The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph

At length all these preparations were completed, and on Thursday, the 9th of August, the Great Eastern and the Medway put to sea. The Governor of Newfoundland, who had come around from St. John's and been received with the honors due his rank, accompanied them in the Lily down the broad expanse of Trinity Bay, and then bore away for St. John's while the Great Eastern and Medway kept on their course to join their companions in the middle of the Atlantic. They had a little over six hundred miles to run to the "fishing ground," and made it in three days. On Sunday noon they came in sight of the appointed rendezvous, and soon with glasses made out the Albany and the Terrible, which had arrived a week before and placed buoys to mark the line of the cable, and then, like giant sea-birds with folded wings, sat watching their prey. The sea was running high, so that boats could not come off, but the Albany signalled that she had not toiled for nothing; that she had once hooked the cable, but lost it in rough weather. The history of this first attempt, though brief, was cheering. When the Albany left Heart's Content, Captain Moriarty went in her. He had been in the Great Eastern the year before, and saw where the cable went down, and had had his eye on the spot ever since. He claimed, with Captain Anderson, that he could go straight to it and place the ship within half a mile of where it disappeared. At this old sailors shook their heads, and said, "They'd like to see him do it;" "No man could come within two or three miles of any given place in the ocean." Yet the result proved the exactness of his observations. With unerring eye he went straight to the spot, and set his buoys as exactly as a fisherman sets his nets.