Seven Wonders of the Industrial World. Deborah Cadbury
summer dissolved as endless difficulties connected with the launch arose. After much negotiation, a new launch date was agreed with Martin’s Bank for October 1857. If the ship was not in the Thames by this date, the creditors would claim the yard and ‘we will be in the hands of the Philistines,’ declared company secretary John Yates. The fifth of October arrived and Brunel, not satisfied that everything was ready for the launch, had no alternative but to defer the date once again. The mortgagees seized the yard and refused access to all working on the ship. The situation had become impossible. Brunel was now put under immense pressure to agree to launch on the next ‘spring tide’ of 3 November and the company was charged large fees for the delay.
As the Great Ship stood helplessly inert, waiting at the top of two launch-ways, her brooding shape invited much comment. Many thought she was unlaunchable and would rust where she was. Other wise ‘old salts’ predicted that if she ever did finally find the sea, the first wave would break her long back in half. Brunel never doubted; but no matter how carefully he planned the coming operation, there were still many unknowns and little time to test the equipment. In the small hours of the cold autumn nights it seemed he was attempting the impossible. He was proposing to move an unwieldy metal mountain more than four storeys high down a precarious slope towards a high tide with untried equipment.
The plan for launching the ship sounded simple. Hydraulic rams would gently persuade her down the launch-ways. Tugs in the river, under the command of Captain Harrison, could also ease her towards the river, and there were restraining chains to hold her back should she move too fast. Two wooden cradles, 120 feet wide, were supporting the ship and they rested on launch-ways of the same width. Iron rails were fixed to the launch-ways and iron bars 1 inch thick were attached to the base of the cradles and both surfaces were greased to enable the vessel to slide easily down the launch-way gradient.
As the spring tide of 3 November approached, work on the ship became more frenzied. At night, 1,500 men working by gaslight carried on with last minute instructions from Brunel. Brunel himself never left the yard, sleeping for a few hours when exhausted on a makeshift bed in a small wooden office. He issued special instructions to everyone involved with the launch, saying:
The success of the operation will depend entirely upon the perfect regularity and absence of all haste or confusion in each stage of the proceedings and in every department, and to attain this nothing is more essential than perfect silence. I would earnestly request, therefore, that the most positive orders be given to the men not to speak a word, and that every endeavour should be made to prevent a sound being heard, except the simple orders quietly and deliberately given by those few who will direct.
Unfortunately for Brunel, perfect silence was not a high priority with the board of the Eastern Steam Navigation Company. For months now, the company had borne the disastrous haemorrhage of enormous amounts of money into the Great Ship. The launching presented them with a small chance to recoup some of those losses. Unknown to Brunel, they had sold over 3,000 tickets to view the launch from Napier shipyard. Newspapers, too, had played their part, informing the public that an event worthy of comparison with the Colosseum was about to take place at Millwall. ‘Men and women of all classes were joined together in one amicable pilgrimage to the East,’ reported The Times. ‘For on that day at some hour unknown, the Leviathan was to be launched at Millwall … For two years, London – and we may add the people of England – had been kept in expectation of the advent of this gigantic experiment, and their excitement and determination to be present at any cost are not to be wondered at when we consider what a splendid chance presented itself of a fearful catastrophe.’
The launch place of the Leviathan presented a chaotic picture to Charles Dickens. ‘I am in an empire of mud … I am surrounded by muddy navigators, muddy engineers, muddy policemen, muddy clerks of works, muddy, reckless ladies, muddy directors, muddy secretaries and I become muddy myself.’ He noted that ‘a general spirit of reckless daring’ seemed to animate the ‘one hundred thousand souls’ crammed in and around the yard, upon the river and the opposite bank. ‘They delight in insecure platforms, they crowd on small, frail housetops, they come up in little cockleboats, almost under the bows of the Great Ship … many in that dense floating mass on the river and the opposite shore would not be sorry to experience the excitement of a great disaster.’
In the dull light of the November morning the scene that greeted Brunel as he emerged from his makeshift quarters was one of confusion and noise, with uncontrollable crowds swarming over his carefully placed launch equipment. All of fashionable London, displaying intense curiosity, expecting to be amused, charmed, and hopefully thrilled, was taking the air in Napier shipyard. Then, almost farcically, in the midst of preparations, a string of unexpected distinguished visitors turned up in all their finery, first the Comte de Paris and then, complete with a retinue resplendent in gold cloth, the ambassador of Siam. A half-hearted attempt at a launching ceremony saw the daughter of Mr Hope, the chairman of the board, offering the token bottle of champagne to the ship. Brunel refused to associate himself with it. She got the name wrong, christening the ship ‘Leviathan’, which nobody liked since all of London had already decided on the Great Eastern.
The whole colourful funfair scene was terribly at odds with the cold, clinically precise needs of the launching operation. Brunel felt betrayed, as he later told a friend: ‘I learnt to my horror that all the world was invited to “The Launch”, and that I was committed to it coûte que coûte. It was not right, it was cruel; and nothing but a sense of the necessity of calming all feelings that could disturb my mind enabled me to bear it.’
Brunel had no alternative but to make the attempt in spite of the difficulties. He stood high up on a wooden structure, against the hull, his slight figure wearing a worn air, stovepipe hat at an angle, habitual cigar in his mouth. He held a white flag in his hand, poised like a conductor waiting to begin the vast unknown music.
As his flag came down, the wedges were removed, the checking drum cables eased, and the winches on the barges mid-river took the strain. For what seemed an eternity, nothing happened. The crowd, which had been quiet, grew restive. Brunel decided to apply the power of the hydraulic presses. Suddenly, with thunderous reverberation, the bow cradle moved three feet before the team applied the brake lever on the forward checking drum. Immediately, accompanied by a rumbling noise, the stern of the great hull moved four feet. An excited cry went up from the crowd: ‘She moves! She moves!’ In an instant the massive cables of the aft checking drum were pulled tight, causing the winch handle to spin. As the winch handle ‘flew round like lightning’, it sliced into flesh and bone, and tossed the men who were working the drum into the air like flotsam. The price the team paid for not being entirely awake to the quickly changing situation was four men mutilated. Another man, the elderly John Donovan, sustained such fearful injuries he was considered a hopeless case and was taken to a nearby hospital where he soon died.
Later that afternoon, Brunel tried to move the hull once more but a string of minor accidents and the growing dark persuaded him to finish for the day. In the words of Brunel’s 17-year-old son Henry, ‘the whole yard was thrown into confusion by a struggling mob, and there was nothing to be done but to see that the ship was properly secured and wait till the following morning’.
The spring tide had come and gone, the next one was not for another month; another month of extortionate fees while the ship lay on the slipway. Brunel was determined to get the ship completely on to the launch-ways as soon as possible. He was very concerned that while the ship was half on the building slip (whose foundation was completely firm) and half on the launch-ways (which had more give) the bottom of the hull could be forced into a different shape. His urgent task was to get the ship well down the launch-ways to the water’s edge in case the hull started to sink into the Thames mud under its immense weight. The fiasco of 3 November at least provided information on how to manage the launch more effectively. Some alterations were made to improve the equipment and another attempt at the launch was made on the nineteenth. This was a huge disappointment with the hull moving just 1 inch. Clearly, more would have to be done.
The winches on the barges mid-river had been ineffective and all four were now mounted in the yard, their cables drawn under the hull and across to the barges; but even chains of great strength and size broke when any strain was put on them.