“Deserved A Better Fate”: The Misadventures of the “Great Eastern"

Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern, by Robert Howlett

It would not be overly hyperbolic to describe Isambard Kingdom Brunel as the man who built the Victorian Era.  Brunel was not merely a brilliant engineer, he was a visionary.  His building projects such as massive dockyards, steamships, bridges, tunnels, and the Great Western Railway, were all tangible symbols of his age's optimism, drive, and fervent belief of humanity's limitless potential.

His magnum opus was the “Great Eastern,” one of the most remarkable engineering feats of the 19th century.  Sadly, his greatest achievement proved to be his biggest disaster.  "Great Eastern" is now often alluded to as a “cursed” ship.  While her history was certainly one of the most ill-starred in maritime history, this can largely be attributed to a combination of simple mismanagement, not the occult.  Brunel's creation was (if you will pardon the cliche) ahead of its time.

"Great Eastern" was designed to be not just a ship, but a thing of wonder, a floating palace that would travel the world in grand style.  It could hold up to 4,000 passengers.  The hull was 692 feet long.  Brunel designed a remarkable series of bulkheads that formed 16 watertight compartments, which he believed would make the ship virtually unsinkable.  The monster ship was held together by over three million inch-thick rivets--all of which were driven in by hand.  The ship weighed 22,500 tons, and looked it.  Brunel's "great babe," as he affectionately dubbed it, was six times bigger than any ship that had ever been seen before.  Its vast storage capability meant it was capable of sailing around the world without ever needing to stop to refuel.  (The vessel was originally christened "Leviathan," which would have been almost too appropriate.)

When the "Great Eastern" was finally completed, just launching it into the Thames was itself a herculean effort.  Ordinary chains and barges snapped and sank under the effort.  It took days just to move the ship a few inches.  Finally, on January 31, 1858, "Great Eastern" was afloat.  The effort of moving it the 330 feet down to the water had taken three months and cost an estimated £1,000 a foot.  

The total expenses that went into building the "Great Eastern" were over a million pounds.  The cost sent the company behind the ship into bankruptcy.  Undaunted, Brunel managed to raise more money under a new board of directors.

It was this new ownership that helped doom "Great Eastern."  Brunel had designed the ship for long ocean journeys to India and Australia.  Unfortunately, the new management decided they wanted a quicker return on their investment.  They abandoned these plans in favor of making shorter runs across the North Atlantic.  The day before the ship first set sail, Brunel himself came to give his masterpiece one last inspection.  It proved to be the last act of his illustrious career.  Just after posing for photographs in front of the ship, the 53-year-old engineer suddenly collapsed.  He had suffered a massive stroke which led to his death one week later.

Brunel breathed his last just as word came of the first great disaster to hit the "Great Eastern."  As the ship was making a trial run, through some unaccountable negligence, a steam valve had been left shut, causing an explosion.  Six men died in the accident, and the ship's luxurious grand salon was destroyed.  The planned maiden voyage to America had to be canceled.

While they waited for the ship to be repaired, its owners brought the "Great Eastern" to Holyhead, Wales, where they opened it to paying sightseers.  When the repairs were nearly finished, a massive gale wrenched the ship from its moorings and flung it out to sea.  Although Brunel's bulkheads kept the "Great Eastern" from sinking, by the time it was recovered, the newly-finished salon had been re-demolished.  Weeks later, the ship's captain, the coxswain, and the young son of the chief purser were drowned in a storm.

When news of this latest calamity reached London, the directors of the ship's managing company threw up their hands and resigned.  Word was spreading that Brunel's magnificent vessel was a massive iron-hulled hoodoo.

"Great Eastern's" maiden voyage had been scheduled for June 9, 1860, but various difficulties forced a week's delay.  Three hundred people had bought tickets for the 12-day journey, but most got tired of waiting and booked passage on a Cunard liner instead.  By the time "Great Eastern" finally set sail for New York on June 16, there were only 35 passengers.  They must have felt very small and lonely in the enormous surroundings.  Adding to the increasing aura of failure and unease was the fact that this would be the very first time the ship's new captain had ever crossed the Atlantic.

As a money-saving measure, the cheapest coal had been used to power the ship.  This proved to be yet another mistake.  It damaged the funnel casings, which made the dining room so hot as to be unusable.  Aside from that, the voyage was uneventful (a word one seldom gets to use when discussing the "Great Eastern,") and the ship arrived in New York to something of a hero's welcome.  So great was the interest in the amazing vessel that the owners charged the curious $1 a head to tour the ship.  (This high price so offended Gothamites that they chose to increase the return on their money by vandalizing the ship for souvenirs.)

While awaiting the return to England, a short two-day pleasure trip was planned.  The excursion attracted two thousand passengers, all of whom would very soon regret their decision.  It was only after they set sail that the paying guests learned there were only 300 beds available.  A burst pipe flooded the food supply, leaving nothing to eat but dried chicken, salt beef and biscuits that could have passed for the iron rivets holding the ship together.  And soon, even that wretched fare was gone.  When the passengers went on deck, the five funnels rained soot on them.  And there was no water available for them to clean up.  The first night out, a navigation error left the ship 100 miles off-course.  By the time the nightmare cruise finally ended, there were two thousand more people firmly convinced that the "Great Eastern" was a floating curse.  

New York had had enough of the ship.  When the "Great Eastern" left for Milford Haven with 90 passengers, it virtually slunk out in disgrace.  During the voyage, a screw shaft broke.  As the "Great Eastern" approached the harbor, it fouled the hawser of a small nearby boat, drowning two of its passengers.  As a sort of encore, it then rammed into a frigate.

After all this, the captain, not surprisingly, never wished to set eyes on the "Great Eastern" again.  The third captain had what were probably prudent second thoughts and quit before he had even set foot on the ship.  

The next voyage of the "Great Eastern" carried only 100 passengers.  Hundreds of would-be emigrants were willing to travel on it in steerage, but the board of directors, with remarkable short-sightedness, refused to invest the money to add third-class accommodation to the ship.  They wanted the "Great Eastern" to be solely a luxury cruise ship for rich passengers, ignoring the fact that the enormous vessel would have been uniquely well-suited for transporting large amounts of emigrants.  Instead, they dismissed what would surely have been an immensely lucrative enterprise in favor of trying to lure in the wealthy--most of whom had more alluring travel options than the slow, notoriously unlucky "Great Eastern."  The ship was too cold to cross the ocean during the winter, which only decreased its profitability.  Adding to the its problems was that there were no docks or harbors anywhere in the world fully capable of handling such an overwhelming vessel.

In September 1861 the "Great Eastern" was hit by a hurricane which caused £60,000 worth of damages.  The next year, it hit an uncharted rock that ripped its outer hull.  This latest escapade cost £70,000 to repair.

By 1864, the owners gave up on ever turning the "Great Eastern" into a luxury liner and sold it for £25,000.  It was to be used to lay cable across the ocean floors.  Typically, its first effort in this new role ended in disaster, when an accident caused the cable to slip and sink to the ocean floor.  The cable was never recovered.  However, the "Great Eastern" went on to have a successful run as a cable layer until 1874, when the debut of ships specially designed for cable made the "Great Eastern" obsolete.

The owners just did not know what to do with the ship after that.  They simply dumped it in the harbor at Milford Haven and left it to the rust and the barnacles.  By this point, the ghost of Isambard Brunel was undoubtedly weeping.

In 1886, the "Great Eastern" was sold for £20,000.  The new management towed it to Liverpool (it crashed into a tug along the way.)  It was used as a giant advertising banner.  The ship was plastered with slogans touting local stores and brands of tea. It was as if an aging, once-magnificent movie icon had been reduced to doing late-night infomercials.

The "Great Eastern" was finally sold to metal dealers in 1889.  The ship was so well-built it took 200 men two years to tear it apart.  Brunel's ambitious dream ended her days as a great heap of anonymous scrap parts. 

The final victim of the legendary "Curse of the Great Eastern" turned out to be the ship itself.  Sir Daniel Gooch, one of the engineers who sailed with the ship during its cable-laying days, wrote sadly, "Poor old ship; you deserved a better fate."

Let that be the "Great Eastern's" epitaph.

[Note:  Five people were killed while the "Great Eastern" was being built--not an overly high death rate for such a project--but the real source of the alleged "jinx" on the ship is believed to stem from another tragedy.  During the "Great Eastern's" construction, it is said that a riveter and his apprentice disappeared.  According to this legend, their fate remained a mystery until the ship was dismantled.  Inside the double hull, two skeletons were discovered.  They had accidentally been riveted inside the ship, with the noise of construction drowning out their desperate cries for help.  Popular belief has it that this dreadful incident, which in effect turned the "Great Eastern" into a floating graveyard, was responsible for the long run of bad luck that plagued the ship.

Accounts differ on whether or not this macabre tale is fact or imaginative fiction.  In either case, as I said at the beginning of this post, the true curse of the "Great Eastern" was human stupidity rather than spectral revenge.]

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

It's a family affair!

How Napoleon took Malta.

Is consciousness everything?

Tesla's key to the universe.

The mystery of the Great Sheep Panic.

A whole lot of info about the Bayeux Tapestry.

Some popular medieval swear words.

A 108 year old female soldier.

If your laboratory is haunted, consider bringing a sword to work.

An ancient cosmic massacre.

A shipwreck that was turned into dresses.

The role of a Jewish Caribbean community in the American Revolution.

A very rare King Arthur manuscript is going up for auction.  Don't assume you'll be able to buy it with the spare change in your pocket, though.

The origins of the phrase "cutting corners."

The Great Airship Semi-Hoax.

The unsolved murder of Kate Scharn.

Two dueling steam warships.

The "psychic sensitive" and the apports.

The weather forecast that changed the course of WWII.

A freaking big fence that is one of those "It could only happen in the 1970s" stories.

The link between mushrooms and fairies.

Following the trail of Johnny Appleseed.

Ancient Roman backpacks for the win!

The "repulsive graft" of undertakers.

The strange patterns of Venus.

A serial rapist is killed by his victims.  Right in the courtroom.

The shipwreck at the top of the world.

3I/Atlas might have seeded some of its weirdness into our solar system.

The Year Without a Summer.

A little blue octopus is making scientists very happy.

How water affects our minds.

That's a wrap for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll sail on an ill-fated ship.  In the meantime, here's some '70s country rock.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

 

So, who’s ready for some walking extraterrestrial stumps?  The “Spokesman Review,” October 18, 1966:

NEWPORT, Ore. (AP)-People in this coastal logging area didn't believe 16-year-old Kathy Reeves when she told them about "the three little stumps that walked across the pasture."

Not only did they move, said Kathy, but they also were of different colors--orange, light blue, white, yellow and "watermelon-colored."

That was six months ago. 

Since then, 25 persons have seen the unidentified flying objects and 15 statements were taped by newsmen. They are from two deputy sheriffs and a chemist for Georgia-Pacific.  There are about 10,000 persons in the communities of Newport, Siletz, Toledo and Camp 12.

The latest reports were Friday.

Kathy's mother didn't believe her at first, either.

"One morning about 2," said Mrs. Reeves, "I woke up and my whole bedroom was a rosy glow so bright you could read a newspaper by it."

The Reeves family then moved out of its home on Pioneer Mountain. The new owner, Delbert Mapes, said he saw the lights before the Reeves moved out, but hasn't seen any since.

The chemist, Max W. Taylor. camped on the Reeves front lawn and saw two bluish lights on the Reeves' house, but he couldn't find the source of the light.

Taylor called Thomas Wayne Price, a deputy sheriff.

"I saw a flying object myself," said Price. "I don't know what it was, but it was orange and it was bigger than any star. I know it wasn't a meteor or a satellite because it was maneuvering. There was a noise like a giant spinning top.  It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck."

Kathy said her house was not surrounded by UFOs until one incident that happened while she and another girl were walking at night. They said they saw what appeared to be a flashlight with a cover over the end.

"I thought it was somebody playing a trick, so I threw a rock at the light," said Kathy. "A lot of big ones went on all around it and we ran home."

As far as I know, it’s still anyone’s guess what the heck was going on.

The Cursed Chest of Cornwall

"Western Morning News," January 8, 1949, via Newspapers.com

In late 1948, Trevor Ley of Stanbury Manor, Morwenstow, bought an old hand-carved, cedarwood chest from a Cornwall antique shop.  The woman who owned the shop let him have the chest for a low price, explaining that since she had acquired it, anything placed on the walls kept falling to the ground.  She thought that “some sort of ghost seemed to be attached to it.”

This purchase soon led Trevor to question his life choices.  As the shop owner had warned, wherever the chest was placed, the most damnable--literally--things began happening.  Six antique shotguns that were securely fastened to the wall suddenly smashed to the floor, even though the nails and wires that had held them were still intact.  A heavy painting leaped two feet from the wall, hitting Trevor on the head.  Two other large pictures which had been “hanging safely for generations” also propelled themselves into the center of the room.  In another bedroom, a painting did something even weirder--it somehow was pushed backwards through the paneling.  An electric light bulb which had been placed on a window sill hurled against the wall on the opposite side of the room.  

And so on.  The Leys were naturally curious why their ghost--which they had nicknamed “Old George”--had attached itself to the chest, but Trevor had a healthy distrust for self-proclaimed “mediums” and declined most of their offers to contact their “spirit.”

In January 1949, Trevor brought in the local vicar, the Rev. K. Rees, to try to exorcise “George.”  When Rees examined the chest, the men were bemused to find what appeared to be bloodstains on the object.  The red stains  were on carved figures on the outside of the chest.  One was on the arm of a woman holding a corpse. The other, three feet away, was on the body of a headless man.  Rees made the cheery remark that "The chest would make an ideal hiding-place for a body.”  When asked about conducting an exorcism, Rees demurred.  "I'm not well versed in exorcising,” he explained.  “I must look it up."

Finally, the Leys brought in a spiritualist from London to rid them of their poltergeist.  These efforts were apparently successful, as “George” subsequently ceased to bother them.  However, just to be on the safe side, the Leys put the now-famous chest up for auction.  This failed to find a buyer, and the chest was withdrawn from sale.  I have been unable to learn of its subsequent history.

Despite his efforts to trace the chest’s history, Trevor never learned for sure why the chest came to be haunted, but he did uncover one wonderfully M.R. James-ish clue.  He wrote to a psychic researcher named William H, Gilroy that he had received a letter from a Cornish curate who had recognized the chest from its photos in the newspapers.  

This curate told Trevor that “many years ago there were two sisters living in the Manor House, Newlyn, (he gave their names but I cannot find his letter at the moment, but will look it up if it is of interest to you). They had in their house quite a collection of antiques and among them was this chest which they kept in their bedroom. One time, after having been away for a few days, they returned late one night and being rather tired, placed their heavy baggage on the chest rather than unpack at such a late hour. Early the next morning their attention was drawn to the chest and as they went over to it the lid, although weighted down by the heavy baggage, slowly opened and they looked inside. What they saw they would never reveal, but it was so horrible that they were both struck stone deaf; and although they lived to an old age they never got their hearing back.

“When they died the house and furniture were sold at auction and all trace of the chest was lost until it turned up in the antique shop where I purchased it.”

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to the Link Dump!

And we tip our hats to our hosts for this week!

Who the hell was Christopher Columbus?

Henry I's most "notorious" daughter.

The world's second-tallest man.

The loneliness of being a French POW in Britain.

Heads up, Egypt's prehistory is getting rewritten again.

Aboriginals and a dingo's well-tended grave.

A man's rant against floral funerals.

The woman who saved 13th century England.

A newly-discovered document dealing with victims of the Black Death.

Przybylski’s Star, weird stellar object and epic tongue-twister.

Science may be able to "erase" bad memories, but you might not want to.

Since the world has been longing for a scientific analysis of how geologists are portrayed by the film industry, here ya go.

The puzzle of Turkey's ancient underground city.

A very mysterious and very creepy disease.

Bermuda turns out to be a very strange island.

The man who was on the Royal Navy list for nearly 100 years.

A talented counterfeiter.

A canine hero of WWI.

A mysterious murder in Mutton Town.

British volunteers in WWI Italy.

Some 13th century plates and bowls.

A popular Georgian-era medicine.

Beluga whales are smarter than we thought.  I suspect that holds true for all animals.

People in the Andes are aces when it comes to digesting potatoes.

An unsolved murder in the Tenderloin.

A "solution" to the "Mary Celeste" mystery.  (Not that it's a new idea; I remember reading about this theory years ago.)

The mummified cat of Chetham's Library.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at the dangers of buying an antique chest.  In the meantime, here's a remarkable video which explains why I will never never never never never ever even think about going anywhere near Mount Everest.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

I put this missing-persons story into the “mini mysteries” file, due to the unsettling lack of information surrounding the case.  The “Miami Herald,” October 6, 1985:

You could set your clock by Irene Matheson.

Since Perrine Elementary School opened six years ago, Matheson was always the first person to arrive. She unlocked the cafeteria door at 5:45 a.m., let in the cook at 5:50 a.m. and began baking the rolls, breads, cakes and pies that feed students and faculty at five South Dade schools.

"She was never late--not once," cafeteria manager Michelle Perkins said Friday. "That's why we know something is terribly, terribly wrong."

After hearing the concern of co-workers, Metro-Dade Sgt. Carl Baaske agreed and began an immediate search when Matheson, 69, did not show up for work Tuesday morning.

Police usually will not take missing persons reports until the person missing has been gone for 48 hours. This seemed different, Baaske said. 

"It's as though she dropped off the earth," Baaske said Thursday night. "With two million people in Dade County, someone should have seen her or her car by now."

Police initiated a statewide hospital search for Matheson and her 1977 tan Honda station wagon. Officers in police helicopters looked in the many South Dade canals. They were joined by Matheson's son-in-law Tony Klopp.

Klopp, an Eastern Air Lines pilot, rented two light planes for two days so he and a friend could check out the coastline, junk yards, dumps and fields. Her daughter, Cindy Klopp, spends her days driving around looking for her mother's car or sitting by the telephone, waiting for a call.

"I pray she's had a stroke or just driving around," Klopp said. Her mother is in good health with no history of mental illness.

Matheson was last seen at 11 p.m. Monday. Klopp thinks whatever happened to her mother occurred after she left for work Tuesday. The condominium near The Falls where Matheson lives was in perfect order.

"Her coffee cup and a spoon were in the sink," Klopp said, sorting through snapshots of her mother taken at family parties. "Throw pillows were put up so the puppy wouldn't get them and the door was double-locked," she said.

Police have pieced together the hours before Matheson was reported missing from information gathered from family, friends and neighbors. Grandson Scott Klopp was the last family member to see Matheson. She drove the 12-year-old from his Redland home to the Perrine Khoury League baseball field at Franjo and Old Cutler roads.

A follow-up story appeared in the “Miami News” on December 5:

The discovery--almost by coincidence--last night of the car owned by a Kendall woman who has been missing more than two months is the first significant clue police have had in weeks, but may not be helpful if the woman does not want to be found, Metro police said.

"She's an older woman, and it could be a case that she might have gone senile for some reason and doesn't want to come home," said Metro Sgt. Ernest Pruitt, of the department's missing persons unit. "I've seen cases like that before."

Irene Matheson's 1977 tan Honda was found backed into a parking space in an apartment complex at 7941 S.W. 104th St. Police learned the car belonged to Matheson, a 69-year-old baker for the Dade County school system, while running a license plate check on the car and another nearby, Pruitt said.

The two parked cars were struck by a driver who then quickly fled the scene, he said. A resident of the complex reported the hit-and-run accident--in which no one was injured--and it was only while police were investigating the accident that they learned the slightly damaged Honda belonged to the missing woman, Pruitt said.

Pruitt said residents told police that the car had been parked in the space for about a week and had been seen parked in other spaces for about a month.

Police dusted the car for fingerprints and searched it before towing it to the station where it will be vacuumed and examined by laboratory technicians, Pruitt said.  A sticker in a panel of the car's door indicated the vehicle was serviced at a station on Oct. 1, the day she was reported missing.  The sticker also indicated how many miles the car had been driven since the time of servicing.  Since then, the car had been driven about 99 miles, Pruitt said.

Apparently the last driver of the car backed the vehicle into the parking space and against a fence in order to make it more difficult to read the license tag, Pruitt said.

Matheson was last seen on the night of Sept. 30. Her relatives believe she dressed for work at Perrine Elementary School the next morning, and left in her Honda from her home at Heatherwalk Condominium complex--a few miles from where her car was found.

The discovery last night was the first break in the case. "We worked this case continuously for the first two weeks," Pruitt said. "We searched the area around the canal, had the Water and Sewer Authority people search the canals around the house in case she may have accidentally driven into one, conducted surveillances of the area around her house, conducted aerial searches of the area using heat-sensitive equipment in case we could find a body. And we came up with nothing.”

The discovery of Matheson’s car seems to have done exactly nothing to indicate the whereabouts of Irene herself.  To date, the mystery of her disappearance remains unsolved.

The Ghost Sausage of Devon

This brief, but delightfully offbeat “ghost story” (for lack of a better term) was related by author, paranormal researcher, and photographer J.P.J. Chapman:

Many years ago my late father-in-law rented a large farm near Bampton in North Devon.  The farm buildings and the dwelling house were situated half way up a steep hill overlooking the River Exe.  During a warm summer it was quite nice but with a lingering threat of bitter winds and snow in winter.

There was a lane going from the farm to a large moor which was quite 300 feet higher than the tillage.  Now, it is well known that large open spaces, devoid of any useful vegetation and situated atop a high hill, frequently possess a bad reputation.  Of a summer evening my wife and I frequently took a walk to the moor.  It commanded a wonderful view, while the sunsets were a sight to behold.

The lane ended at a gate which led into this moor.  Quite a while before the events to be related my wife and I frequently remarked that it was an eerie spot and the sooner passed the better.  Personally, I never gave it much thought for, being a “country lad,” I knew of many such places which were not nice--and that was all that could be said.

However, things proved otherwise.  My wife and her sisters rode a lot and took turns exercising the horses.  Sometimes they went out together.  I can still see them up on the moor, putting the horses into a gallop and thoroughly enjoying the wild ride.

On one occasion one of the girls was asked by her father to go on the moor to see if some cattle had strayed.  It was in the autumn and, the sun having set, it would soon be dark.  My wife’s sister decided to ride up.  Having seen that all was well she was just about to leave the moor, through the gate which she had left open, when the horse suddenly shied.  Nothing would induce it to pass through the gate.  There was no alternative route except by a long detour, so go through they must.

After several attempts she decided to dismount and lead the horse through.  This time as they reached the gate a curious luminous shape could be seen drifting nearby.  It was like an elongated sausage, with baleful eyes.  The whole thing seemed to be pulsating, from dim to bright.  It was in a vertical position except for a sideways, wavering movement.  To say the least, the girl was frightened but made up her mind to face it.

Placing herself between what-ever-it-was and the horse she coaxed the animal through.  When the horse was half way it broke loose and galloped down the lane for about 50 yards where it stopped and waited.

There were several curious facts concerning this particular haunting.  It took place only at dusk--no other time.  No other animals, except horses--any horse--were affected.  But here again was a most remarkable fact.  It had to be a horse and a human.  If there was not this combination nothing happened.  The “Ghost Sausage” as I dubbed it, seemed anchored to one spot, its movements restricted as related.  Several times I visited the place but, while noticing there was something there, never could decide what.  The ghost seemed quite harmless.  I got the impression that it was neither good nor bad.  It was just some form of a ghost--nothing more.

There was a big disused quarry nearby; possibly some earth spirit had been released.  My sister-in-law stated it was a greenish colour, about a foot across and five feet high.

This is the end of my story.  If the present residents of the farm ever see it, I don’t know, as we have not been near the place for the last 35 years or more.

What it was, how it originated, I do not know.  I never could find out.  Your answer will be as good as mine!