Navigare 1 2014

maritime milestones
The Great Eastern:
The greatest ship of the 1800’s
At six times larger than the
previously largest ship in the
world, the Great Eastern was
one of the most astonishing
naval engineering feats ever.
Unfortunately, this technical
triumph was a financial
disaster. Nonetheless,
this large ship made the
world a smaller place.
Bente Amandussen
Editor Navigare
Sjøfartsdirektoratet
Ever since Noah built the
Ark, man has strived to
build bigger boats and
over the millennia that
mankind has sailed the
seas, ships have gradually
increased in size. This has
always followed a natural
progression, until the
launch of SS Great Eastern in 1858. This
leviathan of a ship dwarfed the previous
holder of the title “World’s largest ship”
by being fully six times bigger. Indeed, no
larger ship was built until the 20th century.
THE LARGEST: The Great Eastern was by no means a swan but what she lacked in elegance, she made up for
in sheer size. Lithograph by Charles Parsons, 1858
BREAKING BOUNDARIES
The story of the Great Eastern is as much
a tale of a man as that of a ship. She was
designed by none other than Britain’s
greatest civil engineer, Isambard Kingdom
Brunel, who was no stranger to world
records. In all his works, Brunel showed a
degree of boldness, almost amounting to
professional abandon. Every engineering
project this genius had been involved with
was the largest or the first of its kind, or
both.
Apart from designing the world’s largest
ships twice before, his many feats
include the first tunnel ever under water,
the longest bridge in the world and the
Great Western railway, which had both
the longest railway bridge and the longest
railway tunnel in the world at the time.
However, Brunel saw the railway only
as a means to an end. He envisioned it
carrying people from London in less than
three hours to the port of Bristol, then
boarding large ocean-going steamships
sailing quickly and safely across the Atlantic
to America.
STEAMING THE SEAS
In a time when sails reigned the seas,
Brunel believed that steamships could
provide a fast and reliable method of crossing
the Atlantic. Not many agreed with
him. One of his critics commented,
“Steam navigation of the Atlantic is about
as plausible as sending a man to the
moon”.
Nevertheless, Brunel designed the
Great Western, which at 2300 tons displacement
was the largest ship in the world
when launched in 1838. The wooden
hulled paddle steamer had a successful
career and held the Blue Riband with a
westward time of 16 days and an eastward
time of 13 days, 9 hours.
It was such a success that a sister ship
was commissioned. However, Brunel was
not content with making a simple copy.
The Great Britain was an iron hulled,
screw driven, ocean-going steamship, the
first of her kind and the ancestor of all
modern ships. Safety features included a
30 | Navigare 1 - 2014