These descriptions prompted me to recall some advice written by historian W. Other authors called the cable a “slippery eel,” “lazy brute,” “sea snake,” or “monster” (Field, 1896 McDonald, 1837 Verne, 1870). I was struck by the comparison between the cable and a sea monster. In summer 2022, I was performing research in the archives of the National Museum of American History when I read this account of the transatlantic cable. Field and the Laying of the First Atlantic Cable (New York: Wilson-Erickson Incorporated, 1937), 178. McDonald, A Saga of the Seas: The Story of Cyrus W. In the 1860s, writers compared the transatlantic cable to a sea serpent. Non-functioning but still valuable, the cable’s illusiveness made it an easy comparison to other creatures that haunted the ocean’s depths. Instead, it was a transatlantic telegraph cable, first dropped into the Atlantic in 1865 and retrieved by the Great Eastern a year later. ![]() What rested before the crew, dripping wet and covered in a white ooze, was not a biological specimen born from the seafloor’s slime. Pulling the thing aboard, they found “the sea-serpent at last.” “There the monster lay,” one contemporary recorded, “its neck firmly in their gripe, and its black head lying on the deck” (Field, 1898). ![]() Low on spirits and supplies, the crew contemplated a return to land until one windless day, the ship finally hooked its prey. As long hours turned into longer days, sailors struggled to locate and catch the fabled monster. In 1866, the ship SS Great Eastern plied the Atlantic Ocean in search of a creature within its depths.
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