• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1407 0

avoid another accident. Over the next few days the ship and crew would face three critical moments. The shore end of the cable was a sort of eight-mile-long tail, deliberately made thicker than the main cable to withstand the rocky bottom of the coast. Soon the vulnerable connection point between the heavy tail and the much lighter main cable would pass through the paying-out machinery. About a day later, the first, on-deck coil of cable would run out and have to be replaced, its work taken over by a second coil, belowdecks. And after that the Niagara would begin making its way through much deeper zones of the Atlantic.

Cross section of the Niagara, ca. 1855 (New-York Historical Society)

Operations resumed on the 8th, but without Morse. His activities in Valentia had so much inflamed his injured leg that the Niagara’s, surgeon restricted him to his berth. He could not sleep that night, kept awake by the ruckus overhead of the paying-out wheels, scrunching like jumbo coffee grinders. He sensed, too, that the juncture was near—the point where the shore cable, weighing 18,000 pounds per mile, was spliced to the nine-times-lighter main cable. Soon he heard the machinery stop. Then voices, one saying, “The cable is broke.” The unequal sections had come apart. Prudently, care had been taken to buoy up the end of the shore cable so that, by bright moonlight in the moderate sea, the connection was repaired in half an hour: “the joyous sound of All right’ was heard,” Morse noted, and “the machinery commenced a low and regular rumbling.”

For about the next twenty-four hours the Niagara steamed smoothly through the pea-green water, uncoiling cable day and night at the rate of three miles an hour, in fine weather. Telegraphic communication was kept up continually with Dr. Edward Whitehouse at the station in Valentia.

The morning of August 9, a Sunday, brought the “critical point of change,” as Morse called it. The Niagara had almost completely paid out the first (and smallest) of its five coils, some 120 miles of cable. Coil two had to be fed onto the wheels from beneath the deck—a worrisome moment when the cable might kink. But as the last loop of coil one unfurled, the captain slowed the ship slightly. The crew handled the slack cable deftly, and in two minutes made the changeover without accident. The new cable came up uncrinkled from the hold, unwound itself easily, and passed through the machinery over the stern into the sea.

Morse telegraphed to Whitehouse onshore: “214 miles out. All well. Beautiful day. Every thing going right.” His leg apparently improved, he attended Sunday services on deck, impressed anew with the workings of Providence. “The more I contemplate this great undertaking, the more I feel my own littleness, and the more I perceive the hand of God in it, and how he has assigned to various persons their duties, he being the great controller, all others his honored instruments.”

Next day provided the third and more critical test of control. The Niagara had passed beyond the shallow waters of the coast. Paying out cable at an increased rate of five miles an hour, the ship was approaching a point where the ocean floor gradually dropped to about 400 fathoms, then suddenly fell to 1700, then to 2050—nearly the greatest depth of the Atlantic over the entire route. The paying out would have to be closely watched: increased depth tended to accelerate the flow of cable.

Morse was lying in his berth at six o’clock that evening when he heard alarmed voices calling “Stop her! Stop her!” Going up to the deck he saw the cable, fallen off the feeding wheel, running out at great speed. In the confusion a cool-headed engineer managed to halt the surge by using ropes. But the cable strained so mightily it perspired drops of tar.

About three hours later, telegraphic communication with shore suddenly went dead. Morse speculated that the strain to which the cable had been subjected after it fell off its wheel had split open the gutta-percha, destroying the insulation. For two and a half hours he tried without success to