When land finally came into view, the passengers, wild with excitement, began an impromptu celebration in the ruined saloon. Limping into harbour with the band playing, the Great Eastern had survived. Everyone on board was quite sure no other ship could possibly have done so. She was, indeed, unsinkable. The grateful passengers disembarked, one woman so overwhelmed that she fainted. But the bill for the damage, which took months to repair, was £60,000. The company was in debt again.
By the summer of 1862, the Great Eastern was making regular, successful and uneventful trips to New York with a new captain, Walter Paton. In August, she embarked once again with a full cargo and 1,500 passengers and, although the ship met with yet another bad storm, Captain Paton stayed on the bridge and battled through it at full power. They reached New York on a night of calm waters and silver moonlight. The ship took on the pilot off Long Island and proceeded through the narrow channel to dock. During this final length of the journey a deep rumbling sound was heard; the ship faltered and then recovered. No damage could be found. Next day at anchor, the captain sent a diver down who discovered a great gash, 85 feet long and 5 feet wide, on the flat bottom of the outer hull. The inner hull was untouched. Brunel’s double hull had saved the ship. She had collected this awful wound from an uncharted needle of rock that came within 25 feet of the surface.
Captain Paton was a long way from Milford Haven where the ship could be put on a gridiron for repairs. He did not want to chance a journey back across the Atlantic at a time of equinoctial gales with a hull so badly ruptured, but there was no facility in America where she could be repaired and no dry dock big enough to take her. Even if he could beach her massive hull somewhere in North America, the long gash was in the flat bottom of the ship and impossible to repair.
Shipbuilders in North America were intrigued by the challenge of repairing the vast ship, but no one had an answer until a civil engineer called Edward Renwick and his brother, Henry, offered their services. Neither man inspired confidence. Both had only partial sight and were inclined to grope their way around furniture. However, they were confident, in spite of their disabilities, that they could repair the ship. Their plan was to build a watertight cofferdam over the long gash, enabling work to be completed in the dry.
Their project was accepted and templates were made from the inner hull. The space between the hulls was calculated, which then gave the exact shape of the outer hull. The riveters were to conduct their job from inside the ship by making their way down a dark shaft to the gash in the hull and many needed some persuading to trust the temporary cofferdam clamped on to the big ship’s hull. One day panic grew as knocking was heard in the double hull. Rumours spread quickly and the riveters became adamant that a ghost was hammering. They downed tools and refused to work as long as the banging continued.
The captain was called. He, too, heard the ghost ‘pounding on the hull’. Work was stopped. Fear infiltrated the ship like mist. Every inch of the bilge was inspected. The hammering was coming from below the waterline, so Captain Paton inspected the outside of the hull in a small boat. There, the ‘ghost’ was discovered: a loose chain knocking the side of the ship as it rose and dipped in the swell.
The work was finished in December 1862 and Edward and Henry Renwick presented their bill for £70,000. The insurance firm refused to pay. The company had now lost £130,000 in the last two years. When the Great Eastern arrived back in England she spent months on a gridiron while Board of Trade inspectors reviewed the work of the Renwick brothers. She made three more trips across the Atlantic, lost another £20,000 and was then beached again while the board considered the situation. Despite their efforts, the board had failed to make their fortunes from the unique vessel and even while she was on her gridiron in some lonely cove, like a great sea creature thrown up on to the beach and forgotten, she was still silently absorbing funds. The company decided to sell their one asset. The Great Eastern was auctioned in January 1864 for the disappointing sum of £25,000.
Far from being finished, however, the Great Eastern was on the threshold of a completely new career. The chairman of the new company was Daniel Gooch and he had never lost faith in Brunel’s great ship. He immediately chartered the Great Eastern to the Atlantic Telegraph Company for £50,000 of cable shares. It was their intention to lay cable across the ocean from Ireland to America. There had already been an unsuccessful attempt to lay cable by a wealthy American businessman, Cyrus Field. He was quite sure that it was possible to make the cable link between the two continents as the sea floor between Newfoundland and Ireland was plateau-like and not too deep.
The Great Eastern was stripped of all her finery and prepared for cable-laying. The grand saloon and palatial first-class cabins were thrown aside to house the miles of cable and the machinery that would deliver it to the ocean. And in July 1865, with Daniel Gooch on board, she began her next venture.
Daniel Gooch knew Brunel had designed a strong and magnificent ship that had come through adversity time and again. He felt her worth would at last be realised. The success of the venture, he declared, ‘will open out a useful future for our noble ship, lift her out of the depression under which she has laboured from her birth and satisfy me that I have done wisely in never losing confidence in her’.
Despite his enthusiasm, he, too, soon ran into problems. On 2 August 1865, after successfully laying out 1,000 miles of cable across the Atlantic, it broke and disappeared to fall 2,000 fathoms into the faceless ocean, which offered no clues or help. ‘All our labour and anxiety is lost,’ despaired Daniel Gooch. ‘We are now dragging to see if we can by chance recover it, but of this I have no hope, nor have I heart to wish. I shall be glad if I can sleep and for a few hours forget I live … This one thing upon which I had set my heart more than any other work I was ever engaged on, is dead.’ The ship returned, defeated, having lost £700,000 worth of cable.
From defeat, once again, optimism blossomed and in July 1866, after reviewing the mistakes of the previous year, the ship sailed again with stronger cable and improved machinery. This time success was the reward as the ship put in to Hearts Content Bay, Newfoundland. Daniel Gooch sent a telegram back to the Old World: ‘Our shore end has just been laid and a most perfect cable …’ And when in September returning home they reached the approximate position of the previous year’s lost cable, they put the improved grappling gear to work and, by some small miracle, found and recovered it. Success now seemed assured and Daniel Gooch estimated that the company would be nearly £400,000 a year better off. For the next three years, the Great Eastern laid cable all over the world, from France to America, Bombay to the Red Sea and a fourth cable to America, as well as completing repair work on previously laid cable. In 1874, however, her cable-laying days were over with the launch of a custom built ship, the Faraday, produced especially for the sole task of cable-laying.
Now the Great Eastern presented the company with a problem. No one had ever made money from her as a passenger ship. She had been designed originally to steam halfway round the world to Australia where, with 4,000 passengers and enough fuel for the return journey, she would have presented strong competition for sailing ships and made a fortune. But the Suez Canal was now in operation and the Great Eastern was just too large to use it. Any journey she now made to Australia would not be competitive and she was always considered too large to be economic on the Atlantic run.
She spent twelve quiet years, largely forgotten, on the gridiron at Milford Haven, a gentle dilapidation settling on her like a mould. Suggestions were made for her future, perhaps as a hospital or hotel, but they came to nothing. She was auctioned in 1885 for £26,000 to a coal haulier, Edward de Mattos. He leased her for a year to a well-known Liverpool draper, Louis Cohen, who proposed to turn her into a showboat for the exhibition of manufactures.
The old ship was goaded into life, but her paddle engines were eaten up with rust and unusable. Even her screw engines were stiff and reluctant as she slowly made her way to Liverpool, to be turned into some sort of funfair decked with advertisements.