The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph

It is indeed marvellous how little was known, up to a very recent date, of the true character of the ocean. Navigators had often tried to find out how deep it was. When lying becalmed on a tranquil sea, they had amused themselves by letting down a long line, weighted with a cannon-ball, to see if they could touch bottom. But the results were very uncertain. Sometimes the line ran out for miles and miles, but whether it was all the while descending, or was swayed hither and thither by mighty under-currents, could not be known. But this true character of the ocean it was necessary to determine, before it could be possible to pass the gulf of the Atlantic. What was there on the bottom of the sea, where the cable was to find its resting place? Was that ocean-bed a wide level plain, or had it been heaved up by volcanic forces into a hundred mountain-peaks, with many a gorge and precipice between? Such was the character of a part of the basin of the ocean. Here and there, all over the globe, are islands, like the Peak of Teneriffe, thrown up in some fierce bursting of the crust of our planet, that shoot up in tremendous cliffs from the sea. Who shall say that the same cliffs do not shoot down below the waves a thousand fathoms deep? And might there not be such islands, which did not show their heads above the surface, lying in the track between Europe and America: or perchance a succession of mountain ranges, over which the cable would have to be stretched, and where hanging from the heights it would swing with the tide, till at last it snapped and fell into the abyss below? Such at least were possible dangers to be encountered; and it was not safe to advance a step till the basin of the North Atlantic was explored.