Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [64]
Next Cook led him a few miles south to a parcel of land just outside South Wellfleet, consisting of eight acres atop a 130-foot cliff that overlooked the same beach along which Thoreau had walked half a century earlier. Buffeted by wind, now Marconi walked the ground. The land in all directions had been shaved to a stubble by gales and by loggers who over the previous century had stripped it to provide lumber for shipbuilders. Marconi knew he would have to import the tall masts necessary to hold his aerial aloft.
He liked this clifftop parcel. If he stood facing east, all he saw was the great spread of the Atlantic. As Thoreau observed, “There was nothing but that savage ocean between us and Europe.”
When he faced the opposite direction, he saw the harbor at Wellfleet in clear view and very near. A railroad passed less than a mile away, and the nearest telegraph office, at Wellfleet Depot, was only four miles off. This meant lumber and machinery could be delivered to Wellfleet by ship or rail and hauled with relative ease overland to the cliff. A company report on Marconi’s search states, “Plenty of water is available on the site and a very bad inn is situated about 3 miles away; there is, however, a residential house which we can rent on very moderate terms within 200 yards of the site.” One bit of historical resonance was lost on Marconi. During the eighteenth century Wellfleet had been named Poole, after a village in England—the same Poole whose Haven Hotel now served as Marconi’s field headquarters.
Cook assured Marconi there would be no problem persuading the landowner to let Marconi build here. The landowner was Cook himself. He had acquired the land using the proceeds of his work as a wrecker. Whether either man recognized the paradox therein is unclear, but here was Marconi, whose technology promised to make the sea safer, acquiring land from a man who had made his living harvesting precisely the wrecks Marconi hoped to eliminate. In the future these eight acres of seaside land would be some of the most coveted terrain in the world, but at this time the stretch was considered worthless. Marconi bought it for next to nothing.
Marconi also hired Cook to be his general contractor, with a mandate to find workers, arrange living quarters and food supplies, and acquire necessary building materials. Marconi and his men took their initial meals at the nearby inn, but the food was so awful that he vowed never to eat there again. He arranged to have more elegant fare, and the wines to go with it, shipped from Boston and New York. Among the locals this caused a good deal of frowning and saddled Marconi with a lasting reputation as a culinary aesthete.
Soon Marconi headed back to England, leaving Vyvyan to face the true nature of the location.
IN LONDON COLONEL HOZIER of Lloyd’s and Nevil Maskelyne of the Egyptian Hall, acting together as a syndicate, approached Marconi and offered to sell him Maskelyne’s patents and apparatus. Marconi listened. As negotiations proceeded, Hozier somehow cut Maskelyne out of the syndicate and began negotiating on his own behalf, despite the fact that it was Maskelyne’s technology upon which the syndicate was based. Hozier wanted £3,000—over $300,000 today—and a seat on Marconi’s board. To make the arrangement more palatable, even irresistible, Hozier promised that in return he would broker a deal between Marconi and Lloyd’s itself.
Hozier’s maneuver left Maskelyne embittered. But his anger, for the moment, seemed of no consequence.
THE LANDSCAPE THAT NOW confronted Vyvyan was lovely but spare. There were few trees, none tall enough to be worthy of the name, let alone to be useful for building houses or ships. Most of the surrounding flora hugged the ground. Hog cranberry coated the sand, tufted here and there by beach heather, also called “poverty grass,” a name that captured the overall austerity of the terrain. There was crowberry, savory-leaved aster, mouse-ear, and goldenrod, as well as pitch pine planted during the previous