SS Great Eastern

SS Great Eastern was an iron-hulled steamship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and built by John Scott Russell & Co. at Millwall Iron Works on the River Thames, London, England. Powered by both sidewheels and a screw propeller, she was by far the largest ship ever built at the time of her 1858 launch, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers from England to Australia without refuelling. Her length of was surpassed only in 1899, by the 17,274-gross-ton , her gross tonnage of 18,915 was surpassed only in 1901, by the 20,904-gross-ton and her 4,000-passenger capacity was surpassed only in 1913, by the 4,234-passenger . Her five funnels (later reduced to four) was unusual for the time. She also had the largest set of paddle wheels in existence.

Brunel knew her affectionately as the "Great Babe". He died in 1859 shortly after her maiden voyage, during which she was damaged by an explosion. Finishing her life as a floating music hall and advertising hoarding (for the department store Lewis's) in Liverpool, she was broken up on Merseyside in 1889.

History

Concept

thumb|upright=1.3|[[Isambard Kingdom Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern|The famous photograph by Robert Howlett of Brunel before the ship's launching chains]]

After his success in pioneering steam travel to North America with and , Brunel turned his attention to a vessel capable of making longer voyages as far as Australia. With a planned capacity of 15,000 tons of coal, Great Eastern was envisioned as being able to sail halfway around the world without taking on coal, while also carrying so much cargo and passengers that papers described her as a "floating city" and "the Crystal Palace of the sea". Brunel saw the ship as being able to effectively monopolize trade with Asia and Australia, making regular trips between Britain and either Sri Lanka or Australia.

Brunel showed his idea to John Scott Russell, an experienced naval architect and ship builder whom he had first met at the Great Exhibition. Scott Russell examined Brunel's plan and made his own calculations as to the ship's feasibility. He calculated that it would have a displacement of 20,000 tons and would require to achieve , but believed it was possible. At Scott Russell's suggestion, they approached the directors of the Eastern Steam Navigation Company with the new design plan. The James Watt Company would design the ship's screw, Professor Piazzi Smyth would design its gyroscopic equipment, and Russell himself would build the hull and paddle wheel. Total power was estimated at . She had six masts (said to be named after the days of a week – Monday being the fore mast and Saturday the spanker mast), providing space for of sails (7 gaff and maximum 9 (usually 4) square sails), rigged similar to a topsail schooner with a main gaff sail (fore-and-aft sail) on each mast, one "jib" on the fore mast and three square sails on masts no. 2 and no. 3 (Tuesday & Wednesday); for a time mast no. 4 was also fitted with 3 yards. In later years, some of the yards were removed. According to some sources she would have carried in sails. Setting sails turned out to be unusable at the same time as the paddles and screw were under steam, because the hot exhaust from the five (later four) funnels would set them on fire. Her maximum speed was . She was involved in a series of accidents during construction, with 6 workers being killed.

Launch

thumb|Section of Great Eastern with launching cradle on slipway

Great Eastern was planned to be launched on 3 November 1857. The ship's massive size posed major logistical issues; according to one source, the ship's 19,000 tons (12,000 inert tons during the launch) made it the single heaviest object moved by humans to that point. On 3 November, a large crowd gathered to watch the ship launch, with notables present including the Comte de Paris, the Duke of Aumale, and the Siamese ambassador to Britain. With the building company already in debt, cost cutting measures were implemented; the ship was removed from Russell's shipyard, and many investors requested she be sold. As reported by the Times, one investor openly proposed that the ship be sold to the Royal Navy, noting if the navy employed Great Eastern as a ram, she would easily cleave through any warship afloat. The new company modified parts of its predecessor's design, most notably cutting the ship's coal capacity as it intended to use the ship for the American market. Fitting out concluded in August 1859 and was marked with a lavish banquet for visitors (which included engineers, stockholders, members of parliament, 5 earls, and other notables). Ultimately New York City – which had quickly dredged a berth for her alongside a lumber wharf – was decided on as the ship's first destination. Duplicate tickets were sold for some berths, families were separated and remixed in improperly assigned cabins, and five plainclothes police officers (put on by New York Police Department to deter pickpockets) were discovered and chased into a livestock pen on deck. Great Eastern remained in Annapolis for several days, where she was toured by several thousand visitors and President James Buchanan. During the presidential visit, one member of the company board discussed sending the ship to Savannah to transport Southern cotton to English mills, but this idea was never followed up on.

With the engineering success but financial failure of the 1860 trip, the ship's ownership company again attempted to turn Great Eastern profitable. During the winter of 1860, Scott Russell (who had recently won a $120,000 legal judgement against the ship company) refitted the ship and repaired damage sustained during its first year of operations; during the refit, she once broke free from her moorings and cut off the bowsprit of HMS Blenheim. She departed for New York in May 1861 (her other potential port, Baltimore, being now considered too risky because of the outbreak of the American Civil War), arriving in the port with little fanfare. Taking on a cargo of 5,000 tons of barrelled wheat and 194 passengers, she departed for Liverpool on 25 May, making an uneventful trip. Upon her return to Britain, it was announced that the ship's company had been contracted by the British War Office to transport 2,000 troops to Canada, part of a show of force to intimidate the rapidly-arming United States. After a further refit to carry troops, Great Eastern departed Britain for Quebec City carrying 2,144 soldiers, 473 passengers, and 122 horses; according to one source, this number of passengers – when coupled with Great Easterns crew of 400 – marked the most number of people aboard a single ship to that point in history.

The ship continued a cycle of uneventful cruises, cargo loadings, and brief exhibitions from late 1861 to mid-1862. By July 1862, the ship was turning its first noteworthy profits, carrying 500 passengers and 8,000 tons of foodstuffs from New York to Liverpool, bringing in $225,000 in gross and requiring a turnaround of only 11 days. However, the ship's owners struggled to sustain this profitability as they were heavily focused on upper- and middle-class passenger service. As such, the ship was not used to transport large groups of immigrants travelling to the United States, nor did her transatlantic passages take full advantage of the major downturn in the American clipper industry during the American Civil War.

1862–1884: Later career

Great Eastern Rock incident

thumb|left|Berthed at New York, 1860

On 17 August 1862, Great Eastern departed from Liverpool for New York, carrying 820 passengers and several thousand tons of cargo – given the size of her load, she was drawing of water. After outrunning a small squall, the ship approached the New York coast on the night of 27 August. Fearing that Great Eastern was resting too low in the water to pass by Sandy Hook, the ship's captain instead chose the nominally safer route through Long Island Sound. While passing by Montauk Point around 2:00 AM, the ship collided with an uncharted rock needle (later named Great Eastern Rock) that stood around below the surface. The rock punctured the outer hull of the ship, leaving a gash wide and longit was later calculated that the needle was large enough to contact the inner hull, but that the outer hull and strong transverse braces had prevented the inner hull from being breached. The collision was noticed by the crew, who guessed that the ship had struck a shifting sand shoal, and after a bilge check Great Eastern continued onto New York without incident. While in port, however, it was noticed that the ship had acquired a slight list to starboard, and so a diver was sent in to inspect the hull. After several days' inspection, the diver reported the large hole in the ship's outer hull, a major issue as no drydock in the world could fit the ship.

In January 1864, it was announced that the ship would be auctioned off. During the auction, four members of the company board of directors bid $125,000 for the ship and won it, thus acquiring personal control of the vessel. The group then allowed the ship company to go bankrupt, thus separating the ship from the now defunct shipping company and divesting many smaller stockholders. The ship was then contracted out to Cyrus West Field, an American financier, who intended to use it to lay underwater cables. To accommodate the of cable she was carrying, Great Eastern had some of her salons and rooms replaced with large tanks to hold the cable. In July the ship began laying the undersea cable near Valentia Island, gradually working her way west at a speed of . The effort went relatively smoothly for several weeks, but the cable end was lost mid-Atlantic in an accident, forcing the ship to return in 1866 with a new line. The ship's first officer, Robert Halpin, managed to locate the lost cable end and the unbroken cable made it to shore in Heart's Content, Newfoundland on 27 July 1866. In early 1869 she laid a series of undersea cables near Brest. Later that year she was outfitted to lay undersea cables in the Indian Ocean; most of the operation's expenses were covered by the British government and banks in India, which hoped to circumvent the unreliable overland cables linking Britain to India. The ship was ultimately saved, however, as a dock engineer (Frederick Appleby) was able to build a dock around her, using the ship's massive hulk as a station for driving pylons. During her 11 years moored in Milford, she accrued a large amount of biofouling on her hull. Early marine naturalist Henry Lee (best known at the time for his skepticism towards sea monsters) conducted an extensive study of her hull, calculating she had ~300 tons of marine life attached to her. She was sold at auction, at Lloyd's on 4 November 1885, by order of the Court of Chancery. Bidding commenced at £10,000, rising to £26,200 and sold to Mr Mattos, a city merchant.

Sold again, she was used as a showboat, a floating palace/concert hall and gymnasium. She later acted as an advertising hoardingsailing up and down the Mersey for Lewis's Department Store, who at this point were her owners, before being sold. The idea was to attract people to the store by using her as a floating visitor attraction. In 1886 she was sailed to Liverpool for the Liverpool Exhibition of 1886 – during the transit, she struck and badly damaged one of her tugs, the last of 10 ships she would damage or sink. On 10 May 1887, the steamship G. E. Wood collided with her in the Mersey. Sold again after the exhibition, one company considered using her to raise shallow shipwrecks, while one humorist suggested that Great Eastern be used to help dig the Panama canal by ramming her into the isthmus. She was, again, sold at auction in 1888, fetching £16,000 for her value as scrap. Many pieces of the ship were bought by private collectors, former passengers, and friends of the crew – various fixtures, lamps, furniture, paneling, and other artifacts were kept. Parts of Great Eastern were repurposed for other uses; one ferry company converted her wood paneling into a public house bar, while one mistress at a Lancashire boarding school acquired the ship's deck caboose for use as a children's playhouse.

Trapped worker legend

After Great Easterns scrapping, rumours spread that the shipbreakers had found the remains of trapped worker(s) entombed in her double hull—likely inspired by tales spread by her crew of a phantom riveter who had been sealed in the ship's hull. The legend was first widely noted on by James Dugan in 1952, who quoted a letter from a Captain David Duff, and many later sources cite Dugan's work. Other authors, notably L. T. C. Rolt in his biography of Brunel, have dismissed the claim (noting such a discovery would have been recorded in company logs and received press attention), but the legend has become widely mentioned in books and articles about nautical ghost stories. Brian Dunning wrote about the legend in 2020, noting that while it was technically impossible to prove or disprove, the incident could not have happened given the lack of evidence being found during the numerous times Great Eastern was being repaired. This legend is also mentioned in the song "Ballad Of The Great Eastern", released by Sting in 2013.

Surviving parts

thumb|left|Model of Great Eastern in the [[Museum of London Docklands]]

Football historian Stephen Kelly states that in 1928, Liverpool Football Club were looking for a flagpole for their Anfield ground, and consequently purchased her top mast. However, further investigation by local journalist Simon Weedy has shown that the mast was originally moved there by Everton F.C., prior to their departure from Anfield in 1892. It still stands there today at the Kop end. In 2011, the Channel 4 programme Time Team found geophysical survey evidence to suggest that residual iron parts from the ship's keel and lower structure still reside in the foreshore.

During 1859, when Great Eastern was off Portland conducting trials, an explosion aboard blew off one of the funnels. The funnel was salvaged and subsequently purchased by the water company supplying Weymouth and Melcombe Regis in Dorset, UK, and used as a filtering device. It was later transferred to the Bristol Maritime Museum close to Brunel's SS Great Britain then moved to the SS Great Britain Museum.

In October 2007, the recovery of a anchor in of water about from Great Eastern Rock stirred speculation that it may have belonged to Great Eastern.

In popular culture

Great Eastern is the subject of the Sting song, "Ballad of the Great Eastern" from the 2013 album The Last Ship.
The history of Great Eastern is chronicled in detail in James Dugan's non-fiction book The Great Iron Ship.
An Atlantic crossing on Great Eastern is the backdrop to Jules Verne's 1871 novel A Floating City
The 1867 ten-day maiden trip from Liverpool to New York forms the backdrop of the posthumously published eight-volume erotic novel, The Great Eastern, by the Greek writer Andreas Embirikos
Great Eastern and its creator Isambard Kingdom Brunel are central to Howard A. Rodman's 2019 novel The Great Eastern, in which Captain Ahab is pitted against Captain Nemo.
The Great Eastern was the name of a radio comedy show on CBC Radio One from 1994 to 1999, named for the steamship.
In the trade management video game Anno 1800, released in 2019 by Ubisoft, the player has the opportunity to construct Great Eastern as an addition to their naval fleet. Great Eastern has the largest cargo capacity of any ship in the game with a total of eight cargo slots.
In China Miéville's fantasy stories set in Bas-Lag, the pirate city of Armada contains a ship named The Grand Easterly, based on SS Great Eastern.
The launching of the ship, Brunel's illness & subsequent death feature as the initial setup for the 2019 novel The Great London Conspiracy by Jordan Mooney.

Gallery

File:On the deck of SS Great Eastern by Robert Howlett, 1857.jpg|On the deck, 1857

File:The Great Eastern by Robert Howlett, 1857.jpg|Great Eastern,<br/>12 November 1857

File:SS Great Eastern launch ramp.JPG|SS Great Easterns launch ramp at Millwall

File:Leviathan Great Eastern.jpg|Print referring to the difficulty of trying to launch Great Eastern. The Mariners' Museum

File:PSM V12 D562 The great eastern.jpg|Magazine illustration ca. 1877

File:James Pullen's model of SS Great Eastern at Langdon Down Museum.JPG|James Henry Pullen's model of SS Great Eastern

File:FlagpoleGreatEasternLFC.jpg|A topmast salvaged from Great Eastern at the Kop end of Anfield, the home stadium of Liverpool F.C.

File:Part of a funnel from the SS Great Eastern - geograph.org.uk - 1447346.jpg|Part of a funnel from SS Great Eastern. SS Great Britain Museum, Bristol

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References

External links

Great Eastern on thegreatoceanliners.com
The building of the Great Eastern. at Southern Millwall: Drunken Dock and the Land of Promise, pp. 466–480, Survey of London volumes 43 and 44, edited by Hermione Hobhouse, 1994.
Eastern and Cable Laying
Brief description of Great Eastern
First voyage of Great Eastern, in The Engineer, 16 September 1859.
Images of Great Eastern at the English Heritage Archive
Maritimequest SS Great Eastern Photo Gallery