On the Deck of Great Eastern

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Hi Andy.
Know that this is a well known view of the Great Eastern, but every time I see this view it still impresses me. And this was in 1855!
Read the history years ago and at times like this still think about that little kid and the worker who were trapped inside the double hull and not discovered until the great ship was broken up! Always tried to understand how this could have happened.
The seamen later said that this was why the ship had such bad luck.
Still, great pictures for a great ship, thanks for sharing them with us Andy.

GRIZZ
 
Hi Andy.
Know that this is a well known view of the Great Eastern, but every time I see this view it still impresses me. And this was in 1855!
Read the history years ago and at times like this still think about that little kid and the worker who were trapped inside the double hull and not discovered until the great ship was broken up! Always tried to understand how this could have happened.
The seamen later said that this was why the ship had such bad luck.
Still, great pictures for a great ship, thanks for sharing them with us Andy.

GRIZZ


I read that book in grade school in the late 1950s. Wiki reports the skeleton story as unlikely.

Break up
It is rumoured that a human skeleton was found inside Great Eastern's double hull, a rumour that forms the topic of Sting's song "Ballad of the Great Eastern." However, the same thing has been said of RMS Titanic and the Hoover Dam (among others), and inspection hatches in the inner hull would have provided an easy escape. The ship was the subject of one programme in the BBC documentary series Seven Wonders of the Industrial World that repeated the tale about two dead bodies in the hull, including a child worker, although stated it as a rumour. An episode of Haunted History implied that the find of the skeleton was indeed factual. One of the narrators of the segment read an article published from the time when Great Eastern was being dismantled. The article stated that the workers broke into a compartment in the inner shell on the port side, and did find a skeleton.[22] Harold Wilkins in his book Strange Mysteries of Time and Space said, in chapter 9, that no skeleton was found.
 
Have to wonder how the skeleton story made it all these years ( had heard that also ) but not the part about how it was tested so dramatically- and saved it's passengers as a double hulled ship. Wow. And the skeleton was a cat?

Be happy to not have an awful moment in History, had someone learned from it. Just amazing in an appalling way, Titanic's designers kind of having the gall to use the word ' unsinkable'. ' Great Eastern ' was right there to see- talk about lessons in History.

Super thread, thanks so much! Had no idea HOW big!
 
Well that's history for you, you can never really tell if it's real or a story. Still have to laugh. Guess these answers still give me some wiggle room though....one says it's true, others say it's faulse and then there is Winki. Hate to say it but some of those answers make you wounded what references do those writers use (maybe should ask which dimension).
Isn't that what makes a good "tall tale" though? Enough trouth to make it believable, enough creepiness to make you shudder and a little bit of mystery to keep you guessing (or in that little place in the back of your mind which still asks,"could it still be true?").
I 'll tell you guys that story about that guy slipping and falling into the pouring cement of the Hoover Dam still gives me creeps.
GRIZZ
 
The remains of the ship's launching ramp have been rediscovered and preserved. That's awesome.

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Andy, that's only a small part of it ! Originally it would have reached the buildings in the far distance, and gone past the photrgrapher into the river. The buildings aren't contemporary ,but do mark one side an d end of the shipyard.
 
This single sentence, from Wiki, tells you all you really need to know about the ship's success as a passenger vessel:

Her first voyage to North America began on 17 June 1860, with 35 paying passengers, eight company "dead heads" (non-paying passengers), and 418 crew.
 
World's biggest ship drew crowds to Old Point
by
Mark St. John Erickson

Nobody knows how many people crowded the shore at Old Point Comfort on the afternoon of Aug. 3, 1860, standing tip-toe and craning their necks to get the first glimpse of one of history’s greatest engineering marvels.

But as the colossal black plumes from the five towering smokestacks of the leviathan British steamship Great Eastern billowed over the horizon, the kitchen at the Hygeia Hotel was so hard at work that — on one day alone during the vessel’s visit — it served more than 10,000 meals.

So tightly packed was the resort with extra mattresses, sleeping mats and blankets — including not just its guestrooms but also the dining room, ballroom, saloon and porches — that the commander at Fort Monroe had his men erect 25 huge campaign tents, only to see them fill so fast that throngs of sightseers slept on the grass.

As a Richmond reporter noted, “Every tent was filled, and 50 more would have been crowded.”

The only thing bigger than the vast crowd’s excitement was the mammoth 22,000-ton, 692-foot-long, six-masted iron ship, which loomed so large in height, breadth and length that — when it anchored off Old Point — the contrast with the gaggle of steamers, sailing vessels and log canoes swarming around it made observers gasp.

“The Great Eastern was big — ridiculously big. It was a generational ship much, much bigger than anything that had been built before — and bigger than anything else that would be built until the early 1900s,” says Mariners’ Museum curator Marc Nucup, describing the stupendous technological feat wrought by British engineering titan Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Brunel already was world-renowned for such engineering milestones as the Thames Tunnel, the Bristol Clifton Suspension Bridge, the Great Western Railway, Paddington Station and the pioneering transatlantic steamship Great Western when in the early 1850s he began working on a project he hoped would trump them all.

He conceived of the Great Eastern as a ship so advanced in technology and great in scale that it could take 4,000 passengers to Australia, powered the entire way by its own supply of coal.

“Ships were the biggest and most complicated things that people built up into the early 20th century,” Nucup says, “and the Great Eastern was the largest ship that anyone had ever seen.

Six times larger by volume than any other vessel of its time, the iron giant that Brunel affectionately called the “Great Babe” was the first double-hulled ship and was driven by six huge sets of sails, two 56-foot wheels and a 24-foot screw propeller.

Five giant engines generating 8,000 horsepower enabled it to reach speeds approaching 15 knots.

That groundbreaking size and complexity came at serious cost, however, leading to a series of accidents that included a failed launch in July 1858 and a deadly steam explosion on its September 1859 maiden voyage.

“It has this reputation as an ill-starred ship — and part of that comes from being so far ahead of its time,” Hampton Roads Naval Museum historian Clay Farrington says.

“Ships of this size and complexity wouldn’t become common for more than a generation — and there were a lot of things that had to be worked out.”

Chronic financial problems plagued the project, too, leading Brunel and his backers to turn their attention to the Great Eastern’s potential as a transatlantic freight and passenger steamer.

It made its maiden voyage to New York on June 17, 1860, and when it arrived 10 days later it was greeted by tens of thousands of spectators.

“The great event of the week has been the arrival of the steamship Great Eastern — the greatest mechanical and engineering wonder of the age,” the Richmond Enquirer’s New York correspondent wrote.

“The day of her entree into our bay was remarkably fine and clear … and it gave an opportunity for an immense assemblage of people to gather along the Battery, along the piers and the housetops, while innumerable small craft … swarmed over the water in every direction to witness her ascent from the Narrows.

“The scene was one of the most imposing and inspiring character, and not to be forgotten during life by those who witnessed it.”

And when the company announced it would be steaming south to visit the Chesapeake Bay in early August, the sensational stories of the vessel’s technological sophistication and scale ignited widespread interest among the residents of an increasingly well-connected region.

“This was all a scheme by the owners of the Old Bay Line. They paid the Great Eastern 1,000 tons of coal a day to make the cruise to the Chesapeake,” says Hampton Roads historian John V. Quarstein, co-author of the 2009 book “Old Point Comfort Resort: Hospitality, Health and History on Virginia's Chesapeake Bay.”

“No one had ever conceived of a ship like this before. It’s the biggest ship in the world by far. And they used that huge attraction to promote the line and all the points of call it had established across the bay.”

The Hygeia Hotel at Old Point leaped to exploit the Great Eastern’s immense drawing power, too, organizing its own excursions and preparing to feed and entertain thousands.

“This was the best place to see it, and Joseph Segar — the owner — did more promotions about its visit than any other excursion hotel on the bay,” Quarstein says.

“Everyone knows there will be nothing like it anywhere else, and Segar starts to hear from people like Caleb Willard, the owner of the famous Washington, D.C., hotel. People all over the bay wanted to see the giant ship and be a part of the spectacle.”

Excursion steamers from Richmond fueled a large part of the crowd, and so did boats from Norfolk.

Among the spectators who came for the Great Eastern’s arrival was a correspondent for the Norfolk Argus.

“The approach of the huge ocean monster was duly telegraphed by a dense cloud of smoke, which was distinctly seen from Old Point at 4 o’clock, when she was a full 30 miles away upon the ocean and far outside the Capes,” he wrote.

“A large number of vessels, steamers and sail vessels, were in sight within the Capes, presenting a scene of great interest and beauty as the huge vessel and its diminutive escorts passed up toward the Fortress. Thousands of persons crowded the shores, and never before was so exciting and pleasing a panorama seen at the location.”

Spectacle wasn’t the only reason why the residents of the Chesapeake were thrilled by the sight of the giant ship, which eased into its mooring with a cannon salute and its great band playing “Hail Columbia!”

As one reporter noted, the Great Eastern was to the ocean what the burgeoning railroad had been to land, and numerous schemes rose up nominating Hampton Roads as the best port to make that transatlantic connection happen.

Even before the mighty ship’s departure from New York, the Richmond Enquirer was touting the great Virginia harbor as the only place with the scale to match the potential of Brunel’s behemoth.

The Richmond Daily Dispatch followed up after its arrival, calculating that its massive hold could transport as many 30,000 bales of cotton, 12,000 hogshead of tobacco or 300,000 bushels of wheat, corn or flour at a time, providing in one vessel the oceanic connection needed to bypass Northern ports and ship the South’s agricultural wealth directly to Europe.

Even Northern papers began to express concern about the potential threat posed by a union between the Great Eastern and Hampton Roads, Quarstein says.

But the region would not have all the rail connections needed until Collis Huntington brought the Chesapeake & Ohio and two of the world’s biggest grain elevators to Newport News and its deep-water port some 30 years later, though those improvements might have happened sooner had it not been for the Civil War.

“One has to wonder what would have happened if the South had been able to ship its goods to Europe with such an enormous ship. The impact could have been tremendous,” Farrington says.

“This ship was so big that the papers were comparing it in size and importance to Noah’s Ark — then pointing out that it greatly surpassed the Ark in both length and tonnage.”

Erickson can be reached by phone at 757-247-4783.

Full article with pics can be found here - http://www.dailypress.com/features/history/dp-nws-great-eastern-1860-story.html

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
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