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However, the optimism of the summer dissolved as endless difficulties connected with the launch arose. After much negotiation, a new launch date was agreed with Martin’s Bank for October 1857. If the ship was not in the Thames by this date, the creditors would claim the yard and ‘we will be in the hands of the Philistines,’ declared company secretary John Yates. The fifth of October arrived and Brunel, not satisfied that everything was ready for the launch, had no alternative but to defer the date once again. The mortgagees seized the yard and refused access to all working on the ship. The situation had become impossible. Brunel was now put under immense pressure to agree to launch on the next ‘spring tide’ of 3 November and the company was charged large fees for the delay.
As the Great Ship stood helplessly inert, waiting at the top of two launch-ways, her brooding shape invited much comment. Many thought she was unlaunchable and would rust where she was. Other wise ‘old salts’ predicted that if she ever did finally find the sea, the first wave would break her long back in half. Brunel never doubted; but no matter how carefully he planned the coming operation, there were still many unknowns and little time to test the equipment. In the small hours of the cold autumn nights it seemed he was attempting the impossible. He was proposing to move an unwieldy metal mountain more than four storeys high down a precarious slope towards a high tide with untried equipment.
The plan for launching the ship sounded simple. Hydraulic rams would gently persuade her down the launch-ways. Tugs in the river, under the command of Captain Harrison, could also ease her towards the river, and there were restraining chains to hold her back should she move too fast. Two wooden cradles, 120 feet wide, were supporting the ship and they rested on launch-ways of the same width. Iron rails were fixed to the launch-ways and iron bars 1 inch thick were attached to the base of the cradles and both surfaces were greased to enable the vessel to slide easily down the launch-way gradient.
As the spring tide of 3 November approached, work on the ship became more frenzied. At night, 1,500 men working by gaslight carried on with last minute instructions from Brunel. Brunel himself never left the yard, sleeping for a few hours when exhausted on a makeshift bed in a small wooden office. He issued special instructions to everyone involved with the launch, saying:
The success of the operation will depend entirely upon the perfect regularity and absence of all haste or confusion in each stage of the proceedings and in every department, and to attain this nothing is more essential than perfect silence. I would earnestly request, therefore, that the most positive orders be given to the men not to speak a word, and that every endeavour should be made to prevent a sound being heard, except the simple orders quietly and deliberately given by those few who will direct.
Unfortunately for Brunel, perfect silence was not a high priority with the board of the Eastern Steam Navigation Company. For months now, the company had borne the disastrous haemorrhage of enormous amounts of money into the Great Ship. The launching presented them with a small chance to recoup some of those losses. Unknown to Brunel, they had sold over 3,000 tickets to view the launch from Napier shipyard. Newspapers, too, had played their part, informing the public that an event worthy of comparison with the Colosseum was about to take place at Millwall. ‘Men and women of all classes were joined together in one amicable pilgrimage to the East,’ reported The Times. ‘For on that day at some hour unknown, the Leviathan was to be launched at Millwall … For two years, London – and we may add the people of England – had been kept in expectation of the advent of this gigantic experiment, and their excitement and determination to be present at any cost are not to be wondered at when we consider what a splendid chance presented itself of a fearful catastrophe.’
The launch place of the Leviathan presented a chaotic picture to Charles Dickens. ‘I am in an empire of mud … I am surrounded by muddy navigators, muddy engineers, muddy policemen, muddy clerks of works, muddy, reckless ladies, muddy directors, muddy secretaries and I become muddy myself.’ He noted that ‘a general spirit of reckless daring’ seemed to animate the ‘one hundred thousand souls’ crammed in and around the yard, upon the river and the opposite bank. ‘They delight in insecure platforms, they crowd on small, frail housetops, they come up in little cockleboats, almost under the bows of the Great Ship … many in that dense floating mass on the river and the opposite shore would not be sorry to experience the excitement of a great disaster.’
In the dull light of the November morning the scene that greeted Brunel as he emerged from his makeshift quarters was one of confusion and noise, with uncontrollable crowds swarming over his carefully placed launch equipment. All of fashionable London, displaying intense curiosity, expecting to be amused, charmed, and hopefully thrilled, was taking the air in Napier shipyard. Then, almost farcically, in the midst of preparations, a string of unexpected distinguished visitors turned up in all their finery, first the Comte de Paris and then, complete with a retinue resplendent in gold cloth, the ambassador of Siam. A half-hearted attempt at a launching ceremony saw the daughter of Mr Hope, the chairman of the board, offering the token bottle of champagne to the ship. Brunel refused to associate himself with it. She got the name wrong, christening the ship ‘Leviathan’, which nobody liked since all of London had already decided on the Great Eastern.
The whole colourful funfair scene was terribly at odds with the cold, clinically precise needs of the launching operation. Brunel felt betrayed, as he later told a friend: ‘I learnt to my horror that all the world was invited to “The Launch”, and that I was committed to it coûte que coûte. It was not right, it was cruel; and nothing but a sense of the necessity of calming all feelings that could disturb my mind enabled me to bear it.’
Brunel had no alternative but to make the attempt in spite of the difficulties. He stood high up on a wooden structure, against the hull, his slight figure wearing a worn air, stovepipe hat at an angle, habitual cigar in his mouth. He held a white flag in his hand, poised like a conductor waiting to begin the vast unknown music.
As his flag came down, the wedges were removed, the checking drum cables eased, and the winches on the barges mid-river took the strain. For what seemed an eternity, nothing happened. The crowd, which had been quiet, grew restive. Brunel decided to apply the power of the hydraulic presses. Suddenly, with thunderous reverberation, the bow cradle moved three feet before the team applied the brake lever on the forward checking drum. Immediately, accompanied by a rumbling noise, the stern of the great hull moved four feet. An excited cry went up from the crowd: ‘She moves! She moves!’ In an instant the massive cables of the aft checking drum were pulled tight, causing the winch handle to spin. As the winch handle ‘flew round like lightning’, it sliced into flesh and bone, and tossed the men who were working the drum into the air like flotsam. The price the team paid for not being entirely awake to the quickly changing situation was four men mutilated. Another man, the elderly John Donovan, sustained such fearful injuries he was considered a hopeless case and was taken to a nearby hospital where he soon died.
Later that afternoon, Brunel tried to move the hull once more but a string of minor accidents and the growing dark persuaded him to finish for the day. In the words of Brunel’s 17-year-old son Henry, ‘the whole yard was thrown into confusion by a struggling mob, and there was nothing to be done but to see that the ship was properly secured and wait till the following morning’.
The spring tide had come and gone, the next one was not for another month; another month of extortionate fees while the ship lay on the slipway. Brunel was determined to get the ship completely on to the launch-ways as soon as possible. He was very concerned that while the ship was half on the building slip (whose foundation was completely firm) and half on the launch-ways (which had more give) the bottom of the hull could be forced into a different shape. His urgent task was to get the ship well down the launch-ways to the water’s edge in case the hull started to sink into the Thames mud under its immense weight. The fiasco of 3 November at least provided information on how to manage the launch more effectively. Some alterations were made to improve the equipment and another attempt at the launch was made on the nineteenth. This was a huge disappointment with the hull moving just 1 inch. Clearly, more would have to be done.
The winches on the barges mid-river had been ineffective and all four were now mounted in the yard, their cables drawn under the hull and across to the barges; but even chains of great strength and size broke when any strain was put on them. ‘Dense fog made it almost impossible to work on the river,’ observed Henry Brunel. ‘Moreover, there seemed a fatality about every attempt to get a regular trial of any part of the tackle.’ Two more hydraulic presses were added to the original two, giving a force of 800 tons at full power.
By 28 November, Brunel felt confident enough to try to move the Great Ship once more. From a central position in the yard, Brunel signalled his instructions with a white flag. The hydraulic presses were brought up to full power and, to the accompaniment of terrifying sounds of cracking timber and the groaning and screeching of metal, slowly the ship moved at a rate of one inch per minute. As before, though, the tackle between the hull and the barges proved unreliable and Captain Harrison and his team found themselves endlessly repairing chains. In spite of the difficulties, by the end of the day the ship had been moved fourteen feet and there was renewed hope of floating the ship on the high tide of 2 December. An early start on 29 November saw the river tackle yet again let them down and the four hydraulic presses pushed to their maximum could not move the ship. Hydraulic jacks and screw jacks were begged and borrowed and by nightfall another 8 feet had been claimed so that by the thirtieth the ship had moved 33 feet in total and hope now had real meaning. But then one of the presses burst a cylinder, which killed off any possibility of a December launch.
Brunel would not be defeated though, and throughout December he carried on inching the colossal black ship down the launch-ways. Each day it was becoming more reluctant to start. ‘While the ship was in motion,’ noted Henry Brunel, ‘the whole of the ground forming the yard would perceptibly shake, or rather sway, on the discharge of power, stored up in the presses and their abutments.’ In the freezing fogs of December and January, the hundreds of workers were heard, rather than seen, as the yard echoed with the sounds of orders and endless hammering. The gangs sang to relieve their boredom as they mended the chains. At night, gas flares lit the scene and fires burned by the pumps and presses to stop them freezing up. With the small figures of the workers beneath the huge black shape in the mist, which was red from the many fires, it gave the impression that some unearthly ritual was being enacted on this bleak southerly bend in the Thames.
Brunel was coming to the conclusion that the pulling power he had hoped to obtain from the barges and tugs on the river was not going to be enough and that his best hope lay in providing much more power to push the ship into the river. The railway engineer, Robert Stephenson, a friend who had come to view the operation, agreed and orders were placed with a Birmingham firm, Tangye Bros, for hydraulic presses capable of much more power.
The whole country was following Brunel’s efforts to launch the reluctant ship and the press were increasingly critical. ‘Why do great companies believe in Mr Brunel?’ scoffed The Field. ‘If great engineering consists in effecting huge monuments of folly at enormous cost to share holders, then is Mr Brunel surely the greatest of engineers!’ There was no shortage of letters offering diverse advice. One reverend gentleman thought the best plan was to dig a trench up to the bows and then push the ship in. Another claimed that 500 troops marching at the double round the deck would set up vibrations that would move the vessel. Yet another idea was to float the ship to the river on cannon balls or even shoot cannon balls into the cradles. Scott Russell, too, aired his theories on just why the ship was ‘seizing up’ and reluctant to move. He suggested the two moving surfaces should have been wood not iron.
December and January were bitterly cold. By day, the ship looked mysterious in dense fogs; the nights were black as the river itself. Brunel stood alone against a background of criticism; his sheer unremitting determination to get the ship launched permeated every impulse. By early January, he had acquired eighteen hydraulic presses and they were placed nine at each of the cradles. It was thought that their combined power was more than 4,500 tons.
The new hydraulic presses were so successful that as the month advanced the Thames water was lapping her hull. The next high tide of the thirtieth was set for launch day. But the night of the twenty-ninth brought sheeting horizontal rain and a strong southwesterly wind. Brunel knew that if they got the ship launched, the difficulties of managing the craft in the shallow waters of the Thames, where at this point it was not much wider than the length of the ship, would be considerable in such high winds. Miraculously, though, 31 January was still and calm. The Thames shimmered like a polished surface.
At first light, Brunel started the launch process in earnest. Water which had been pumped into the ship the day before to hold her against the strong tide was now pumped out. The bolts were removed from wedges that were holding the ship. Nothing more could be done until the tide came up the river, which it did with surprising speed and force. Messengers were sent with desperate urgency to collect the men in order not to miss the opportunity which seemed to have arrived at last. The hydraulic presses were noisy with effort and the great Tangye’s rams hissed and pushed at the massive structure. Two hours of shoving and straining and tension down the last water-covered part of the launch-ways saw the vast iron stern afloat. The forward steam winch hauled and, quickly, the huge bow responded and moved with solemn deliberation into the water. There were no crowds to witness this defining moment; just a few curious onlookers there by accident as the colossal ship moved from one element to another. As the news spread, bells rang out across London as the Great Eastern floated for the first time.
Brunel, who had not slept for 60 hours, was able to board with his wife and son and at last could feel the movement of the ship as she responded to the currents of the Thames beneath her. Four tugs took the Great Eastern across the river to her Deptford mooring where she could now be fitted out. The cost of the launch was frightening – some estimates suggest as much as £1,000 per foot – and the ship had so far consumed £732,000, with Brunel putting in a great deal of his own money. But the cost to Brunel’s health was higher still. Over the past few months he had pushed himself to the limits of endurance. It seemed the Great Ship owned him in body and soul and gave him no relief from the endless difficulties of turning his original vision into a reality. Now that the Great Eastern was finally in the water after years, Brunel’s doctors insisted that he take a rest.
When Brunel returned in September 1858 he found that the Eastern Steam Navigation Company was in debt, that there was no money to fit the ship out and there was talk of selling her. The company tried to raise £172,000 to finish the work on the ship, but this proved impossible. The financial problems of the board were only resolved when they formed a new company, ‘the Great Ship Company’, which bought the Great Eastern for a mere £160,000, and allotted shares to shareholders of Eastern Steam in proportion to their original holding. Brunel was re-engaged as engineer and, with his usual energy, became busy with designs for every last detail, even the skylights and rigging. Yet he was harassed now with health problems and doctors diagnosed his recurring symptoms as ‘Bright’s disease’, with progressive damage to his kidneys. They insisted that he must spend the winter relaxing in a warmer climate. The last thing Brunel wanted was to leave his Great Ship when there was still so much to supervise. Reluctantly, he agreed to travel to Egypt with his wife and son, Henry.
Before he left, with memories of the impossible position that the board had faced when dealing with Scott Russell, he urged them to ensure that any contract they entered into for fitting out the ship was absolutely binding. However, with Brunel abroad and clearly unwell, the board, left with bringing to completion such a unique vessel, opted for the devil they knew. Scott Russell had built the hull and he was building the paddle engines. He was, after Brunel, the man who knew most about the Great Ship. It was not long before the charming, charismatic Scott Russell with his delightfully low-priced, somewhat ambiguous contract was back on board.
In May 1859, Brunel returned. The enforced holiday appeared to have been beneficial and his friends were hopeful that he was fully recovered. Privately, he knew this was not the case. His doctors had made it quite clear that his disease was progressing relentlessly. Only so much time was left for him and he should certainly not overexert himself. Yet, for Brunel, rest was out of the question. Whatever private bargain he may have made with himself, it proved impossible for him to resist the pull of the Great Eastern. His ship came first, whatever the cost.
With the maiden voyage planned for September, all Brunel could see was the enormous amount still needing to be done. So he rented a house near the ship and, with his usual energy, dealt daily with the many problems that needed his expert attention. Everything from the engine room to the rigging was checked; the best price of coal ascertained; the crew for the sea trials named; progress reports on the screw engines prepared; notes for Captain Harrison; advice on the decoration in the grand saloon: nothing escaped his practised eye. On 8 August 1859, a grand dinner was given for MPs and members of the House of Lords in the richly gilded rococo saloon but Brunel was too exhausted to attend. It was a glamorous occasion and, in Brunel’s absence, Scott Russell rose to it, shining in the glowing approbation of the distinguished audience.
On 5 September, Brunel was back on board his ship. He had chosen his cabin for the maiden voyage and stood for a moment on deck by the gigantic main mast while the photographer recorded the event. He had lost weight; his face was thinner, his clothes hung on him. In one hand he held a stick to help him get about; his shoes were clean and polished. He had a fragile, expended air. As he looked at the camera – his eyes, as always, concentrating, absorbed in some distant prospect – he looked like a man with little time left. Just two hours later he collapsed with a stroke. He was still conscious as his colleagues carried him very carefully to his private coach and slowly drove him home to Duke Street as though he were breakable.
The Great Eastern made her way alone now, without Brunel’s attention, directed by fussing tugs down the Thames to Purfleet in Essex and beyond for her sea trials. Once out to sea, she was magnificent. ‘She met the waves rolling high from the Bay of Biscay,’ reported The Times. ‘The foaming surge seemed but sportive elements of joy over which the new mistress of the ocean held her undisputed sway.’
With Brunel lying paralysed at home in Duke Street, Captain Harrison was now in charge, but his command was diluted as the engine trials took place. The two engine rooms were supervised by the representatives of the firms responsible for the engines; Scott Russell put his man Dixon in charge of the paddle engine room. Brunel had designed many new and innovative features for the smoother running of his ship, some of which those in charge were neither familiar with nor even aware existed. No one had the same intimate understanding of the complex workings of the ship as Brunel and if his familiar figure had been on board, in total charge with his boundless energy and sharp mind directing proceedings, it is possible the accident would never have happened.
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.
She spent twelve quiet years, largely forgotten, on the gridiron at Milford Haven, a gentle dilapidation settling on her like a mould. Suggestions were made for her future, perhaps as a hospital or hotel, but they came to nothing. She was auctioned in 1885 for £26,000 to a coal haulier, Edward de Mattos. He leased her for a year to a well-known Liverpool draper, Louis Cohen, who proposed to turn her into a showboat for the exhibition of manufactures.
The old ship was goaded into life, but her paddle engines were eaten up with rust and unusable. Even her screw engines were stiff and reluctant as she slowly made her way to Liverpool, to be turned into some sort of funfair decked with advertisements. Trapeze artists dived from the rigging. The grand saloon became a music hall. Coconut shies vied with ‘what the butler saw’. Beer halls, conjurors, knife throwers and all the fun of the fair brought in a profit for Mr Cohen. ‘Poor old ship, you deserved a better fate,’ Daniel Gooch wrote in his diary on hearing the news, adding, ‘I would much rather the ship was broken up than turned to such base uses.’
When Mr Cohen’s lease expired, Mr de Mattos tried to repeat his success, but it seems he did not have enough of the circus in his blood to pull it off. So, in 1888, after due consideration, the ship which had cost well over a million pounds to build, maintain and repair was auctioned for scrap for the meagre sum of £16,000.
The still magnificent ship, and all the dreams she carried of everyone connected with her, was taken to the scrapyard at Birkenhead to be demolished. At first, it looked as though the breakers would make a tidy profit. They estimated that they could sell the iron plates and various metals for £58,000, but with the Great Eastern making a profit was never a foregone conclusion and, true to her history, she made a loss. Demolition proved cripplingly expensive, as human hands were not enough to pick the immensely strong hull to pieces. This was a ship designed for strength by her creator, a ship that had survived the full fury of Atlantic storms. It took some 200 men working night and day for two years, swinging demolition balls and anything else they could find to pole-axe her obstinate refusal to be metamorphosed into so many tons of scrap. Slowly the layers of metal were peeled away, the outer skin of the hull, the inner hull, the organs of the engine and all the intimately connecting shafts and pistons, until one day where she had stood was just space.
As for the riveter and his boy, entombed alive in the double hull, rumours persisted that their skeletons were indeed found. According to James Dugan, author of The Great Iron Ship in 1953, there was one witness: a Captain David Duff who at the time was a cabin boy. He claimed to have visited the wrecker’s yard and wrote: ‘They found a skeleton inside the ship’s shell and the tank tops. It was the skeleton of the basher who was missing. Also the frame of the bash boy was found with him. And so there you are Sir, that’s all I can tell you about the Great Eastern.’ But the local papers of the time bear no record of this extraordinary story and the captain’s account has never been authenticated. For the time being, the mystery of whether or not the basher and his mate were entombed remains unsolved.
It is wrong to blame the ill fortune that seemed to haunt the Great Eastern on some evil-spirited ghosts. She was way ahead of her time and was to remain the largest ship in the world until the Lusitania of 1906 and later the Titanic. But in the mid-nineteenth century there were few harbours where the Great Eastern could dock and this fact alone limited her success. She was specifically designed for taking large numbers of people to Australia, but this never happened. Those who managed her have been criticised for their insistence on using her for the luxury market to the United States at a time when there was just too much competition on this route. If she had sailed to New York from Liverpool with a full complement of emigrants and brought back cotton or wheat, she could have made £45,000 per round trip. Eight hundred thousand emigrants left Europe for the United States in the Civil War years.
Had her creator lived beyond the age of 53 then perhaps he would have been able to steer his ship towards profitability. But Isambard Kingdom Brunel was gone and, in 1890, his dream disappeared, too. Only the spirit of the man lived on. His friend Daniel Gooch wrote on Brunel’s death, ‘the greatest of England’s engineers was lost, the man with the greatest originality of thought and power of execution, bold in his plans but right. The commercial world thought him extravagant; but although he was so, great things are not done by those who sit down and count the cost of every thought and act.’
2 The Bell Rock Lighthouse (#ulink_379bf57c-4c6e-5ff3-8172-7887f1291310)
‘There is not a more dangerous situation upon the whole coasts of the Kingdom, or none that calls more loudly to be done than the Bell Rock …’
Robert Stevenson, 1800
THE SAFE ANCHORAGE of the Firth of Forth on the east coast of Scotland has always been a refuge for shipping hoping to escape the wild storms of the North Sea. The safety of this natural inlet, however, is considerably compromised by the presence of a massive underwater reef, the Bell Rock, lying treacherously right in the middle of the approach to the Firth of Forth. It is far enough away from the coast for landmarks to be unable to define its position, being eleven miles south of Arbroath and a similar distance west from the mouth of the Tay. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a storm was brewing in the Forth and Tay area, those at sea faced a forbidding choice: ride out the storm in the open sea or try to find safety in the Firth of Forth and risk an encounter with the Bell Rock.
Hidden by a few feet of water under the sea, the craggy shape of the Bell Rock lay in wait for sailing ships, as it had for centuries, claiming many lives and ships and scattering them wantonly, like trophies, over its silent and mysterious escarpments. It bares itself briefly twice a day at low tide for an hour or two, and then disappears under the sea at high tide, sometimes its position given away by waves breaking on the submerged rocks and foaming surf over its rugged features. An outcrop of sandstone about a quarter of a mile long, it slopes away gently on the southern side, but to the north it rises steeply from the seabed, an unyielding barrier.
For early navigators the greatest danger was to come suddenly upon the northern cliff face. Any ship taking soundings north of the rock would find deep water and assume all was safe, only to learn the fatal error should the ship stray a few yards further south. All on board would listen for the last sounds they might hear of timber being torn and split as wood was crushed against rock. So many lives were lost, along the whole Scottish coast the notorious Bell Rock ‘breathed abroad an atmosphere of terror’.
For centuries the sea lanes were deserted, their wild highways left unchallenged, but from about the mid-eighteenth century the growth of trade in flax, hemp and goods for the weaving industry saw an increase in shipping and, as a consequence, a growing number of fatal collisions with the massive submerged cliff of the Bell Rock. The heavy toll brought pleas for some kind of warning light, although no one was sure how this could be done so far out to sea on a rock which for most of the time was under water.
The local people of the east coast had once succeeded in putting a warning on the rock. In the fourteenth century, it was said, a man called John Gedy, the abbot of Aberbrothock, was so concerned at the numbers who perished there that he set out to the rock with his monks and an enormous bell. With incredible ingenuity, they attached the bell to the rock and it rang out loud and clear above the waves warning all seafarers, an invisible church in the sea.
The good abbot, however, had not reckoned on human avarice. Soon after, a Dutch pirate called ‘Ralph the Rover’ stole the bell, in spite of its miraculous power to save life by its insistent warning ring. Ironically, he died within a year and must have regretted his act when his ship met bad weather and the great reef, and some said a deserving fate, as he and his ship disappeared beneath the waves. From that time, the rock acquired its name and became known as the ‘Bell Rock’.
The coast of Scotland is long and rugged and has many jagged peninsulas and rocky islets. Even by the late eighteenth century for hundreds of miles, according to local accounts, these desolate shores ‘were nightly plunged into darkness’. To help further the safety of these coastal waters, the Northern Lighthouse Board was established in 1786 to erect and maintain lighthouses. At that time, the warning lights to shipping were often no more than bonfires set on dangerous headlands, maintained by private landowners. When the warning fires were most needed in bad weather, they were usually put out by drenching rain.
By 1795, the board had improved on these primitive lights with seven major lighthouses, but progress was slow. They were chronically underfunded, though never short of requests to do more by worried shipowners, and especially to put a light on the Bell Rock. The Northern Lighthouse Board was well aware of the desirability of a light on the rock. Its reputation as a killer lying in wait at the entrance to the enticing safety of the Firth of Forth had travelled well beyond England. However, with little in the way of funds and the difficulties of building so far out to sea on a rock that was submerged by up to sixteen feet of water for much of the day, such a request was improbable madness not even to be considered.
There was one man, however, who had been dreaming of the impossible, of building a lighthouse on the hidden reef and allowing the whole bay of the Firth of Forth to be useful as safe anchorage. Robert Stevenson was a man of strong character who by some strange fate had been given the very opportunities he needed to fulfil his ambition. In early life his chances of success had looked poor. His mother, Jean Stevenson, had been widowed and left penniless when he was only two. Years of hardship followed, but Jean Stevenson, a deeply religious woman, struggled on to ensure an education for her son. In later life, Stevenson always remembered ‘that dark period when my mother’s ingenious and gentle spirit amidst all her difficulties never failed her’.
Jean was eventually remarried in November 1792 to an Edinburgh widower called Thomas Smith who designed and manufactured lamps. At the time, Smith was interested in increasing the brightness of his lamps. A scientific philosopher from Geneva called Ami Argand had recently developed a way of improving brightness by fitting a glass tube or chimney around the wick. Smith was experimenting with taking this work further by placing a polished tin reflector behind and partly surrounding the wick, shaped in a parabolic curve to focus the light. This gave a much brighter beam than conventional oil lamps and the lamps from his workshops were now much in demand. He was soon approached by the Northern Lighthouse Board, who employed him as their lighting engineer. At a time when lighthouses were as basic as a fire or torch on top of an open tower or simple oil lamps encased in glass lanterns, Smith began to design oil lamps with parabolic reflectors consisting of small facets of mirror glass to create a powerful beam.
When the young Robert Stevenson visited his stepfather’s workshop, he found it a magical place where uninteresting bits of metal and glass were transformed into beautiful precision-made objects. Jean could see where her son’s interests lay and, much to his delight, Stevenson was soon apprenticed to Thomas Smith. One of Thomas Smith’s duties at the Northern Lighthouse Board was to visit the board’s growing number of lighthouses. During the summer months he and Stevenson would set out by boat and appraise the situation, repairing damage and deciding on the position of new lighthouses. By about the turn of the century this responsibility fell entirely to Stevenson.
‘The seas into which his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce charted,’ his grandson, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote years later.
The coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road; the isles in which he must sojourn were still partly savage. He must toss much in boats; he must often adventure on horseback through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to the vicissitudes of out door life. The joy of my grandfather in this career was strong as the love of woman. It lasted him through youth and manhood, it burned strong in age and at the approach of death his last yearning was to renew these loved experiences.
From May to October, Stevenson went on his round visiting the board’s scattered lighthouses, taking much needed supplies and solving problems. These could vary from the repair of storm-damaged buildings to the question of finding new pasture for the keepers’ cow. Stevenson was also employed to map out the position of new lighthouses and soon found that some of the inhabitants of the remote islands – who supplemented their income from wrecking – were openly hostile to him.
On one journey in dense fog his ship came dangerously near sharp rocks of the Isle of Swona. The captain hoped to get help towing the ship away from the danger from a village he could see on shore. The village looked dead; everyone was asleep. To attract attention, he fired a distress signal. Stevenson watched in disbelief, as ‘door after door was opened, and in the grey light of morning, fisher after fisher was seen to come forth nightcap on head. There was no emotion, no animation, it scarce seemed any interest; not a hand was raised, but all callously waited the harvest of the sea, and their children stood by their side and waited also.’ Luckily a breeze sprang up and the ship was able to make for the open sea.
During these summer trips Stevenson learned a great deal. He could be impatient, not inclined to suffer fools gladly, but he never lacked confidence in his ability to tackle the most difficult problems. Over these years, as the Scottish coastline and its lighthouses became ingrained on his mind, he was nurturing his secret ambition to tame for ever the awful power of the Bell Rock. The fulfilment of his dream seemed remote. Stevenson was not a qualified civil engineer. As Smith’s young assistant he had little influence with the board. And he was only too aware that the commissioners believed that a light on the Bell Rock was out of the question.
Those living on the northeast coast of England and Scotland in December 1799 saw the old century dragged out with a thunderous storm of screaming winds and mountainous seas, which raged from Yorkshire to the Shetlands. All along the east coast, ships at anchorage were torn from their moorings and swept away. Those seafarers who could hear anything above the wind and crash of waves listened for the dreaded sound of wood cracking and splitting as it was thrown against rock – the sound of death. In Scotland, the haven of the Firth of Forth, guarded by the Bell Rock, was ignored. Ships preferred to make for the open sea and take their chances in the storm rather than try to steer their way past the dreaded reef. The storm lasted three days and was to sink 70 ships.
The call for a light on the Bell Rock grew louder. If there had been a lighthouse, shipowners argued, many more ships would have made for the safety of the Firth of Forth. The Northern Lighthouse Board began, at last, to give serious consideration to what they still saw as an insoluble problem and Stevenson was quick to present his own plan for a beacon-style lighthouse on cast-iron pillars. Although there was not a more dangerous situation ‘upon the whole coasts of the Kingdom,’ he argued, his design would be safe, relatively inexpensive and even pay for itself as the board collected fees from ships taking advantage of its warning light. The cautiously minded board was impressed with the idea of economy, but less sure of Stevenson’s design.
Despite his experience around the coast of Scotland, Stevenson had not yet managed to set foot on Bell Rock itself and was impatient to do so. In April 1800, he hired a boat, intending to survey the site, but the weather was too stormy to land. In May, as he sailed nearby on a journey north, it lay invisible, even at low tide. He had to wait until the neap tides of October before he could make the attempt again. At the last minute, however, the boat he had been promised was unavailable and no one was prepared to take him out to the rock, not even in calm seas. Time was running out for a landing on the rock before winter and, if he could not find a boat, he would miss the favourable tides. Finally, a fisherman was found who was prepared to take the risk; it transpired the man often braved the Bell Rock to hunt for valuable wreckage to supplement his income.
Once on the rock, Stevenson and his friend, the architect James Haldane, had just two hours in which to assess the possibilities that the rock might offer before the tide returned and the rock disappeared. It was covered in seaweed and very slippery. The surface was pitted and sea water gurgled and sucked in the fissures and gullies that criss-crossed the rock, but Stevenson was encouraged by what he saw. The exposed area at low tide was about 250 by 130 feet, revealing enough room for a lighthouse. Better still the surface of the rock was of very hard sandstone, perfect for building.
There was one problem though. He had thought that a lighthouse on pillars would offer less resistance to the sea, but when he saw the heavy swell around the rock, overwhelming the channels and inlets, pushing its bullying foamy waters into deep fissures even on a calm day, he knew his plan could not work. Visiting boats bringing supplies or a change of keeper would be shattered against the pillars in heavy seas, and the capability of the pillars to withstand the timeless beating of the waves was questionable, too. ‘I am sure no one was fonder of his own work than I was, until I saw the Bell Rock,’ he wrote. ‘I had no sooner landed than I saw my pillars tumble like the baseless fabric of a dream.’
The two hours passed all too quickly. The fisherman, who had gathered spoils from wreckage on the reef, was anxious to leave as the returning tide swirled around their feet. For Stevenson, finding the Bell Rock and standing at the centre of its watery kingdom, with nothing but the ever-encroaching sea in sight, had been a revelation. It was clear that only an immensely strong tower would have a chance of surviving in such an exposed position – a building higher than the highest waves, made of solid sandstone and granite. With these thoughts in mind, he undertook an extensive tour of English lighthouses and harbour lights in search of a model on which to base his own plans. It was a journey of some two and a half thousand miles by coach or on horseback, which took many months of 1801. He soon found there was only one such stone sea-tower already in existence. It was built on a buttress of rock about nine miles from the port of Plymouth, off the south coast in Cornwall.
The Eddystone Lighthouse, so called because of the dangerous eddies and currents that swirled around it, had withstood the fearsome gales blown in from the Atlantic since 1759. It had been built by John Smeaton, a man revered by Stevenson and considered to be the father of the civil engineering profession. Standing 70 feet high, it was made from interlocking solid Portland stone and granite blocks, which presented a tall, smooth curved shape to the elements. It had been inspired, Smeaton said, by the trunk of an oak tree. ‘An oak tree is broad at its base,’ he explained, ‘curves inward at its waist and becomes narrower towards the top. We seldom hear of a nature oak tree being uprooted.’
There had been several attempts at lighthouses on the Eddystone rocks before Smeaton’s triumphant endeavour, the most notable being the Winstanley Lighthouse, built in 1698. Henry Winstanley, the clerk of works at Audley End in Essex, was also an enthusiastic inventor and he took it upon himself to build a remarkable six-sided structure on the Eddystone rocks standing over 100 feet high. With charming balconies, gilded staterooms, decorative wrought-iron work and casement windows for fishing, the whole curious structure was topped with an octagonal cupola complete with flags, more wrought iron and a weather vane. It might have been more appropriately placed as a folly on a grand estate, but Winstanley was confident it could withstand the most furious of storms. He was so confident that he longed to be there in bad weather to observe the might of the sea and by chance he was there on 26 November 1703. That night a bad storm blew in with horizontal rain, screaming winds and waves 100 feet high. Winstanley certainly had his wish. At some time in the night, the fury of the sea took Winstanley and his pretty gilded lighthouse and tossed them to a watery oblivion. In the morning, nothing remained but a few pieces of twisted wire.
