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By Root 1650 0

his system throughout the Continent, and his thwarted efforts to obtain some financial reward from European governments. “I conceive, however, that this justice will not be withheld,” the pamphlet concluded. “I do not permit myself to doubt that when these simple facts of my case are fairly brought before them, they will honorably and promptly sustain severally their character for justice.” He sent copies to Secretary of State Lewis Cass, asking him to pass them on to American ambassadors in Europe, with instructions to promote the indemnity at court. Prospects looked hopeful, but Morse had become well schooled in disappointment: “My dependence is not on man, but on one who knows the end from the beginning, who will give if it is for his glory, and withhold if it is not.”

Providence in some degree repaid Morse’s trust. Cass forwarded the pamphlets to American ministers in various countries. He told them that if they wished to present Morse’s claims to government authorities, the State Department did not object. But he instructed them to do so unofficially and discreetly, “without putting into jeopardy the dignity of your own government.”

Morse spent the rest of his time in Paris agreeably. He roomed at the American legation, by courtesy of the American minister, with whom he smoked an after-breakfast cigar. He glimpsed the Emperor, noted the universal fashion for carriage-filling crinolines. It dismayed him, however, to hear current opinion about the political strife in the United States. “The European mind,” he found, “is sadly abused by the gross falsehoods of our violent Abolitionists. The Abolitionists have a terrible responsibility for evils they have brought upon the world, the North, the South, and the poor African himself.”

Morse returned to England at the end of June, as the cable was being stowed in the American and British ships. The huge Niagara lay near Liverpool, anchored in the Mersey, but even after its alterations could not draw near enough to the cable factory for direct feeding. At considerable expense the cable was being ferried to it from shore aboard auxiliary ships. The British man-of-war Agamemnon lay moored about two hundred yards from the dockside factory at Greenwich, near London. Cable was being fed to it from the factory yard, drawn over pulleys fixed on intervening, pontoon-like barges, and packed into the ship’s hold in one vast coil. This massive operation proceeded at the rate of about two and a half miles an hour, some sixty miles a day.

Morse and his fellow electrician, Dr. Edward Whitehouse, worked in Greenwich, testing the cable aboard the Agamemnon. The cable consisted of seven strands of thin copper wire, sheathed in three layers of insulation and protection. First the wires were coated with gutta-percha, making a tube about half an inch in diameter. The tube was then wrapped in tarred yarn. Finally the layer of yarn was encased in protective spirally wound iron wire. The resulting cable weighed just under one ton per mile and was ropelike—light and flexible enough to be tied around the arm. Morse and Whitehouse tested the cable each day as it was being stowed, by sending signals through its entire length. They used a 24-plate zinc-silver battery, and handsome Morse instruments made by the Berlin electrical engineer Werner Siemens. Michael Faraday stopped by one day, and seemed “quite delighted” by the stowing operation, Morse said.

The directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, Field’s British partner, consulted Morse about a proposed change in strategy for laying the cable. The original plan called for the Niagara and the Agamemnon to depart from Ireland together, each bearing one half of the cable. They would proceed to the mid-Atlantic, where the two halves would be joined. One ship would head back to Ireland, paying out cable. The other ship, paying out cable, too, would head in the opposite direction toward Newfoundland, where a land-and-water line to the United States was now in operation. Under the proposed new plan, the ships would leave Ireland together, but the Niagara