The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph

But for the present all was over. The attempt must be abandoned for the year 1865, but not for ever; and with this purpose in her constant mind, the Great Eastern swung sullenly around, and turned her imperial head toward England, like a warrior retiring from the field--not victorious, nor yet defeated and despairing, but with her battle-flag still flying, and resolved once more to attempt the conquest of the sea. FOOTNOTES: [A] Nearly a year and a half after this, when the cable was safely landed in Newfoundland, Captain Anderson, still on board the Great Eastern, in a letter to a friend, thus referred to his first connection with the Atlantic Telegraph:-- "I cannot tell you how I have felt since our success. It is only seventeen months since I first walked up to the top of the paddle-box of this ship at Sheerness, upon a dark, rainy night--reviewed my past career in my mind, and tried to look into the future, to see what I had undertaken, and realize if possible what this new step would develop. I cannot say I believed much in cables; I rather think I did not; but I did believe Mr. Field was an earnest man, of great force of character, and working under a strong conviction that what he was attempting was thoroughly practicable; and I knew enough of the names with which he had associated himself in the enterprise to feel that it was a real, true, honest effort, worthy of all the energy and application of one's manhood; and come what might in the future, I resolved to do my very utmost, and to do nothing else until it was over. More completely however than my resolve foreshadowed, I dropped inch by inch, or step by step, into the work, until I had no mind, no soul, no sleep, that was not tinged with cable. In a word I accuse Mr. Field of having dragged me into a vortex, that I could not get out of, and did not wish to try--and the sum total of all this is, to lay a thread across an ocean! Dr. Russell compared it to an elephant stretching a cobweb, and there lay its very danger: the more you multiply the mechanism, the more you increase the risk."