Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [190]
Next day Morse stood beside Sidney on Valentia to watch the cable on the Niagara being attached to a telegraph on the mainland. The bay was studded with small craft and yachts. Some two thousand persons who had gathered from all over Ireland huzzahed from shore. As they all looked on, sailors carried the cable by hand through the surf, depositing it in a trench dug in the sandy cove. The sailors brought the end into a tent temporarily erected to house the batteries and other telegraphic instruments. The connection was secured and tested both ways from ship to shore, communication passing freely.
Landing of cable from the Niagara (Illustrated London News, August 22, 1857)
Morse left no record of his reaction to the public observances that followed. But given his view of Irish immigrants to America as little less odious than savages, he could not have been pleased. The people of Valentia island had suffered fearfully during the famine of the late 1840s, hundreds dying of starvation. The Lord Lieutenant—Queen Victoria’s representative—received twelve cheers when he reflected on how many Irish families had left the country and found “hospitable shelter” in America. Cyrus Field had joined Morse aboard the Niagara, and he too spoke, promising that if any Irish came to his door across the Atlantic, they would have “a true American welcome.” The evening’s festivities included a ball, a bonfire of peat piled two stories high, and a dinner attended by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Kerry.
Early next morning, August 6, the Niagara, the Agamemnon, and their escort ships headed out over the Atlantic, close enough together to hear each other’s bells.
News that the historic squadron had set off arrived in America by August 18, creating thrilled expectation. “The attention of the whole world,” the Herald reported, “is now fixed upon the movements of that small combined fleet of American and English war steamers … every ship of which will be memorable for all time.” What might be the content of the first transmission? Cyrus Field had received a letter from President James Buchanan, saying he would be honored if the first transatlantic message came from Queen Victoria to him. Morse decided that if he were allowed to send the first message, it would consist of two scriptural texts: “Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace and good will to men …. Not unto us, not unto us, but to Thy name be all the glory.”
An immense coil of 130 miles of cable dominated the Niagara’s, deck, even larger coils lying below. It stood amidst what Morse described as a bewildering mass of other equipment, some of which would be dumped before the ship reached mid-ocean: “steam-engines, cog-wheels, breaks, boilers, ropes of hemp and ropes of wire, buoys and boys, pulleys and sheaves of wood and iron, cylinders of wood and cylinders of iron, meters of all kinds—anemometers, thermometers, barometers, electrometers,—steam-gauges, ships’ logs.” Equally prominent on the ship’s deck was the paying-out machinery: four massive iron wheels, about six feet in diameter, deeply grooved to support the cable.
The squadron had moved out barely five miles from Valentia when the cable caught in the paying-out machinery and snapped. The mishap forced the Niagara to turn around and reanchor in the bay so that the broken ends could be lifted from the water, spliced, and reinsulated with gutta-percha. Morse tested the splice the same afternoon and informed the ship’s captain that the electrical connection performed Cross section of the Niagara, ca. 1855 (New-York Historical Society) well: “not likely again to occur,” he noted. But departure was delayed a full day.
When the Niagara steamed out again, on August 8, it did so at no more than two miles an hour, going slowly to