The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph

This submarine mountain was then regarded as the chief point of danger in the whole bed of the Atlantic, and as the principal source of anxiety in laying a cable across the ocean. Yet, after all, the ascent or descent of less than a mile and a half in ten miles, is not an impassable grade. More recent soundings reduce this still farther. Captain Hoskins, of the Royal Navy, afterwards made a more careful survey of this precipitous sea bottom, and with results much more favorable. The side of the mountain, it is now said, is not very much steeper than Holborn Hill in London, or Murray Hill in New York.[B] But the best answer to fears on this point, is the fact that in 1857, 1858, and 1865, the cable passed over it without difficulty. In 1857 the Niagara was a hundred miles farther to sea, when the cable broke. In 1865 the strain was not increased more than a hundred pounds. In the final expedition, that of 1866, this declivity was passed over without difficulty or danger. Next to the depth of the ocean, it was important to ascertain the nature of its bottom. What was it--a vast bed of rock, the iron-bound crust of the globe, hardened by internal fires, and which, bending as a vault over the still glowing centre of the earth, bore up on its mighty arches the weight of all the oceans? or was it mere sand like the sea-shore? or ooze as soft as that of a mill-pond? The pressure of a column of water two miles high would be equal to that of four hundred atmospheres. Would not this weight alone be enough to crush any substance that could reach that tremendous depth? These were questions which remained to be answered, but on which depended the possibility of laying a cable at the bottom of the Atlantic.