166 A SAGA OF THE SEAS 
by New York humanness and polished by international con- 
tacts. It made clear to his auditor the qualities of the man 
who had proved equal to a great task. 
He said in part: “It was the worst weather I ever knew at 
that season of the year. In the dispatch which appeared in 
the New York papers you may have read, “The weather has 
been most pleasant.’ I wrote it ‘unpleasant.’ We had fogs and 
storms almost the whole way. Our success was the result of 
the highest science combined with practical experience. Ev- 
erything was perfectly organized to the minutest detail... . 
Captain Moriarty had, with Captain Anderson, taken most ex- 
act observations at the spot where the cable broke in 1865, 
and these were so exact that they could go right to the spot. 
After finding it, they marked the line of the cable by a row 
of buoys, for fogs would come down and shut out sun and 
stars, so that no man could take an observation. These buoys 
were anchored a few miles apart. ‘They were numbered, and 
each had a flagstaff on it, so that it could be seen by day, and 
a lantern by night. Thus having taken our bearings, we stood 
off three or four miles, so as to come broadside on, and then 
casting over the grapnel, drifted slowly down upon it, drag- 
ging the bottom of the ocean as we went. At first it was a little 
awkward to fish in such deep water, but our men got used to 
it, and soon could cast a grapnel almost as straight as an old 
whaler throws a harpoon. Our fishing line was of formidable 
size. It was made of rope, twisted with wires of steel, so as to 
bear a strain of thirty tons. It took about two hours for the 
grapnel to reach bottom, but we could tell when it struck. I 
often went to the bow and sat on the rope, and could feel by 
the quiver that the grapnel was dragging on the bottom two 
miles under us. But it was a very slow business. We had storms 
and calms and fogs and squalls. Still we worked on day after 
day. Once, on the 17th of August, we got the cable up, and had 
it in full sight for five minutes—a long slimy monster, fresh 
from the ooze of the ocean’s bed—but our men began to cheer 
