the dynamometer, steadily _increased_ This could only be froineer the proof was like a mathematical demonstration Another fact observed by Captain Anderson was equally decisive:

”The grapnel had caught so at the exact hour when by calculation the shi+p was known to be crossing the line of the cable; nor had the grapnel upon this or any other occasion even for an instant caught any i lowered to the bottoht to be hooked”

Having thus caught the cable, they had good hopes of getting it again, their confidence increasing with every hundred fathoht on board

For hours the ent on They had raised it seven hundred fathoms--or three quarters of a ave way, and the cable oncewith it nearly two miles of rope