172 A SAGA OF THE SEAS 
them at a banquet in Liverpool. The Liverpool Daily Post of 
March 15, 1867, said in part of this affair: “The members of 
the American Chamber of Commerce in this town gave a 
splendid banquet last night, in the Law Association Rooms, 
Cook Street, to Sir Samuel Canning, Sir James Anderson, Mr. 
Cyrus W. Field, and Mr. Willoughby Smith, the layers of the 
Atlantic telegraph cable, on which occasion a magnificent 
solid gold medal was presented to each of these gentlemen. 
. . » The chairman in proposing “The projector and the asso- 
ciates in the laying of the Atlantic cable’ said. . . . ‘But it 
is good for our humility—a virtue in which we do not natural- 
ly excel—to remember that the first credit of that success is 
due, not to an Englishman, but to an American, Mr. Cyrus 
Field. He is the projector of the plan, and had it not been for 
his tenacity of purpose, his faith—which, if it did not remove 
mountains, at least defied oceans to shape his purpose—the 
plan would long ago have been abandoned in despair. In 
this tenacity and utter incapacity to understand defeat, Mr. 
Field is a representative man of the Anglo-Saxon race wher- 
ever found’. . . . Mr. Field said: ‘I think I may safely affirm 
that never before were so many men brought together in one 
enterprise who were so pre-eminently fitted by diversified en- 
dowments and by special knowledge and experience to solve 
the problem of the Atlantic telegraph. Most fortunate, more- 
over, were we in finding such a ship as the Great Eastern, and 
such a commander as Sir James Anderson.’ ” 
These speeches brought out the point that the final suc- 
cess of making, laying, and operating the cable was due to 
the systematic cooperation of many highly-skilled experts 
using elaborate and unique equipment. When the little group 
of New York capitalists had met in Field’s dining-room in 
1854 to discuss the scheme, they had not realized that they 
would become involved in such complicated and difficult 
ramifications. They did not understand the technical skill 
and the financial additions that would be required. Nor did 
