The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph

"The bill was then read a third time and passed." CHAPTER VIII. THE EXPEDITION OF 1857. Scarcely was the business with the American Government completed, before Mr. Field was recalled to England. Once more upon the waves, he forgot the long delay and the vexatious opposition which he left behind--the fogs of Newfoundland, and the denser fogs of Washington. He was bound for England, and there at least the work did not stand still. All winter long the wheels of the machinery had kept in motion. The cable was uncoiling its mighty folds to a length sufficient to span the Atlantic, and at last there was hope of victory. Although the United States Government had seemed a little ungracious in its delay, it yet rendered, this year and the next, most important service. Already it had prepared the way, by the deep-sea soundings, which it was the first to take across the Atlantic. It now rendered additional and substantial aid in lending to this enterprise the two finest ships in the American navy--the Niagara and the Susquehanna. The former was built some dozen years before by George Steers--a name celebrated among our marine architects as the constructor of the famous yacht America, that "racehorse of the sea," which had crossed the Atlantic, and carried off the prize in the British Channel from the yachts of England--and was designed to be a model of naval architecture. She was the largest steam-frigate in the world, exceeding in tonnage the heaviest line-of-battle ship in the English navy, and yet so finely modelled that, propelled only by a screw, she could make ten or twelve miles an hour. Notwithstanding her bulk, she was intended to carry but twelve guns--being one of the first ships in our navy to substitute a few heavy Dahlgrens for half a dozen times as many fifty-six-pounders. This was the beginning of that revolution in naval warfare, which was carried to such extent in the Monitors and other ironclads introduced in our civil war. Each gun weighed fourteen tons--requiring a crew of twenty-five men to wield it--and threw a shell of one hundred and thirty pounds a distance of three miles. One or two broadsides from such a deck would sink an old-fashioned seventy-four, or even a ninety or hundred-gun ship.