A plan was mooted to offer the ship in a lottery, which came to nothing, and the ship was finally offered for sale on 14 January 1864 at the Liverpool Exchange, the bidding opening at £50,000. No bids were offered and the ship was withdrawn from sale, the auctioneer declaring that it would be offered for sale with no reserve in three weeks time. Meanwhile, Daniel Gooch approached Thomas Brassey and John Pender to see if they would be willing to assist in the purchase of Great Eastern. The opening bid at the auction was £20,000 and John Yates who was acting for Gooch secured the ship for a bid of £25,000, despite the ship being worth £100,000 in materials alone. The three men set up a new company, the Great Eastern Steamship Company, and Great Eastern was chartered to the newly formed Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company for £50,000 of shares, and would be responsible for carrying out the necessary conversion work for the ships new role. Cable laying[edit] The conversion work for Great Easterns new role consisted in the removal of funnel no. 4 and some boilers as well as great parts of the passenger rooms and saloons to give way for open top tanks for taking up the coiled cable. Under Sir James Anderson[20] she laid 4,200 kilometres (2,600 mi) of the 1865 transatlantic telegraph cable. Under Captains Anderson and then Robert Halpin, from 1866 to 1878 the ship laid over 48,000 kilometres (30,000 mi) of submarine telegraph cable including from Brest, France to Saint Pierre and Miquelon in 1869, and from Aden to Bombay in 1869 and 1870.
Posted on: Thu, 02 Jan 2014 08:48:36 +0000
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