European Correspondence

From our Regular Correspondent. London. August 31, 1883. You will hear with interest Uiatthere 8 soine probability of once more beholding tlie f amous leviathan steamship, the Great Kustern, making regular passages to and from the rlverThames. Years haveelapsed since the huge fabric was nearer to the city of London thau the Medway. Her bulk is not likely to allow her to come very high, for thereare bends in the river this side of Gravesend which would prove rather dangerous navigation to a vessel that is more than an eighth of a mile long. It s stated that a company has been formed to purchase the vessel, and that she will be employed in the coal trade between the Firth of Forth and the Thames. As muc as twenty thousand tons of coal, it is cal culated, eau bc stowed in her vast interio in sacks. No one need doubt the Grea Eastern's carrying capachy, though th use to which she is to be put at last seem strange, and not without pathos to thos who eau reoall the dreams of her design ers and builders, and the enthusiasin an excitemeut which hercolossal form awak ened as she lay broadside to the river a the shipyard thirty years ago. It will be strange if she would prove success in this, her latcst under'taking. So hopeless did she seeui as a commercial ven ture even before she was launched that Mr. Lindsay, the shipowner, relates that when Mr. Brunei asked him, " llow will she pay ? " he answered that she would never pay as a. ship, and that the best thing to do would be to send her to Brighton, dig out a hold in the beacli and bed her there, and make a promenade of her, with a grand hotel in her 'tween-decks, wliere room could be (band for salt water baths and dancing saloons. If she would " pay " now, the triumph will come late, but it will be a tiiumph for the great old ship, for all that. It is thirty years ago since she was built, and during that time ship-building has maUe gigantic strides as respects diinensions of er aft; therefore, if we in this age cannot reflect without wonder upon the mass of material which entered into the Great Eastern's composition, what must have been the ama.ement and the enthusiasm excited by her in the public of the age to which she fairly belonged. She was furnislied with engines for her paddies and screw whose combined power was equal to eleven thousand liorses. Her interior was designed to afford accommodations for four thousand passengers. As even with a speaking trumpet at his mouth her captain was unable to make his orders heard she was fitted with semaphores for day use and colored lamps at night, and also an electric telegraph, by which the commander made his orders known. Her saloons in their original form were truly magnificent, furnislied with tnassive looking glasses, ornamented pannels, nobby decorated column?, sofas covered with Utrecht velvet portiers of rich crlmson silk to all the doorways, and so forth. She carried twenty large boats, and two small stearaers, each one hundred feet long. Under full sail she spread six thousand five hundred yards of eau vass. There were ten anchors and eiglit hundred fathoms of clialn cable, whilst her five funnels were each one hundred feet high, with ten furnaces to every paddie boiler, of which there were ten. On the seventeenth of June 1860, she started on her lirst voyage across the Atlantic, with only thirty-slx passengers aboard, Her seoond pauage to America was made in the May of the following year the di9tance being made in ten days, her greatest speed never exceeding fourtecn and a half knots. She was next employed in trausporting about two thousand troops to Quebec, and then followed anotlier trans-atlantic voyage with four hundred passengers on board. On this occasion a most melancholy account of her behavior in a storm was given by the passengere who stated that, tall as she was, she rolled her quarter boats under water, and that the angle her decks presented was upwards of forty-five degreea. She is mainly memorable as a triumph of engineering and constructive skill. At this moment she is reported to be in as good condition as she was at the time of her launch, and in her, iron finds one of the most signally successful illustrations of lts serviceableness In ship building, when of good quality and put together by the hands of a m aiter.