The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph

"Tuesday.--Another twenty-four hours of uninterrupted success. All day yesterday it was so calm that the masts of our convoy were reflected in the ocean, an unusual thing to see. A large shoal of porpoises gambolled about us for half an hour. A glorious sunset, and later, a crescent moon, which we hope to see in the brightness of her full, lighting our way into Trinity Bay before the days of this July shall have ended." But the whole night did not pass away so tranquilly. By midnight the rain fell fast, and the wind blew fiercely, and then occurred the only real alarm of the voyage. The scene is thus described by Mr. Deane: "All went on well until twenty minutes past twelve A.M., Greenwich time, when the first real shock was given to the success which has hitherto attended us, and this time we had real cause to be alarmed. A foul flake took place in the after tank. The engines were immediately turned astern, and the paying out of the cable stopped. We were all soon on deck, and learned that the running or paying-out part of the coil had caught three turns of the flake immediately under it, carried them into the eye of the coil, fouling the lay out, and hauling up one and a half turns from the outside, and five turns in the eye of the under flake. This was stopped, fortunately, before entering the paying out machinery. Stoppers of hemp also were put on near the V-wheel astern, and Mr. Canning gave orders to stand by to let go the buoy. This was not very cheering to hear, but his calm and collected manner gave us all confidence that his skill and experience would extricate the cable from the obvious danger in which it was placed. No fishing line was ever entangled worse than the rope was when thrust up in apparently hopeless knots from the eye of the coil to the deck. There at least five hundred feet of rope lay in this state, in the midst of thick rain and increasing wind.