The Other Side of the Night (2 page)

That attitude began shifting as Western Europe and North America moved into the 19th century. As the Industrial Revolution took hold on both continents, business became more international, compelling more and more industrialists, businessmen, and merchants to hazard the trip across the North Atlantic for commercial purposes. At the same time the social changes being wrought in the nations of Western Europe, particularly in Great Britain, transforming agrarian communities into industrial societies, created a surplus population which began emigrating from Europe to Canada and the United States, a migration which would gradually shape the character of both continents.

Suddenly there was a new industry on the North Atlantic, whole shipping lines springing up devoted to carrying passengers as well as cargo. Names that would become household words in a few decades’ time appeared in the newspapers, advertising crossings to and from Liverpool, Cobh (later Queenstown), London, Hamburg, Bremen, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Halifax—names like Cunard, White Star, Collins, Inman, Hamburg-Amerika, Norddeutscher-Lloyd, and Holland-America. People began moving across the ocean in unprecedented numbers, until hundreds, then eventually thousands, of passengers were being carried by individual ships at one time. But while the nature of business on the North Atlantic had changed, the ocean itself hadn’t, and when one of these passenger-laden ships went missing, the loss of life was no longer negligible. In fact, it could be horrific.

One of first recorded passenger ships to disappear was the square-rigged packet
Lady of the Lake,
bound from England to Quebec in 1833, when she was lost in mid-Atlantic with 215 passengers and crew aboard. It was believed that she struck an iceberg. A similar fate overtook the
Ocean Queen
, which disappeared somewhere in midocean with ninety souls aboard her in 1834. Two years later the packet
Driver
with 372 people aboard sailed from Boston and was never seen again. Another tragedy came in 1840, when the 222-ton
Rosalie,
built in 1838, vanished in the Sargasso Sea. In September 1853, the emigrant ship
Annie Jane
foundered somewhere west of Scotland, taking all 348 passengers and crew with her, leaving not a trace.

Sometimes there were tantalizing hints as to the fates of missing ships. In August 1840 the steamship
President
, ostensibly the pride of the American merchant fleet, made a somewhat unimpressive debut as she took more than sixteen days to cross from New York to Liverpool on her maiden voyage. Despite the extravagant claims of speed made by her owners, the
President
’s crossing was fully three days longer than the rival Cunard Line’s new
Acadia
, also on her maiden voyage. But the
President
soon became a popular ship and usually sailed with a full or nearly full passenger list. The only persistent criticism of her was that her coal consumption was considered by some of her officers to be excessive, and on one occasion she had to turn back to New York to avoid running out of coal in mid-Atlantic.

On March 11, 1841, the
President
left New York with 136 passengers and crew aboard, and almost immediately was caught in a fierce gale. An American packet, the
Orpheus
, saw her two days later, “rising on top of a tremendous sea, pitching and laboring very heavily.” She was never seen again. There were only a few clues to her fate, mostly scattered reports of wreckage found floating on the sea, but eventually the conclusion was inevitable—the
President
had sunk, taking everyone aboard with her.

Rigged as she was like any other steamer of the day with a full set of masts and yards, she should have been able to ride out almost any storm under sail, even if she were deprived of the power of her engines. What is most likely was that she encountered a rogue wave—at the time a little-known phenomenon–-one of those enormous walls of water that suddenly rears up before or alongside a ship, breaking over it with thousands of tons of water, sufficient to reduce even the stoutest wooden hull to flinders in moments. It was only one of many weapons the North Atlantic had at her disposal to teach respect to those who failed to show her sufficient deference.

Whatever the exact cause, the disappearance of the
President
was like a brooding spectre that hovered over the Atlantic for a long time. The disaster badly frightened those travelers who had to make a transatlantic crossing, and they switched their bookings from steamers to sailing packets in droves, although it was never explained how the fact that the
President
was a steamship had contributed to her disappearance. Yet, a year later, the number of passengers making the crossing on steamships was barely half of what it had been before the
President
was lost. There was more to come.

Not all ships that were lost simply sailed into oblivion. On September 27, 1854, the speedy
Arctic
, the finest ship in Collins’ fleet, six days out of Liverpool and about sixty miles south of Cape Race, Newfoundland, was caught in a heavy fog and rammed by the small French steamer
Vesta
. At first the damage to the
Arctic
seemed slight, but it soon became obvious that the flooding was rising faster than the ship’s pumps could cope. The
Arctic
’s captain, James Luce, steered his ship toward Newfoundland, hoping to run her into shallow water and save her.

But while she was still some twenty miles short of her goal, the rising water quenched the fires in the
Arctic
’s boilers and she lost all power. With the ship’s situation now hopeless, her captain ordered the passengers into lifeboats. In what was one of the saddest chapters of the history of the American merchant marine, the
Arctic
’s crew, abandoning all pretense of discipline, commandeered the boats—in some cases physically throwing passengers out—and rowed away, leaving those still on board to their fate. Shortly afterward the ship sank, taking with her almost 400 lives, leaving only forty-five survivors.

Tragedy would again strike the Collins Line two years later. In late January 1856, Cunard’s brand-new
Persia
was ready to set out on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York. By purest chance, the then-fastest ship on the Atlantic run, the Collins Line’s
Pacific
, had left Liverpool just three days before with forty-five passengers and 141 crew aboard. Although the captain of the
Persia
was firm in his protests that there would be no “race” to New York between his ship and the
Pacific
, the public certainly anticipated such a contest. There was much belching of smoke and furious churning of paddlewheels when the
Persia
pulled away from the dock that morning, but unknown to those watching her depart, there would be no record crossing for the
Persia
on this voyage. Five days out of Liverpool, making well over eleven knots, she ran headlong into a field of ice. Her bow was damaged—sixteen feet of her hull plating had its rivets sheered off—and her starboard paddlewheel and its housing were crushed and crumpled. Her speed reduced by more than half, down by the head, nevertheless the
Persia
pressed on to New York, her iron hull having withstood an impact that would have shivered a wooden-hulled vessel.

When the
Persia
limped into New York on February 9, there was no sign of the
Pacific
— she had literally vanished without a trace. As more and more ships made port in New York and Boston and reported the extent of the icefield that the
Persia
had encountered, it became clear what had most likely happened to the
Pacific
. Running at eleven knots or better, she had driven into the ice, and the impact which the
Persia
’s iron hull had been able to absorb had overpowered the wooden keel and frames of the
Pacific
, sending her to the bottom with everyone aboard her. It would be more than a century before her wreck was found—in the same waters where the
Persia
had rammed the ice floe.

Disaster would twice overtake the Inman Line as well. In 1854, the
City of Glasgow,
a beautiful Clyde-built ship, disappeared in the North Atlantic with 480 passengers and crew aboard her. Sixteen years later, somewhere between New York and Liverpool, the
City of Boston
, with 177 passengers and crew, vanished forever. It’s believed that she was a victim of a fire onboard; certainly fire caused the loss of Hamburg-Amerika’s
Austria
in 1858, costing 471 lives.

Collision was a hazard as well, as ships would get lost in fog, storm, and mist, and blunder into each other. Almost 400 people drowned when Hamburg-Amerika’s
Cimbria
was accidentally rammed and sunk. In 1891 the Anchor Line’s
Utopia
sank after colliding with a collier, and 562 aboard her were lost. Norddeutscher-Lloyd’s
Elbe
was the victim of a collision in 1895, at the cost of 332 passengers and crew; in 1898 the French Line’s
La Bourgogne
was rammed by a merchantman and quickly sank, taking 549 lives with her.

Naval ships were by no means immune from the North Atlantic’s furies either. HMS
Atalanta
had begun her career with the Royal Navy as HMS
Juno
in 1844. After service in the Pacific she became in turn a storeship, a barracks, and the headquarters of the Portsmouth Dockyard police before being converted into a training ship in 1878 and renamed. Sailing to Bermuda in January 1888,
Atalanta
arrived there on the 29th, and set sail for home on the 31st with 250 young cadets and thirty-one officers and ratings aboard. She never arrived at Portsmouth, nor was any trace of her or any clue to her fate ever found. Her disappearance was considered a national catastrophe in Britain.

What marked each of these tragedies–along with countless others—was the inability of the ship in distress to summon aid from any other ship that was out of immediate sight or sound. The problem was, in a nutshell, communications–-or rather a lack of them. The simple truth was that once a ship sailed out of sight of land, it was as remote and inaccessible to the rest of the world as if it were on the far side of the moon. Yet, ships die hard, and save for those rare occurrences when the sea would literally rear up and smash apart some hapless vessel, hammering its remains to the bottom, there was almost always time for a ship struggling to survive to summon assistance, to signal her distress—but only if there was another ship near enough to see or hear. But unless some means was devised that allowed a ship at sea to signal “over the horizon” to other ships or even the shore, the fate of any vessel finding itself alone and in distress was inevitable.

The solution would be provided at the beginning of the 20th century by a young Italian engineer, Guglielmo Marconi. Born in Bologna, Italy, on April 25, 1874, he was the second son of Giuseppe Marconi, an Italian country gentleman, and Annie Jameson, the daughter of a member of the Irish gentry who had been born and raised in Daphne Castle in County Wexford, Ireland. Demonstrating a powerful intellect even as a youth, Marconi was privately educated at schools in Bologna, Florence, and Leghorn, where he showed a keen interest in physical sciences-–particularly electricity—in early adolescence. Constructing his own laboratory at his father’s country estate at Pontecchio, he began experimenting in 1895, building on the work of Hertz, Preece, Lodge, Maxwell, Righi, and other scientists who had specialized in electrical studies.

Working carefully and methodically, that same year he was able to construct a device that produced controlled, modulated electric sparks which were translated into electrical signals that could be picked up by a receiving device over a distance of one and a half miles without the use of wires. The system was practical, reliable, and in one fell swoop, Marconi became the inventor of “wireless” telegraphy. The potential applications for such a system were immediately obvious to Marconi, and he attempted to interest the Italian government in his invention, only to be rebuffed. So he did exactly what any other young inventor who had created some new technological marvel did during the 1890s–-he took it to London.

Communications was one of the Victorians’ great fascinations. Postal deliveries six times a day in the cities, telegraph lines running to every town and most villages, great underwater cables cris-crossing the oceans–-these were among the hallmarks of the high tide of the British Empire. With colonies, protectorates, territories, mandates, embassies, and consulates girdling the globe, not to mention an equally vast collection of business enterprises, the Victorians’ obsession with communications was an understandable consequence of the need to manage the far-flung marches of the Empire. When young Marconi arrived in London in 1896, he immediately took his apparatus to the Engineer-in-Chief of the Post Office, Mr. (later Sir) William Preece. Preece, who was the antithesis of the stereotypical myopic civil servant appointed only on the basis of whom rather than what he knew, immediately saw the value as well as the potential of wireless, and set the process in motion by which later that year Marconi was granted the world’s first patent for a system of wireless telegraphy.

A series of successful demonstrations followed in London, on Salisbury Plain, and across the Bristol Channel, all of which received considerable attention in the British press. Marconi saw to this, for in addition to being an engineering genius he had a shrewd business mind, and understood that good press coverage all but guaranteed the success of his next venture. That came in July 1897 when he formed The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company, which three years later was renamed Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company Limited. So successful was he in promoting his invention, and so successful was his wireless system in operation, that within a few years “Marconi” became synonymous with “wireless” and the two were often used interchangeably.