Leseprobe
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Great Iron Ship
James Dugan
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Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik / Geschichte
Beschreibung
IF EVER there was a subject fit for the hand of the biographer, the story of the Great Eastern is surely it. James Dugan has made the entertaining most of a monstrous but true episode of the high Victorian days, the age of iron and the mechanical engineer. He has written a failure-story far more amusing than most success-stories could be: and out of 692 feet and 12.000 tons of iron he has made a character almost human in its foibles and its superb talent for getting into trouble.Before the Great Eastern had made her first trip to New York, she had eaten up $5,000,000, the first of the fortunes she regularly swallowed on every voyage. She had hardly steamed a few dozen miles when the forward funnel blew out. She passed through the hands of three groups of shareholders before she ever carried a paying passenger. Everything that could possibly happen to a ship happened to the Great Eastern. Tanks of fish oil deluged her engine deck. Two horses died of a bad cold because she passed too close to an iceberg. On her fourth voyage she got stuck in Flushing Bay, at the western end of Long Island Sound, with a gash in her bottom that would have comfortably accommodated an ordinary-sized ship. Storm, mechanical failure, inefficient captains and crew-the Great Eastern had everything. She almost cut New York in two when she first docked.Into her story enter such figures as Cyrus Field-who made use of the Great Eastern to lay the Atlantic cable; Louis Napoleon-he wrested the leviathan just in time from the hands of the Sultan of Turkey, who wanted to use her to house his harem; Jules Verne, Du Chaillu. Indian nabobs, the war correspondent Scott Russell, and dozens of other figures of a bygone age.The whole story is told by Mr. Dugan with an unfailing appreciation of the high, low and medium comedy involved in the Great Eastern's crazy career, and with a sharp eye for the Victorian background and personalities.
