As part of the redevelopment of Neptune Court, right at the heart of the National Maritime Museum, the iconic power boat Miss Britain III has been the subject of a great deal of attention from the conservation team.
Miss Britain III (BAE0064)
Miss Britain has always been of interest to me as she was built in my home city of Southampton. In 1933 she competed in the Harmsworth Trophy and later that year became the first boat to break the 100mph barrier. Despite approaching her 90th birthday she still shines in the sunlight and draws lots of attention from visitors.
During the first phase of the redevelopment Miss Britain was removed from her old stand, allowing better access for the conservation team, whilst awaiting her new stand. This allowed the Museum’s metals conservators to gain access and work on the gearbox which had been previously difficult.
Following on from this work, my colleague Fay, and I gave her the most thorough clean which has been possible for some years. Although she is cleaned nearly every week on the outside, the inside is usually out of reach. This clean largely consisted of removing dust, which was a loose covering outside, but thick and more compacted inside the boat. This is important to remove for several reasons. Firstly it affects the appearance of the object, making it dull and less eye-catching to visitors. Secondly, the dust can cause chemical or physical damage through abrasion or retaining moisture.
On the outside, the aluminium bodywork was cleaned with soft cloths and hogs hair brushes. This involved a detailed brushing out of every rivet and join. It is vital that this is carried out carefully, as any rough action can be abrasive and cause damage to the relatively soft surface. Although painstaking, the end result was excellent to see.
Once the outside had been cleaned it was time to turn our attention to the inside of the cockpit, and this was where the fun really started! Access was a tricky issue, with only two small openings, each with a fragile leather seat underneath. This meant that we had to lean head-first into the seating area, balancing on the wings of the boat and working as quickly and carefully as possible. To ensure that we did not cause damage through this process we had to first pad the wings with acid-free tissue and plenty of bubble wrap.
As the leather of the seats is so old it is quite dried and cracked, and so can only be gently dusted with our softest of goat hair brushes. This is done in conjunction with a low-suction vacuum cleaner to remove the dust leaving the surface of the object undamaged. The large ‘clumps’ of dust along the creases of the seat needed to be removed with tweezers as they were more robust than the surrounding leather at this point, and we found a number of stray sweet wrappers in the foot well as well! It was quite slow work due to the build-up of dust, but satisfying at the same time.
On the dashboard we were surprised to see not one, but two St Christophers, the patron saint of mariners. Seeing these small details on museum objects, although in this case it is something not visible to visitors, is always a pleasure. They give objects like Miss Britain a human story, bringing to mind a young man, unsure of how safe his journey was, placing his faith in the saint to bring him back from the journey.
The St Christophers inside Miss Britain III
Miss Britain III will be moving to her new stand in Neptune Court during May.
If you have passed the Museum lately you may have noticed the arrival of a giant ship in a bottle which was formerly located in Trafalgar Square.
A campaign was launched by the Art Fund and the National Maritime Museum at the end of 2011 and successfully raised £362,500 enabling the National Maritime Museum to acquire and permanently display Yinka Shonibare, MBE’s much-loved sculpture.
In order to help explain the meaning behind the sculpture and its new home at the National Maritime Museum we met up with Yinka Shonibare and our very own Simon Stephens.
Our Curate the Commons project is moving on apace. Over the past month our participating Flickr users have been “favouriting” and tagging their chosen images. With varied backgrounds and interests everyone has approached this selection process from a different point of view. The next (and potentially trickier) stage will be to narrow down the selection of what goes on display in the Compass Lounge as a group.
Here Nerisha explains her top five picks and why she chose them, we’ve linked all the image titles back to our Flickr photostream:
The contrast of colour between the seals and ice provide something very interesting for the eye. The ice seems to go on forever in the background and gives you a real sense of the environment.
Camel in Kuwait carrying fuel for cooking
Reproduction ID: PM5322-6
Maker: Alan Villiers
Date: 1938
This photo is simply striking, unusual and makes me wonder how far are the man and his camel travelling? How much food will that amount of fuel cook?
This photograph is interesting as it offers a glimpse of daily life and activities. I like the composition as there is a view of the sea, the boat and at centre the sailor plays his accordion.
Sailors’ life, basking in the sun. This photograph is beautifully composed, the basking men draw your eye in and you notice the men at the centre of the photograph.
Commercial Dock Pier
Reproduction ID: P27581
Maker: Waldo McGillycuddy Eagar CBE
Date: circa 1914
Eagar Collection
I love the photographer’s perspective, a peek into what happens down at the docks. I love the way the photo is ‘framed’ by the chains.
The Museum is embarking on its second co-curated exhibition since the July 2011 opening of the new Sammy Ofer Wing and the Compass Lounge – a dedicated space for participatory displays developed by the Museum and the public together. The Compass Lounge is a place to make new connections with our collections, and to offer alternative and multiple perspectives to the Museum’s interpretation of what’s on display.
We’ve invited members of the Museum’s active Flickr community to curate a display of historical photographs from our collection, to give our audiences a chance to highlight objects and images that are significant to them. Over the next few weeks those taking part in the project will add their views and thoughts to the Museum’s Collections Blog. Here’s Duncan on his first impressions:
On 14 April 2012 the assorted members of the Curate the Collection group met for the first time at the National Maritime Museum. For me personally, it was the first time I have visited Greenwich or the National Maritime Museum. I had no real expectations for the meeting apart from a desire to see how exhibitions are constructed in a museum space using both interactive content and user opinion/feedback. Armed with my historical hat on I approached the meeting with increasing excitement. I spent the morning exploring Royal Greenwich and after being surrounded by Maritime buildings, pubs and boats (Cutty Sark) I was ready to begin debating. I was very encouraged by the diversity of personalities, ages and opinions amongst the group – all brought together by a mutual appreciation of Flickr and its communal spirit.
“Curate the Collection” Flickr group looking serious and listening intently to the project outline! By benicektoo on Flickr.
The breadth of individual interests certainly complicated our attempts to ascertain a common theme for our project. This was further complicated by the wealth of available archive material that we could have access to. Our resources include the Flickr Commons, the National Maritime Museum digitalised collection and a planned visit to the photographic archive at the Brass Foundry. As a group we were also introduced to ‘The Compass Lounge’ exhibition space and caught a tangible glimpse of our future interactive exhibition space. Marrying both digital and print photography in an interactive space may pose some interesting challenges for the group but I was again encouraged by the plethora of imaginative ideas.
I was also surprised to learn that only about 1% of the NMM’s photographic collection has been digitalised. If anything this project will hopefully be a reason to digitalise individual images that would not usually see the light of day outside of the NMM collection.
Today the National Maritime Museum is opening an exhibition to mark the centenary of the sinking of the passenger liner Titanic in 1912.
The Titanic has become the most famous maritime disaster in history, largely through the compelling personal stories told by survivors of the tragedy, in which over 1500 people lost their lives.
This exhibition will focus on some of these stories as told to Walter Lord who featured them in the book, A Night to Remember. The book was later made into a film by producer William MacQuitty. The exhibition will display for the first time a selection of items from the Lord-MacQuitty Titaniccollection which was bequeathed to the National Maritime Museum.
Love Flickr? We’re looking for active Flickr members to take part in an exciting co-curation project to choose photos from the Museum’s collection that you’d like to see on display. We’re keen to understand what interests and motivates you as Flickr members, and how it can inform the way we interpret our photographic collections. You’ll get a behind the scenes look at the Museum and find out how displays are put together, from selecting a theme to writing gallery text and more. The photos selected will be uploaded onto Flickr Commons and will also be exhibited in the Compass Lounge; the Museum’s new interactive gallery space in the Sammy Ofer Wing. The display will run for a period of six months until February 2013.
The workshops are part of a PhD research project that is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the National Maritime Museum. The workshops will take place on 14 April and 12 – 13 May from 10am – 4pm at the Museum in Greenwich, London. If you would like to be involved please email Bronwen Colquhoun at b.r.colquhoun@newcastle.ac.uk to express an interest in taking part, as places are limited. We will get back to you with more definite dates and times once they have been confirmed.
Please note that participants must be able attend all of the stated sessions and there are no fees or expenses available, but lunch will be provided free of charge.
Whilst undertaking my internship in the Metals Conservation studio at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, part of my duties involve regular visits to the stores. On a routine inspection of one of the sections, the discovery of these interesting objects quickly caught my attention. A pair of weighted brass and leather diving boots, with brass buckles and copper rivets is not something that one comes across every day.
Manufactured by famous London diving company Siebe Gorman in the mid-19th century, these boots would have been used for underwater diving on a soft and loose bottomed sea bed such as sand or silt.
The boots were showing signs of active corrosion products of a bright green soft waxy deposit predominantly around the areas where the copper rivets attach to the leather. This is caused by the reaction between the free fatty acids found in the leather with the copper, which forms a waxy metal salt, most commonly known in conservation as a metal soap. The brass was also covered in a green corrosion product, although this was a harder product, more firmly attached to the metal. The leather was dirty, very waxy and rigid and brittle in areas and due to its weight, the leather had collapsed and ‘set’ itself into a slumped form.
Various methods of treatment were decided on to remove the corrosion products, clean, reshape and support the slumped leather suitable for re-storage. Delicate mechanical removal of the waxy deposits was undertaken, taking care not to damage the brown coloured copper oxide layer beneath. Whilst working under a 20 x microscope mechanical removal using a scalpel was used to remove the harder corrosion products from the brass components. A temporary custom built ‘tent’ was used to house the boots for humidification to soften the leather to enable re-shaping and support.
Conservation work on the diving boots is still underway. I am continuing to stabilise the corrosion and will shortly start constructing inner supports for the leather.
Siebe Gorman Diving Boots before conservation treatment
There have been a number of major changes at the National Maritime Museum in the last few months – some physical, with new buildings and infrastructure as part of the Sammy Ofer Wing and new galleries, and some virtual, with new websites and gallery interactives.
The changes to the Collections website are significant. We launched this as part of the new wing in July and have been running it as a live beta. It has a vastly improved visual interface, driven by a desire to make it easier to experience some of the amazing works of art, objects and records we have.
We’ve improved the search behind the scenes so that we can hopefully get you to the right object or record you are looking for quickly. We also hope it directs you to related content and lets you see how the object is part of other exhibitions, personal collections, themes or related publications.
We now have more than 250,000 records available and will continue to release more. This means making content available where we don’t have full records. All of the research showed that doing this was the priority, even if we had some gaps in our knowledge. Help improve our records This is where we hope you can come in. If you have information that you feel is important or key to a record then we would be very glad to hear from you. Each record now has a ‘Share your knowledge‘ feature, where you can contact us and help improve the information we have. We have already had a significant number of records updated, and these records now feature a credit to the person who has helped us. Other important features are the ability to save searches, create your own collections, download images and add tags. We hope that the ability to share and add collections to your own websites and social networks will also prove useful. Opening up our data
One of the primary reasons for changing the collection website was to enable the data to be used in more flexible ways, both by the Museum and by software/application developers. Providing our content with an API (Application Programming Interface) means that other people can use our data and find new contexts for our content – whether that is another museum, university, public body or just someone with a good idea and some understanding of developing web services. We’re using it to help do new things in the Museum’s galleries and to bring you more of our vast collection.
The new site is helping us discover parts of the collection that were perhaps a little hidden before.
We have switched over to the the new site permanently now and hope it works for you too. We are making lots of changes as we go and we’re always looking for feedback, so do let us know your thoughts.
HMS Endymion rescuing a French two-decker, 1803-05 (BHC0532)
This painting went on public display at the Museum in July 2011, for the first time in many years. What follows is a revision of the note posted here at that time, including updated details on the artist and his family kindly supplied by his great-great-granddaughter Sylvia Steer. I am grateful to her for making contact on the matter in September 2011 and also to Anthony Colls and to Jennifer Dunne.
The painter is the so-far little-documented Ebenezer Colls and the picture itself has until recently been something of a mystery. We have long known it relates to another version of the same incident by J. C. Schetky, though who was copying whom, and when, has been uncertain. Moreover, about twenty years ago and quite by chance, I came across another version at Grimsby by Nicholas Pocock, which must have been painted much earlier since he died in 1821. The uncertainties about how all three related have now proved fairly easy to resolve though not quite as tidily as first seemed the case.
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In 1871 the well-known naval and marine artist, John Christian Schetky (1778 – 1874) exhibited an almost identical picture of this subject at the Royal Academy under the title ‘A gallant rescue; naval incident of the French war’ with a brief description of it. It roused considerable interest for reasons explained below, and was immediately purchased for 100 guineas by Admiral Sir James Hope, who presented it to the United Service Club as soon as it came off the Academy walls. In 1891 it was re-shown in the great Royal Naval Exhibition at Chelsea (no. 620), with a longer catalogue text. This had been put together by Hope in discussion with Schetky for the picture’s presentation to the Club, and in 1893 was also quoted in full in Sir John Knox Laughton‘s original ‘Dictionary of National Biography’ on Endymion’s captain:
‘Towards the close of the long French war, Captain the Hon. Sir Charles Paget, while cruising in the Endymion frigate on the coast of Spain, descried a French ship of the line in imminent danger, embayed among rocks upon a lee shore, bowsprit and foremast gone, and riding by a stream cable, her only remaining one. Though it was blowing a gale, Sir Charles bore down to the assistance of his enemy, dropped his sheet anchor on the Frenchman’s bow, buoyed the cable, and veered it athwart his hawse. This the disabled ship succeeded in getting in, and thus seven hundred lives were rescued from destruction. After performing this chivalrous action, the Endymion, being herself in great peril, hauled to the wind, let go her bower anchor, club-hauled and stood off shore on the other tack.’
The 1871 RA catalogue description adds that Endymion’s crew gave ‘three British cheers’ as they left the scene and that the ship dropped her starboard bower anchor to club-haul, a risky emergency manoeuvre in which the leeward anchor, with a spring (hawser) led astern, is dropped as the ship comes up into the wind: the vessel is then allowed to ‘reverse’ briefly onto the spring, pulling her stern quickly round to make sail on the opposite tack. The cable and spring have to be cut away and the anchor is usually lost, unless buoyed for later recovery:
‘Clubhauling was only resorted to as a measure of desperation in very bad weather, when embayed on a lee shore without room to wear [i.e., 'gybe' with the wind astern], and where there was no prospect that the vessel could tack successfully because of the sea breaking on the weather bow’ (John Harland, ‘Seamanship in the age of sail’ [1984], p. 195)
The exhibition of Schetky’s picture in 1871 caused some public debate. For while Paget (1778-1839) commanded the Endymion from April 1803 to April 1805 he did not do so towards the end of the French wars (1793-1815) and nothing of this nature is recorded in his log, which was quickly checked at the time. If the incident happened, he may have omitted it for good reason in terms of the risk he took in hazarding his ship and the lives of his own men, albeit the seamanship involved is a testament to his confidence in them. He could not, however, have prevented it from entering naval lore by word of mouth. Laughton – one of the leading naval historians of his time – nevertheless dismissed it as ‘improbable’ in his 1893 DNB entry.
There things rested until 1913, when the Revd Edward Paget, Dean of Calgary, Canada, and Sir Charles’s grandson, published a ‘Memoir’ of him in which he devoted a chapter to ‘A Gallant Rescue’.* This testimony appears so far to have been overlooked. Edward Paget reports the story was well known in the family, originally from Sir Charles himself and that Schetky (according to the latter’s sisters) also heard it from him directly, since they were contemporaries and knew each other well. He was also not the first to depict it: for in 1807, Sir Charles had commissioned a previous picture of it from Nicholas Pocock (1740 – 1821). By 1913 this had descended to Edward and, though not now well-known, appeared (when this piece was first written) to be the one today in the local art collection at Grimsby.
There is, however, a snag. For while the Pagets certainly had such a picture, it appears to have been another version since, if the Grimsby records are correct, theirs was presented in 1871 by the Earl of Yarborough: he was High Steward of Grimsby but had no personal connection with the Pagets as far as can be seen. That would mean the Grimsby canvas cannot be the one inherited by Edward Paget and used to illustrate his 1913 ‘Memoir’. The only clue to an alternative source of the (B&W) illustration there is its apparent tone: that is, it looks lighter than the dark and stormy Grimsby oil, which might suggest that it was a watercolour version, for example. The original, whatever it was, in due course passed to Sir Charles’s fourth daughter Georgina who in 1841 married Captain William Henry Kennedy (d.1864) and on her death in 1901 to Edward Paget, her nephew.
It must presumably have been this one, which he knew when owned by Georgina Kennedy, that Schetky based his oil. One of Schetky’s sisters later told Edward that this was painted about 1866, though only exhibited in 1871. The ‘Memoir’ further confirms that the description, quoted above, was written by Hope and that the misleading dating of the incident to the end of the French wars was probably a slip of memory. Also that Sir Charles – who had other risky manoeuvres to his name – had not reported it officially since contrary to his specific instructions to destroy enemy shipping, let alone more general regulations. Edward also recalled his father’s report that Sir Charles’s particular worry in not doing so was how otherwise to account to the Admiralty for Endymion’s loss of the two anchors involved.
He nevertheless had Pocock – the leading marine painter of his day – depict the episode for him, in one or more versions. Laughton, by 1913, had also told Edward that he did not know of Pocock’s painting -or, presumably, the family tradition – when he wrote Sir Charles’s DNB entry some 20 years earlier. Edward himself made some enquiry to see if the French ship could be identified, though this got nowhere, and reproduced all the relevant albeit largely circumstantial evidence he had gathered on the truth of the incident. In sum, there is no reasonable doubt that it happened, though exactly when in the 1803-05 period, where on the northern Spanish coast, and which French warship was involved remain unknown.
The remaining questions are therefore, first, what was the presumed second version of the Pocock (i.e. oil or watercolour) which remained in the Paget family until at least 1913; and, second, where is it now? One would have thought that Sir Charles would have commissioned an oil – and it may indeed still be that at Grimsby, if it was disposed of before 1871. If so, his family appear to have had another and now unlocated version, possibly in watercolour, for much longer. It is that one which Edward Paget later had on his walls in Canada when he wrote the 1913 ‘Memoir’, and he may himself not have realized that there were perhaps two versions. Though not conclusive, this is the most probable explanation to fit the currently available facts.
Colls’s picture is the same general composition as both the Pocock and Schetky versions and it is safe to assume it is based on the latter, following its exhibition at the RA in 1871. It is, however, one of a same-size pair of which the other (BHC0482) shows the start of the action in which the Indefatigable and Amazon drove the French Droits de l’Homme onto the Brittany coast in 1797, in equally stormy conditions. Colls copied this from a print of a painting by W.J. Huggins and until the 1980s the present picture was itself mistakenly thought to show the end of the same episode. All of the Endymion pictures show her on the port tack as she prepares to drop her sheet anchor for the French two-decker, before bearing up into the wind, club-hauling at the cost of losing her starboard bower anchor, and clawing offshore on the starboard tack. The Schetky version remains in the former United Service Club building, London, now headquarters of the Institute of Directors. Destruction of the Droits de l’Homme, 13 January 1797 (BHC0482)
Charles Paget was fifth son of the first Earl of Uxbridge and entered the Navy in 1790. Well-connected and competent he rose rapidly and had early success as a frigate captain. In 1804, in the Endymion, he became rich from his share in the capture of four Spanish treasure ships. After other commands as a captain and rear-admiral, he was promoted vice-admiral in January 1837 and posted to command the North America and West Indies station. He died of yellow fever in 1839, at St Thomas, Jamaica.
Colls was a marine painter who exhibited pictures at the British Institution, 1852-54, from an address in Camden Town but practised for a longer period. His work is competent and attractive, and he was certainly prolific since examples regularly appear on the market. His dates were not known until about 2004 when a genealogical web posting stated that he was born in 1812 at Horstead, Norfolk, (on the outskirts of Coltishall), into a family with a local history as owners of water mills. His grandfather was John Colls, miller and farmer, who with H. P. Watts rebuilt Horstead Mill in 1789, was its part owner until 1797, and died in 1806. He had a son, Richard, who became a flour merchant for the family product in London. The latter’s eldest child, also Richard (1802-80) was a still-life painter and photographer; Ebenezer – born on 1 July 1812 – was fourth child and second son and the sixth child and youngest boy was Lebbeus (1818-97) who became a Bond Street picture dealer and gallery owner. Ebenezer was both a picture dealer and an artist. How his artistic career began is unclear but he initially went to sea as a midshipman in the East India Company, which explains where he gained knowledge of ships. He made three eastern voyages, first in the Indiaman Rose (955 tons) from May 1828 and then two more in the larger Edinburgh (1326 tons) from March 1830 and May 1832 respectively. After leaving the sea he apparently made regular summer visits to the Channel Islands to sketch, and also along the south coast and to the naval ports.
In January 1841 in the Thanet area (in or near Ramsgate) he married Harriet Beal and they had four daughters and three sons who figure in the St Pancras, London, census returns of 1851 – 81: Richard, the eldest son (1844-1920), became a bookseller. Walter (1857-1938) became a clerk and Henry (1847-83) also a bookseller and later hotel keeper in Brighton, though not a successful one since he eventually went bankrupt. Ebenezer’s eldest child, Harriet (1842-88), initially taught music and Sarah (1846- 1919) became an accountant and later ran a private school in Hampstead. The third and fourth daughters were Isabella (1849-85) and Florence (b.1865). In the 1851 census Ebenezer’s profession is given as ‘picture dealer’; in that of 1861 ‘marine painter’; in 1871 he was living on ‘ “Dividends” ‘ (with the landscape painter, Edmund Gell, a boarder in his house) and in 1881 he is again called ‘artist’. His final address from before 1871 was 79 King Henry’s Road, Regent’s Park, and he died there aged 75 on 23 September 1887 (‘Morning Post’, 28 September). His widow died at the same address on 2 December 1916, her age being given as 94, which suggests birth in 1822 though she was only baptized at St Laurence, Thanet, on 25 December 1825.
A significant correction in this revised note is that the marine painter Harry Colls (1856- c.1908), and his brother Walter Lebbeus Colls (1860-1942), engraver and photographer, both of whom had successful artistic careers, were not Ebenezer’s children but his nephews, sons of his brother Lebbeus, who had seven children in all.
(* Edward Paget’s Memoir of the Hon ‘ble Sir Charles Paget… was originally privately printed in Toronto in 1911, with his own autobiographical reminiscences appended. The 1913 London edition omitted most of these and included further information, especially on the matter of the ‘Gallant Rescue’, from further information he gathered on a visit to England in 1912.)
In August 1858, Britain and the United States of America were united by a submarine telegraph cable that spanned the Atlantic. The news of this great achievement was met in the cities of America with parades, fireworks and parties. New York was the centre of the festivities and saw military and civic processions, including a torchlight parade by the Firemen, a spectacle so brilliant it was depicted in this engraving created to celebrate the new cable uniting the Old and New Worlds.
This image depicts a very American affair, not just because the American firemen are centre stage, but also because it depicts several American men as pillars of the achievement. You can see Benjamin Franklin, pioneer of the use of electricity; Samuel Morse, whose Morse Code was used to communicate on the telegraph line; Cyrus Field, founder of the New York, Newfoundland and London Electric Telegraph Company and Captain Hudson of the US warship Niagara, one of the steamships used to lay the cable. It’s clear that these men did all have a role to play leading up to and during the 1858 laying, but the cable itself was predominately funded by Liverpool merchants and went through Ireland and Canada, strongholds of the British Empire. Consequently this image may not portray an accurate image of the relationship between America and Britain in laying the cable, but it does show who celebrated it the most and the ideals they associated with it.
This is just an example of the types of objects created to commemorate this great achievement of scientific and engineering ingenuity, and within the National Maritime Museum’s collection there are many other clues as to how people celebrated and commemorated the laying of the submarine telegraph cables.
The Museum has many sections of submarine cable from a variety of telegraph lines, including some apparently from the 1858 Atlantic laying. It is not clear, however, whether any of these were sold as souvenirs – rather, they appear to have come from personal collections of people directly related to the cable industry. But from contemporary sources we do know that sections of cable were set in gold and sold as ‘charms’ in England, advertised in newspapers like the Illustrated London News and The Times. Furthermore, in America the company, Tiffany, spotted an opportunity and bought the surplus cable from the laying company, cutting it into small sections and mounting it with brass ferules. These were engraved with the Tiffany name and sold for fifty cents each.
As well as sections of cable, Tiffany also made commemorative medals like this one, although these don’t appear to have been on general sale, but were commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce of New York to give to individuals who had had a role in the laying of the cable. It’s a good reminder of the central role of business and trade in this venture.
Unfortunately the 1858 Atlantic cable’s success was short-lived, and by mid-September it had stopped working completely, leaving many of these souvenirs redundant and rumours that the Atlantic cable had all been part of an elaborate hoax. The failure of the cable resulted in lost fortunes and a government enquiry that meant the next attempt at laying a submarine telegraph across the Atlantic wasn’t made until nearly a decade later. But with the added glamour of the largest steamship in the world, the Great Eastern as the cable-laying ship, souvenirs for the 1866 Atlantic cable exploded onto the market, including a few that remembered the 1858 cable. One jug, for example, shows both the HMS Agamemnon, one of the ships involved in the 1858 cable-laying, along with the Great Eastern, the much celebrated vessel that helped make the 1866 laying a success.
Despite the 1858 failure, the feat of laying a cable across such a vast body of water was successful in capturing the public imagination, resulting in many souvenirs, books and artworks of the 1866 Atlantic cable. Some other examples can be seen in this NMM Library blog.
