The Great Eastern by Howard A. Rodman
An ingenious and very fun book bringing 19th century fictional Captains Ahab and Nemo together with true life engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and American businessman Cyrus Field. Published last year, I picked up the book because it was mentioned by Keegan-Michael Key in a year-end article in the New York Times where Key lists some of what he’s been enjoying this year. Howard Rodman teaches screenwriting at USC and has a few screenplays to his credit as well as a previous novel. He is also the former President of the Writer’s Guild.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel is renowned in England. Stateside, I had never heard of him but I’m glad to know the name, now. He lived from 1806 to 1859. With his father, Marc, also an engineer, Brunel worked on completing a tunnel under the Thames, which continues to be used today as part of the London rail system. Brunel built Paddington Station. He created England’s Great Western Railway system, designed several bridges, and, most importantly for this novel, steam-ships. His first ship, the Great Western, was the longest ship in existence when it was launched, in 1838, and was the second ship to cross the Atlantic under steam power, coming in only one-day beyond a competitor, the Sirius, which had a 4 day head start. The Great Britain, launched in 1843, was the first modern ship, built of metal, powered by motor, and moving by screw rather than a paddle wheel. The Great Eastern was by far the largest ship of its time, a record it maintained into the 20th century: iron-clad, double-hulled, a steam-powered screw and two paddle-wheels, plus five masts for sailing, just in case. Originally designed to ferry passengers all the way to Australia and India, it failed as a passenger ship but eventually found noble use laying transatlantic telegraph cable, which is the appearance it makes in this book.
Sadly, Brunel barely lived long enough to see the Great Eastern completed. It was launched, initially, in 1858, as the Leviathan. But the shipping company went bankrupt so the boat was sold, repurposed, and renamed. The opening of Rodman’s book gives the chronology a year later. Brunel suffered a stroke on September 5, 1859. Two days later, the Great Eastern launched. But two days after the ship was damaged in an explosion that forced it to return to dock. Brunel died on September 15. The Great Eastern sailed successfully the following June, now on a Southampton to New York itinerary.
But for Rodman, this is not where Brunel’s story ends. Rodman imagines, get this, that Brunel was actually a victim of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, who faked Brunel’s stroke (using a paralytic drug) in order to kidnap Brunel and imprison him on Nemo’s submarine, the Neptune. Restored to health, Brunel then spends the next ten years with Nemo while Nemo attempts, and to a degree, succeeds, in enlisting Brunel’s engineering genius toward Nemo’s ends.
I haven’t read Jules Verne but apparently Nemo appears in two of his books: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Mysterious Island. Verne tells us Nemo was born an Indian Prince, named Dakkar. He was educated in England, but then returned to India with a hatred for the English based on his school experience and the English treatment of his countrymen in India. His wife and two children are killed by the British during a rebellion. Prince Dakkar, now named Nemo, Latin for “no man” takes to the sea in a submarine of his own design, intent on revenge. This is all told, captivatingly, in the first part of Rodman’s book.
After sailing under the North Pole (!), Nemo and Brunel dock at Nemo’s south sea island home. Brunel improves Nemo’s submarine and they re-christen it, Nautilus, then return to the North Atlantic.
Meanwhile, the real-life Cyrus Field, an American businessman and adventurer (he had toured South America with the painter Frederic Church) was organizing an attempt to re-lay a telegraph cable between Ireland and Newfoundland, connecting North America to Europe. He had laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858. Messages were exchanged between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan. But that link had operated for only a few days before the connection disintegrated into static. Now, in 1866, he was trying again, having purchased Brunel’s Great Eastern to haul and lay out the giant spool of cable. And in order to protect the cable-laying operation from harm (accidental or deliberate) Field hired an American ship captain, long experienced in fighting the dangers of the deep, to pilot a chaperone boat, none other than Captain Ahab, late of the Pequod. Except, not late. Because, although Ahab seemingly dies with all the crew save Ishmael at the end of Melville’s Moby Dick (pub. 1851), in Rodman’s imagination Ahab survives.
Thus, in the North Atlantic, in 1866, Brunel, Field, Nemo, and Ahab, are brought together in Rodman’s novel. Nemo is intent on cutting the cable and thwarting the communication tool that he has already seen in deadly use as an aide to Imperial domination. Brunel is caught in a battle between his two great accomplishments: the Great Eastern and the Nautilus, and caught between his pride as an Englishman and his growing sympathy for the British Empire’s victims, personified by Nemo who is his kidnapper but he also admires. Field is the capitalist seeking profit. And Ahab professes his allegiance to his employer, but also still rages in the grip of his mania for a white whale who he becomes convinced is the mysterious submarine creature interfering with the cable-laying operation. The battle is on.
The Great Eastern is a rip-roaring adventure story, told in faux 19th-century prose echoing its models, the novels of Melville and Verne. Besides the main action there are pirates, a fire at New York’s City Hall, a tsunami, even a scene in the catacombs of Paris. I kept Wikipedia open on my laptop to continually research what was true and what was Rodman’s invention. Remarkably, much of it is true, and it’s amazing how Rodman is able to turn true events to further his fictional ends.
The story is at first narrated by an anonymous author. Later, Brunel takes over the narration in first-person through the device of writing in a journal while aboard Nemo’s submarine. Then, when the story shifts to Field and Ahab, there’s a long section told by Ahab in Ahab’s manic-prophet voice, well-imitated by Rodman. Another voice, Ahab’s companion, a hauler, and “chanteyman” (singer), Langhorne from Tobago, tells part of the story as well. From time to time the omniscient author returns. There’s also a few clippings from newspaper articles, sea-chantey lyrics, and telegraph messages.
Once Nemo and Ahab are introduced and the scene is set, Rodman warns us, “When the two of them are pitched ‘gainst each other–and this they will–’tis likely that neither will survive. What we know to a certainty: at battle’s end, when smoke and mist do clear, not more than one of them shall remain alive.” (p. 50). Of course, neither will live because as fictional characters neither ever actually did live. Of Brunel, we know that to the world he died of a stroke in 1859. But if one imagines he lived past that event, one might as well imagine he survives (miraculously, fictionally) a devastating sea battle some seven years later, perhaps even to enjoy the chance to anonymously admire some of his engineering works completed after his death. Could be. Cyrus Field died in New York in 1892, age 72, having gone into the railroad and then the newspaper business and then losing his fortune in bad investments. (His brother, Stephen, was Chief Justice of California and then an Associate Justice on the US Supreme Court from 1863 to 1897).
The Great Eastern, after it’s cable-laying career, was re-fitted as a passenger boat once again, but, once again, failed to find success. Its final chapter was sailing up and down the Mersey river in Liverpool as a floating advertisement for Lewis’s Department store. After being scrapped in 1899 its main mast was bought by the Liverpool Football Club to use as a flag pole. It still stands on the stadium grounds.