eeped in the preservative. The weight of the new cable was
35.75 cwt. per knot, or nearly twice the weight of the old, and it was
stronger in proportion.

Ten years before, Mr. Marc Isambard Brunel, the architect of the Great
Eastern, had taken Mr. Field to Blackwall, where the leviathan was
lying, and said to him, 'There is the ship to lay the Atlantic cable.'
She was now purchased to fulfil the mission. Her immense hull was fitted
with three iron tanks for the reception of 2,300 miles of cable, and
her decks furnished with the paying-out gear. Captain (now Sir) James
Anderson, of the Cunard steamer China, a thorough seaman, was appointed
to the command, with Captain Moriarty, R.N., as chief navigating
officer. Mr. (afterwards Sir) Samuel Canning was engineer for the
contractors, the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, and Mr.
de Sauty their electrician; Professor Thomson and Mr. Cromwell Fleetwood
Varley were the electricians for the Atlantic Telegraph Company. The
Press was ably represented by Dr. W. H. Russell, correspondent of the
TIMES. The Great Eastern took on board seven or eight thousand tons of
coal to feed her fires, a prodigious quantity of stores, and a multitude
of live stock which turned her decks into a farmyard. Her crew all told
numbered 500 men.

At noon on Saturday, July 15, 1865, the Great Eastern left the Nore for
Foilhommerum Bay, Valentia Island, where the shore end was laid by the
Caroline.

At 5.30 p.m. on Sunday, July 23, amidst the firing of cannon and the
cheers of the telegraph fleet, she started on her voyage at a speed of
about four knots an hour. The weather was fine, and all went well until
next morning early, when the boom of a gun signalled that a fault had
broken out in the cable. It turned out that a splinter of iron wire had
penetrated the core. More faults of the kind were discovered, and as
they always happened in the same watch, there was a suspicion of foul
play. In repairing one of these on July 31, after 1,062 miles had been
payed out, the cable snapped near the stern of the ship, and the end was
lost. 'All is over,' quietly observed Mr. Canning; and though spirited
attempts were made to grapple the sunken line in two miles of water,
they failed to recover it.

The Great Eastern steamed back to England, where the indomitable Mr.
Field issued another prospectus, and formed the Anglo-American Telegraph
Company, with a capital of L600,000, to lay a new cable and