Seven Wonders of the Industrial World

The Great Eastern was steaming along, just off Hastings, cutting smoothly through the waves and making light work of the choppy seas that were tossing the smaller boats dangerously around her. Passengers on board had left the glittering chandeliered saloon to dine; a hardier group had gathered in the bow to view the distant land. Suddenly, without warning, there was a deafening roar that seemed to come from deep within the bowels of the ship, and the forward funnel was wrenched up and shot 50 feet in the air, accompanied by a huge cloud of steam under pressure. Up in the air was tossed the forward part of the deck and all the glitter and glory of the saloon in the catastrophic eruption. Passengers were stunned, almost blinded by the white cloud of steam, and then the debris came crashing down.

Captain Harrison seized a rope and lowered himself down through the steam into the wreck of the grand saloon. He found his own little daughter, who by a miracle had escaped unhurt. The accident, it was clear, was in the paddle engine room, which had suddenly been filled with pressurised steam. Several dazed stokers emerged on deck with faltering steps, their faces fixed in intense astonishment, their skins a livid white. ‘No one who had ever seen blown up men before could fail to know that some had only two or three hours to live,’ reported The Times. ‘A man blown up by gunpowder is a mere figure of raw flesh, which seldom moves after the explosion. Not so men who are blown up by steam, who for a few minutes are able to walk about, apparently almost unhurt, though in fact, mortally injured beyond all hope of recovery.’ Since they could walk, at first it was hoped that their injuries were not life threatening. But they had met the full force of the pressurised steam; they had effectively been boiled alive. One man was quite oblivious to the fact that deep holes had been burnt into the flesh of his thighs. A member of the crew went to assist another of the injured and, catching him by the arm, watched the skin peel off like an old glove. Yet another stoker running away from the hell below leapt into the sea, only to meet his death in the blades of the paddle wheel.

‘A number of beds were pulled to pieces for the sake of the soft white wool they contained,’ reported Household Words,

and when the half-boiled bodies of the poor creatures were anointed with oil, they were covered over with this wool and made to lie down. They were nearly all stokers and firemen, whose faces were black with their work, and one man who was brought in had patches of red raw flesh on his dark, agonised face, like dabs of red paint, and the skin of his arms was hanging from his hands like a pair of tattered mittens … As they lay there with their begrimed faces above the coverlets, and their chests covered with the strange woolly coat that had been put upon their wounds, they looked like wild beings of another country whose proper fate it was to labour and suffer differently from us.

Among the crew, the fate of the riveter and his boy, locked alive in the hull years before, resurfaced, with prophesies of worse to come.

The Great Ship sailed confidently on, her engines pounding, not even momentarily stopped in her tracks, just as her designer envisaged. Such an accident would have foundered any other ship. The stunned passengers were at a loss to know what had happened, and were totally unaware that the whole explosive performance could be repeated at any minute with a second funnel. The accident had been caused by a forgotten detail: a stopcock had been inadvertently turned off, allowing a water jacket in the forward funnel to explode under pressure. There was a similar stopcock also affecting a second funnel – also switched off, also building up enormous pressure. By a miracle, one of Scott Russell’s men from the paddle engine room realised what had happened and sent a greaser to open the second stopcock. A great column of steam was released and the danger passed.

Twelve men had been injured; five men were dead. An inquest was held in Weymouth in Dorset. It proved difficult to ascertain just who had responsibility for the stopcock. Scott Russell, smoothly evasive, claimed that he had been on board merely in an advisory capacity and that the paddle engines and all connected with them were the total responsibility of the Great Ship Company. ‘I had nothing whatever directly or indirectly to do,’ he said. ‘I went out of personal interest and invited Dixon as my friend.’ He claimed he had ‘volunteered his assistance only when it became obvious to him that the officers in charge were having difficulty in handling the ship’. All the other witnesses also disclaimed responsibility. There were, however, passengers on the ship who insisted that they had heard Scott Russell ‘give at least a hundred orders from the bridge to the engine room’. The truth, though, was undiscoverable, lost somewhere in the maze of evidence from the variously interested parties. Accidental death was the verdict from the jury.

At his home in Duke Street, Brunel, a shadow but still clinging to life, was waiting patiently through the dull days for word of the sea trials. Paralysed, he lay silently, hoping for good news, hoping so much to hear of her resounding success. Instead, he was told of the huge explosion at sea and the terrible damage to the ship. It was a shock from which he could not recover. It was not the right news for a man with such a fragile hold on life. He died on 15 September, just six days after the explosion on his beloved Great Eastern, still a relatively young man at the age of 53.

The country mourned his loss; the papers eulogised. A familiar brilliant star was suddenly out. ‘In the midst of difficulties of no ordinary kind,’ said the president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Joseph Locke, ‘and with an ardour rarely equalled, and an application both of body and mind almost beyond the limit of physical endurance in the full pursuit of a great and cherished idea, Brunel was suddenly struck down, before he had accomplished the task which his daring genius had set before him.’

With her creator gone, the Great Ship put in to Weymouth on the south coast for repairs that would bring her up to Board of Trade requirements. While work was in progress, sightseers at 2s 6d per head came in their thousands to wonder and whisper if the ship was damned. Was there not a story about a riveter and his boy and bad luck? Since the repairs took longer than expected the company postponed plans for the maiden voyage until the following spring and, as the sightseers had proved financially successful, the Great Ship steamed on to Holyhead in Anglesey, Wales, to find some more.

While there she encountered a fearsome storm with gale force winds and rivers of rain. The crashing waves broke the skylights, deluged the ship and ruined the décor in the grand saloon. Captain Harrison realised she had lost her mooring chains and was at the mercy of the storm. He ordered the engineer to start the paddle engines and, by skilfully keeping her head into the wind, the Great Eastern rode out the storm that saw many wrecked around her. Nearby, the steamship Royal Charter went down with 446 lives, further evidence that the Great Eastern was unsinkable as her creator had claimed. It was decided that Southampton would be a more sheltered port for the winter.

It was, however, a troubled winter for the Great Eastern and those connected with her. At a special shareholders’ meeting, the news that there was a mortgage of £40,000 attached to the ship and the company was over £36,000 in debt led to angry calls for the directors to resign. A new board of directors led by Brunel’s friend, Daniel Gooch, was voted in. They issued shares in the hope of raising £100,000 to complete the ship but doubts were raised over the terms of the contract with Scott Russell and, above all, how £353,957 had been expended on a ship still not fit for sea. Once again, Scott Russell’s loosely defined estimate for fitting out the ship had been wildly exceeded. The services of Scott Russell were finally dispensed with and Daniel Gooch was elected chief engineer.

Yet more bad luck seemed to haunt those connected with the ship. One January day in the winter of 1860, Captain Harrison with some members of the crew set out from Hythe pier on Southampton Water to reach the Great Eastern in a small boat. As they left the shelter of the land, they were hit by a sudden violent squall. The tide was very high with choppy, dangerous seas. Harrison ordered the sail down, but the wet sail would not budge. The rest occurred in just a minute. The wind hit the sail and turned the boat over. Captain Harrison, always cool and collected, made repeated attempts to right the boat, but it kept coming up keel first. Buffeted by wild and stifling seas, he seemed almost powerless. Very quickly, the sea claimed the ship’s boy, the coxswain, and master mariner Captain Harrison himself. The Great Eastern had lost her captain hand-picked by Brunel.

Almost two years had elapsed since the launch and the ship had still not made a trip to Australia as originally planned. With the continued shortage of funds this was difficult to finance and, instead, the Great Ship Company decided to sail her as a luxury liner on the Atlantic. In June 1860, the Great Eastern finally sailed for New York on her maiden voyage. On board were just 38 passengers, who marvelled at the great ship, fascinated by the massive engines, the imposing public rooms, the acres of sail. Despite the small number of people on board, they were in champagne mood, enjoying dancing, musicals and a band and strolling the wide deck as they walked to America with hardly a roll from the Great Eastern. The crew, 418 strong, took her across the Atlantic as though she were crossing a millpond.

‘It is a beautiful sight to look down from the prow of this great ship at midnight’s dreary hour, and watch the wondrous facility with which she cleaves her irresistible way through the waste of waters,’ reported The Times. ‘A fountain, playing about 10 feet high before her stem, is all the broken water to be seen around her; for owing to the great beauty of her lines, she cuts the waves with the ease and quietness of a knife; her motion being just sufficient to let you know that you have no dead weight beneath your feet, but a ship that skims the waters like a thing of life …’

When she reached New York, on 27 June, people turned out in their thousands to view her; they packed the wharfs, the docks, the houses. ‘They were in every spot where a human being could stand,’ observed Daniel Gooch. A 21-gun salute was fired and the ecstatic crowds roared their approval. All night in the moonlight, people tried to board her and the next day an impromptu fairground had gathered selling Great Eastern lemonade and oysters and sweets. Over the next month, the streets were choked with sightseers and the hotels were full as people were drawn from all over America to view this great wonder. The Great Eastern was the toast of New York. Her future as a passenger ship seemed assured.

In the mid-nineteenth century, sea travel was hazardous. Many ships were lost but the Great Eastern was proving to be unsinkable. Confidence in her was rising. She had survived the terrible ‘Royal Charter storm’ and, with her double hull and transverse and longitudinal watertight bulkheads, she would laugh at rough weather. It was thought her hull was longer than the trough of the greatest storm wave.

And so it was with a mood of great optimism that the Great Eastern left Liverpool under full sail on 10 September 1861, in such soft summer weather that some of her 400 passengers were singing and dancing on deck. The next morning was grey with a stiff breeze blowing spray. By lunchtime they were meeting strong winds and heavy seas and by the afternoon, when they were 300 miles out in the Atlantic, the winds were gale force. ‘She begins to roll very heavily and ship many seas,’ wrote one anxious passenger. ‘None but experienced persons can walk about. The waves are as high as Primrose Hill.’

With waves breaking right over the ship, the Great Eastern soon leaned to such an extent that the port paddle wheel was submerged. The captain, James Walker, became aware of a sound of machinery crashing and scraping from the paddle wheel. Clinging on to the rails, he lowered himself towards the ominous sounds. As the Great Ship lurched through the waves and the paddle wheel was flung under water, Walker was pulled into the sea right up to his neck. When he got a chance to investigate he could see planks splitting, girders bending and the wheel scraping the side of the ship so badly that it looked as though it might hole her. Somehow, he clambered back to the bridge and gave the order to stop the paddle engines. But without these, the screw engines alone could not provide enough power to control the ship’s movement in what was fast turning into a hurricane.

As the ship rolled, the lifeboats were broken up and thrown into the foaming water by the furious waves. One lifeboat near the starboard paddle wheel was hanging from its davit and dancing about in a crazy fashion. It was damaging the paddle wheel, so Captain Walker had it cut away and ordered the starboard engines reversed to ensure the rejected boat did not harm the paddle further. The ship was wallowing and plunging at an angle of 45 degrees in the deep valleys of water, with overwhelming mountainous seas on either side. Walker was desperate to turn the ship into the wind, but before he could the paddle wheels were swept away by a huge wave.

Terrifying sounds were coming from the rudder, which had been twisted back by the heavy seas. It was out of control and was crashing rhythmically into the 36-ton propeller, which was somehow still turning. With the loss of steerage from the broken rudder it was quite impossible to turn the ship. And then the screw engines stopped. The ship was now without power and completely at the mercy of the elements. An attempt was made to hoist some sail, but the furious gale tore it to shreds.

Below decks, madness reigned. In the grand saloon, chairs, tables and the grand piano were smashing themselves to pieces. Rich furnishings were shredded. The large cast-iron stove came loose and charged lethally into mirrors, showering fragments of glass everywhere and snapping the elegant decorative columns in half. Among this were passengers trying to dodge the furniture and cling for dear life to something stable. Water roared and torrented in through the broken skylights. At one moment, two cows from the cow pen on deck and some hens were thrown in with the deluge. A swan, which was trying to take off, battered itself to death. The cabins were smashed and soaked as water poured below deck. The ship’s doctor was busy treating 27 passengers with serious fractures, not least the ship’s baker who had managed to break his leg in three places.

For the whole of the following day the hurricane continued to blow and the Great Eastern shipped even more water. A four-ton spar loaded down with iron was put overboard in the hope it would act as a drag and give some control to the seemingly doomed ship. It was soon torn away. By now, the water that was still coming in through portholes and skylights and finding its way below deck was overwhelming the pumps. Ominous thumping and crashing were heard from the holds where nothing had been secured and ruined goods were flung from side to side with the water in the hold, battering the hull. No one had eaten for 48 hours. The situation looked hopeless.

In the evening, an attempt was made to secure the wildly gyrating rudder, still battering itself uncontrollably into the propeller and gradually being torn apart. Heavy chains were eventually wound round the broken steering shaft and made fast, so that the rudder at last became stationary. A sailor was found to brave the seas, and was lowered on a boatswain’s chair to the rudder where, in spite of terrifying conditions, he managed to loop a chain round the rudder and through the screw opening. At last, with two chains attached to the rudder, a very primitive means of steering was established. It was now possible to start the screw engines and slowly make it back to Milford Haven in Wales.

When land finally came into view, the passengers, wild with excitement, began an impromptu celebration in the ruined saloon. Limping into harbour with the band playing, the Great Eastern had survived. Everyone on board was quite sure no other ship could possibly have done so. She was, indeed, unsinkable. The grateful passengers disembarked, one woman so overwhelmed that she fainted. But the bill for the damage, which took months to repair, was £60,000. The company was in debt again.

By the summer of 1862, the Great Eastern was making regular, successful and uneventful trips to New York with a new captain, Walter Paton. In August, she embarked once again with a full cargo and 1,500 passengers and, although the ship met with yet another bad storm, Captain Paton stayed on the bridge and battled through it at full power. They reached New York on a night of calm waters and silver moonlight. The ship took on the pilot off Long Island and proceeded through the narrow channel to dock. During this final length of the journey a deep rumbling sound was heard; the ship faltered and then recovered. No damage could be found. Next day at anchor, the captain sent a diver down who discovered a great gash, 85 feet long and 5 feet wide, on the flat bottom of the outer hull. The inner hull was untouched. Brunel’s double hull had saved the ship. She had collected this awful wound from an uncharted needle of rock that came within 25 feet of the surface.

Captain Paton was a long way from Milford Haven where the ship could be put on a gridiron for repairs. He did not want to chance a journey back across the Atlantic at a time of equinoctial gales with a hull so badly ruptured, but there was no facility in America where she could be repaired and no dry dock big enough to take her. Even if he could beach her massive hull somewhere in North America, the long gash was in the flat bottom of the ship and impossible to repair.

Shipbuilders in North America were intrigued by the challenge of repairing the vast ship, but no one had an answer until a civil engineer called Edward Renwick and his brother, Henry, offered their services. Neither man inspired confidence. Both had only partial sight and were inclined to grope their way around furniture. However, they were confident, in spite of their disabilities, that they could repair the ship. Their plan was to build a watertight cofferdam over the long gash, enabling work to be completed in the dry.

Their project was accepted and templates were made from the inner hull. The space between the hulls was calculated, which then gave the exact shape of the outer hull. The riveters were to conduct their job from inside the ship by making their way down a dark shaft to the gash in the hull and many needed some persuading to trust the temporary cofferdam clamped on to the big ship’s hull. One day panic grew as knocking was heard in the double hull. Rumours spread quickly and the riveters became adamant that a ghost was hammering. They downed tools and refused to work as long as the banging continued.

The captain was called. He, too, heard the ghost ‘pounding on the hull’. Work was stopped. Fear infiltrated the ship like mist. Every inch of the bilge was inspected. The hammering was coming from below the waterline, so Captain Paton inspected the outside of the hull in a small boat. There, the ‘ghost’ was discovered: a loose chain knocking the side of the ship as it rose and dipped in the swell.

The work was finished in December 1862 and Edward and Henry Renwick presented their bill for £70,000. The insurance firm refused to pay. The company had now lost £130,000 in the last two years. When the Great Eastern arrived back in England she spent months on a gridiron while Board of Trade inspectors reviewed the work of the Renwick brothers. She made three more trips across the Atlantic, lost another £20,000 and was then beached again while the board considered the situation. Despite their efforts, the board had failed to make their fortunes from the unique vessel and even while she was on her gridiron in some lonely cove, like a great sea creature thrown up on to the beach and forgotten, she was still silently absorbing funds. The company decided to sell their one asset. The Great Eastern was auctioned in January 1864 for the disappointing sum of £25,000.

Far from being finished, however, the Great Eastern was on the threshold of a completely new career. The chairman of the new company was Daniel Gooch and he had never lost faith in Brunel’s great ship. He immediately chartered the Great Eastern to the Atlantic Telegraph Company for £50,000 of cable shares. It was their intention to lay cable across the ocean from Ireland to America. There had already been an unsuccessful attempt to lay cable by a wealthy American businessman, Cyrus Field. He was quite sure that it was possible to make the cable link between the two continents as the sea floor between Newfoundland and Ireland was plateau-like and not too deep.

The Great Eastern was stripped of all her finery and prepared for cable-laying. The grand saloon and palatial first-class cabins were thrown aside to house the miles of cable and the machinery that would deliver it to the ocean. And in July 1865, with Daniel Gooch on board, she began her next venture.

Daniel Gooch knew Brunel had designed a strong and magnificent ship that had come through adversity time and again. He felt her worth would at last be realised. The success of the venture, he declared, ‘will open out a useful future for our noble ship, lift her out of the depression under which she has laboured from her birth and satisfy me that I have done wisely in never losing confidence in her’.

Despite his enthusiasm, he, too, soon ran into problems. On 2 August 1865, after successfully laying out 1,000 miles of cable across the Atlantic, it broke and disappeared to fall 2,000 fathoms into the faceless ocean, which offered no clues or help. ‘All our labour and anxiety is lost,’ despaired Daniel Gooch. ‘We are now dragging to see if we can by chance recover it, but of this I have no hope, nor have I heart to wish. I shall be glad if I can sleep and for a few hours forget I live … This one thing upon which I had set my heart more than any other work I was ever engaged on, is dead.’ The ship returned, defeated, having lost £700,000 worth of cable.

From defeat, once again, optimism blossomed and in July 1866, after reviewing the mistakes of the previous year, the ship sailed again with stronger cable and improved machinery. This time success was the reward as the ship put in to Hearts Content Bay, Newfoundland. Daniel Gooch sent a telegram back to the Old World: ‘Our shore end has just been laid and a most perfect cable …’ And when in September returning home they reached the approximate position of the previous year’s lost cable, they put the improved grappling gear to work and, by some small miracle, found and recovered it. Success now seemed assured and Daniel Gooch estimated that the company would be nearly £400,000 a year better off. For the next three years, the Great Eastern laid cable all over the world, from France to America, Bombay to the Red Sea and a fourth cable to America, as well as completing repair work on previously laid cable. In 1874, however, her cable-laying days were over with the launch of a custom built ship, the Faraday, produced especially for the sole task of cable-laying.

Now the Great Eastern presented the company with a problem. No one had ever made money from her as a passenger ship. She had been designed originally to steam halfway round the world to Australia where, with 4,000 passengers and enough fuel for the return journey, she would have presented strong competition for sailing ships and made a fortune. But the Suez Canal was now in operation and the Great Eastern was just too large to use it. Any journey she now made to Australia would not be competitive and she was always considered too large to be economic on the Atlantic run.