The Great Eastern

HARPER'S WEEKLY.

[OCTOBER 26, 1861

674

THE "GREAT EASTERN" IN THE
STORM.

ON page 685 we publish a couple of illustrations of the " GREAT EASTERN" IN THE STORM which disabled her, from sketches by Mr. C. F. Hayward, F.R.I., of London, England. We have already mentioned the circumstance in our news columns; but in order that our readers may the better understand the state of affairs, we condense the following account from the Liverpool papers :

The rudder-pin having been broken, the ship fell into the trough of the sea. The passengers went down to dinner, and from that moment commenced a chaos of breakages which lasted without intermission for three days. Every thing breakable was destroyed. Furniture, fittings, services of plate, glasses, piano—all were involved in one common fate.

It now became known that the rudder was unmanageable.

About six o'clock the vessel had to be stopped again, owing to two rolls of sheet lead, weighing some hundred weight each, which were in the engine-room, rolling about with every oscillation of the vessel with fearful force. These having been secured, another start was made, when a tremendous grinding was heard under the paddle-boxes, which had become twisted, and the floats were grinding against the side of the ship. The paddles were stopped, and thenceforward the scene is described as fearful in the extreme.

The ship rolled so violently that the boats were washed away. The cabin, besides undergoing the dangers arising from the crashes and collisions which were constantly going on, had shipped, probably through the port-holes, a great deal of water, and the stores were floating about in utter confusion and ruin.

Some of the chandeliers fell down with a crash. A large mirror was smashed into a thousand fragments, rails of balusters, bars, and numerous other fittings were broken into numberless pieces. Some idea of the roughness of the night's incidents may be gathered from the fact that the chain cables polished themselves bright with friction on deck. A spare riding bit gave way on the cable deck, and knocked a hole through the ship's side. Two oil tanks also on the cable deck were so much damaged by another concussion that two hundred gallons of fish oil contained in them ran into the hold, and caused during the rest of the unhappy voyage a most intolerable odor.

The luggage of the passengers in the lower after-cargo space was lying in two feet of water, and before the deliverance of the ship was effected the luggage was literally reduced to rags and pieces of timber.

Twenty-five fractures of limbs occurred from the concussions caused by the tremendous lurching of the vessel. Cuts and bruises were innumerable. One of the cooks on board was cast violently by one of the lurches against the paddle-box, by which he sustained fearful bruises on the arms, puting it out of his power to protect himself.

Another lurch drove him against one of the stanchions, by which concussion one of the poor fellow's legs was broken in three places.

The baker received injuries of a very terrible character in vital parts ; and one of the most striking incidents of the disaster was this poor, brave man crawling in his agony to extinguish some portion of the baking gear which at that moment had caught fire.

Two cows, with their cow-houses, and a swan were washed into the ladies' cabin, and added not a little to the terror of the lady passengers.

The final escape of the great ship and her safe arrival at Queenstown have already been noticed.

HARPER'S WEEKLY.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1861.
WHY THE WAR MOVES SLOWLY.

A GOOD deal of impatience is expressed by people at the slowness with which the war progresses. Our excitable citizens would like at least a battle a week, and can not understand why nearly three months have elapsed since the affair at Bull Run, and nothing whatever has been done by General McClellan to efface the stain of that day. These murmurs have found utterance in one or two of our city journals.

Many reasons—amply sufficient to account for our slowness—will at once occur to the candid reader. In April last, only six months ago, we had neither money, nor army, nor navy, nor commissariat, nor transportation, nor medical bureau, nor any thing else requisite for military operations on a great scale. Now the Government has as much money as it needs, a well-appointed army of 350,000 men, a well-armed navy of some 300 vessels, and transportation, commissariat, etc., in good condition and ample amount. To have created a first-class army and navy in six months is evidence not of slowness but of unparalleled dispatch. The great armies and navies of Europe are the fruit of years of toil.

But a still better excuse for the apparent slowness of our military and naval movements is derived from the extent of country covered by the war. It is safe to say that there never was a war before prosecuted on a line of such length. From Fortress Monroe, Virginia, to Lexington, Missouri, is over 1000 miles, and we may be said to be guarding every foot of this distance. Our pickets are almost within hail of each other along a line as long as from Havre, in France, to Gibraltar, in Spain ; or from Vienna, in Austria, to Brest. If we compare this distance with that occupied by the lines of the great armies whose campaigns are written in history, we shall see how unprecedented our present circumstances are. The whole of the great Italian war of 1859—in which some 800,000 men were engaged—was waged in an area less than that of New Jersey or of Vermont, and neither belligerent ever-occupied lines extending over 150 miles in length. The Crimean war of 1854–'5 was waged in an area about the size of Manhattan Island, and the lines guarded by sentinels seldom extended, on either side, beyond 20 miles front. Wellington, in the Spanish Peninsula, covered a front line of some thirty miles ; and Napoleon, in Italy and Germany, about the same. Even the operations of the great French army of 1812 were narrow and contracted in comparison with those of the army under General Scott.

So with the navy. In the Crimean war the combined fleets of England and France devoted their whole energies to the blockading of three isolated sea-ports, and the assault of three isolated forts. In the old European wars there never was an attempt made to perfect a blockade of a long coast line. England never attempted to close, with ships of war, every French port. She blockaded a port here and a port there, and left the others to be looked after by flying squadrons. We have a close coast-guard extending along a line 2000 to 3000 miles in length, and hermetically sealing at least twenty-five established ports of entry. The lines of our "blockade" would encircle all Europe, with the exception of Russia. When it is remembered that, at the outbreak of the rebellion, we had but one available ship of war in a loyal port, it must be confessed that this is doing pretty well.

Signs indicate that the impatient among our fellow-citizens will very soon be gratified by the occurrence of startling events. The day rapidly approaches which was long ago appointed for the commencement of active offensive operations by the Government. If, however, fresh delays should intervene, people must not institute disparaging comparisons between the movements of our armies and those of the European hosts which, in past times, have waged wars in holes and corners where the sentries could not relieve each other without jostling the enemy.

ENGLAND PAYING THE PIPER.

MANY of our people have been amused, and not a few have been angered, by the evident sympathy which the cotton question has induced the English to bestow on our rebels. John Bull, as the friend and would-be protector of a new state based on the corner-stone of human slavery, is a very ludicrous object. But events, it seems, are going to give a finer point to the picture.

It is evident that, so long as this war lasts, England and France must furnish the money to carry it on.

Our trade with these countries consists of an interchange of our agricultural produce for their manufactures. They can not dispense with our produce, for they need it to feed their people. We can do without their manufactures, most of which can be made here, and not a few dispensed with altogether. If we stop importing manufactures from Europe, France and England are compelled to pay in gold for the food which they must have from here. This is precisely what has happened. The Morrill Tariff; the closing of the Southern markets, which formerly consumed large quantities of silks, cottons, wines, etc. ; the general derangement of business caused by the war ; the tendency of every body to economize, in view of the troublous times : all these have, for the time, reduced our imports to a nominal figure, and thus forced our European customers to pay for the food which they are taking from us in gold. A few figures will make this very plain.

Up to this date last year we had imported from abroad $185,114,968 worth of foreign merchandise, being some twelve millions less than we imported during the corresponding period of 1859. Up to this date this year we have only imported about $100,000,000 worth. Of dry goods we imported, during the first nine and a half months of 1860, $86,348,114 worth ; during the first nine and a half months of 1861 we only imported $37,467,522 of the same goods. Our exports, on the other hand, have been heavier this year than ever before. During the first nine and a quarter months of 1860 we sent abroad $71, 819,519 of produce and merchandise, twenty millions more than we had shipped during the corresponding period of 1859 ; during the corresponding period of this year we shipped as nearly as possible $100,000,000 worth of produce to foreign countries. The effect of this diminution of our imports and increase in our exports is to be seen in the specie movement, which acts as the regulator of our foreign commerce. During the first nine and a half months of 1860 we exported to Europe $42,000,000 of specie, and imported about $5,000,000 ; during the corresponding period of this year we have exported about $3,500,000 of specie, and have imported $43,000,000. Thus it is evident that while we have been supplying Europe with food, France and England have been supplying us with gold to carry on the war.

Nor is there any prospect of a change in this state of things so long as the war lasts. The failure of the foreign harvests is an admitted fact on all hands. France has not had so short a crop for twenty years, and in this port alone there are at the time we write not less than thirty-five large vessels loading with American wheat for French ports. England, we are given to understand, is scarcely better off; the corn-dealers say that it will tax the whole mercantile navy of the two countries to the utmost to supply Great Britain with food enough to prevent the price rising to oppressive figures. It is as certain as any thing can be that our exports of produce to Europe will rather increase than diminish during the next nine months. On the other hand, there is no reasonable ground for believing that our imports will increase very materially so long as the war lasts. Until peace is re-established the Southern markets will

remain closed. The Northern people, as a rule, may be relied upon to practice economies until they see their way clear out of the present embroglio. And politicians of all parties are agreed that, at all events as long as the war lasts, there must be no reduction in the customs duties. For the sake of retaining our specie in the country, and drawing gold from Europe, the most ardent free-traders are willing, for the time, to waive their opposition to high duties, and to vote for a tariff which shall render the importation of foreign luxuries a comparative impossibility.

Thus England and France, which might, seven or eight months ago, have crushed this rebellion in the bud by frankly informing the rebel leaders that they would not countenance the rebellion, are caught in the trap they laid for us. They believed, in their short-sighted selfishness, that the injury and the ruin of this country would be the gain of England and France, and they let the rebels go on from blunder to blunder, and misapprehension to misapprehension, and exerted all their energy to defame and cripple the Government of the United States. They are now reaping their reward in a decline of 75 per cent. in the exports from Liverpool, in " short time" at Manchester, threatened riots at Lyons, and in the satisfaction of knowing that, as long as the war lasts, they must supply the gold for its prosecution.

THE LOUNGER.

"THE ORNAMENT OF BEAUTY IS SUSPECT."

AT least the American people ought to insist upon fair play. General Washington was in New York when the battle of Brooklyn was lost, one of our most disastrous defeats : he was driven from the city, from the island, from the Hudson River. Fort Washington fell, and he retreated across the Hackensack, and the Raritan, and the Delaware : had not Rivington's New York Gazette been forcibly suppressed by the Sons of Liberty, it would have reveled in abuse of him, and have scornfully challenged the friends of America to confess that they had been grievously and ridiculously mistaken in this Virginian surveyor, all of whose military exploits had been upon the frontier.

But the letter of his Secretary, and, until then, his friend, Joseph Reed, to General Lee, depreciating Washington ; the Conway cabal against him ; the forged letters, purporting to be his, published in London, could not shake him in his purpose, nor ruffle the pure current of his patriotism. His duty was to serve his country, not to satisfy a partial or ignorant criticism. He was not ignorant of these enmities ; he sometimes spoke of them with deep feeling; and his last official act as President was to put upon record in the State Department a solemn denial of the letters slanderously ascribed to him. There is also an unpublished letter of Washington's in which he speaks in these calm words of blows that might easily have harmed more than himself, for they might have reached his country :

" We have some among us, and I dare say Generals, who wish to make themselves popular at the expense of others, or who think the cause is not to be advanced otherwise than by fighting : the peculiar circumstances under which it is to be done, and the consequences which may follow, are objects too trivial for their attention. But as I have one great end in view, I shall, maugre all the strokes of this kind, steadily pursue the means which in my judgment lead to the accomplishment of it, not doubting but that the candid part of mankind, if they are convinced of my integrity, will make proper allowances for my inexperience and frailties. I will agree to be loaded with all the obloquy they can bestow if I commit a willful error."

Whenever in our history we shall see any other leader upon whose ability great hopes have been reposed, clouded by circumstances which he could not control and will not explain, let us not at once throw to the winds all the confidence which we have gladly given him, but patiently wait until it shall be incontestibly proved that confidence was ill-founded. Nor then will every generous soul fail to distinguish character from capacity, nor refuse to an honest man his due because he does not seem to have the qualities which it is no shame to lack.

THE LONDON "TIMES" AND GARIBALDI.

IF some ingenious fellow should tell the London Times that President Lincoln was intriguing to succeed Jeff Davis as head of the rebellion, the London Times would instantly swallow the story and discharge a full broadside of horror at the awful duplicity engendered by American institutions and the demoralizing spirit of popular government. If another ingenious fellow should date from the city of Maine, in the State of San Francisco, and inform the same paper that all the rights of civil liberty were prostrate in the dust beneath the heel of a worse than Asiatic tyranny, because some pestilent traitor had been arrested and put out of harm's way, the London Times would publish it in full, and gloat over the superior happiness enjoyed under a mild monarchy, as the Factory and Mining reports, and all the tragical detail of English poverty, so amply attest.

But a more ingenious fellow than either sent word of a mare's nest to the London Times, and the judicious and honeyed sheet straightway led off in this style : "As if despairing of native genius or enterprise, the President at Washington has actually sent to Garibaldi to accept the post of Commander-in-chief, throwing into the bargain the emancipation of the slaves. It costs an effort to take in the extravagant oddity and the humiliating character of this proposal." But the Times is perfectly capable of the effort, and away it flies into a

ludicrous programme of the possibilities and consequences of his acceptance.

There would certainly have been nothing remarkable or dishonorable in the offer of a position in our armies to one of our most illustrious naturalized citizens, and one of the most celebrated of living soldiers. It would in this have been peculiarly appropriate, that Garibaldi is famous for his unwavering opposition to the efforts of despotism to destroy the unity and liberty of his native land, and may be supposed to cherish the warmest sympathy with the effort of his adopted country to maintain her unity and liberty. It was no reflection upon the valor or ability of Washington, or Gates, or Putnam, or Greene, that the Continental Congress offered a Major-Generalcy to Lafayette. The foreign officers in our revolutionary service were noble men and faithful friends, but it so chanced that they did not win the decisive battles.

The amiable slanderer of the American people and its government, which is so horror-struck by the thought that a gallant hero may have been summoned to fight the battle of constitutional liberty in America, has not a word about the efforts of its friends the rebels and traitors to constitutional liberty to gain the support of the Indians. Why should it have ? The London Times is the exponent of that British public opinion which allowed George Third to hire Hessians to fight his battles against the sons of Englishmen. It can of course only smile approval when rebels, striving to destroy the safeguards of constitutional liberty, in order to make slavery the corner-stone of a new government raised upon its ruins, summon savages to their aid.

THE OPERA.

EVER since the introduction of the Italian opera into England, the days when an enthusiastic admirer gave Manzoli a thousand dollars for a single ticket, and a rapturous devotee of music exclaimed: " One God, one Farinelli!"-ever since those days the opera manager has been one of the powers of fashion. We have had several in this country, but none who have worked more indefatigably for the public amusement than Mr. Ullman. That he has worked to his own profit is to be sincerely hoped. Nobody was ever so churlish as to grudge Mr. Barnum the money he may have made by his Jenny Lind enterprise.

But civil war and the opera are not friends. We hear frequently, indeed, that the Parisian theatres were never so thronged as in the reign of terror. But it is Paris which supports those theatres, not the rest of France. With us it is different. The opera audience of New York, and of Boston, and of Philadelphia is recruited from the other parts of the country. This is particularly so in New York. The ebbing tide from Newport, and Saratoga, and Sharon, and all the springs and shores, has annually left thousands of strangers tarrying in New York until the cold weather. The opera in October and November has been a study of our varied nationality.

But this year the South, as a body, is in arms against us, and waging a bloody and cruel war against the common Government. The autumnal visitors are not here. But the Academy is here, and Mr. Ullman is here, and his lease is here. Of course he concluded his engagement with the authorities of the Academy with the expectation that the usual peace would prevail. In that be shared a very general error. In order, therefore, that he may help himself pay his rent and fulfill all his promises—among which is that of Ristori for September, 1862—Mr. Ullman has proposed to the Directors of the Academy that he will take a benefit, upon condition—or rather, with the hope—that every stockholder will dispose of a certain amount of tickets at one dollar, from five to ten, for every share he may hold. The chorus, orchestra, employes, and several artists, volunteer their aid; the rent, of course, will be no expense. The outlay will be small, and the income will—not to put too fine a point upon it—put Mr. Ullman upon his legs. There will be two performances. The first, upon the 17th of October, will have passed before this paper is published ; the second will be on Monday evening, the 21st October. A new comic opera, "now the rage in Paris," and an opera of Donizetti's, " Betty," never before sung in America, are the promises for Monday, with Miss Kellogg, Miss Hinkley, Signor Brignoli, Signor Mancusi, and Miss Carlotta Patti, to whom the famous Adelina is so greatly indebted, and who, but for a misfortune, might have shared her operatic laurels.

Mr. Ullman wisely speaks of "the bad moral effect" that would be produced by closing the opera in New York during the war, when it is kept open in New Orleans. The Governor of Louisiana has ordered the shops in that city to be closed every day at two o'clock, and the citizens to drill until dark ; but for all that, the stockholders of the Opera-house have subscribed thirty thousand dollars, in addition to the usual nightly subscription of seven hundred and fifty dollars. The Secretary of the stockholders seconds the manager's appeal, and calls upon the shareholders to show that, " despite the treasure promptly found to supply *** war's expensive requisites," there is enough left to support the opera.

The reasoning is good; and we sincerely hope that Mr. Ullman's benefit may be truly beneficial.

LIEUTENANT BRAINE.

THE late Mr. Secretary Toucey did his share in inaugurating the conspiracy against the Government by sending the national ships to the ends of the earth, so that when we were compelled to turn to all our resources there were, thanks to the estimable efforts of that distinguished patriot, but six available ships at the service of the country. We have had, consequently, to create a navy. The old American renown upon the seas was to vindicate itself if it could : and Commodore Stringham and Lieutenant Braine have proved that it can.

The brilliant affair of six weeks and more since at Hatteras Inlet was beginning to pale in the public (Next Page)