EYES ON THE PACIFIC 225 
to dampen the enthusiasm of capitalists and politicians who 
originally favored a Pacific cable. The terms of the Hawaiian 
offer, as stated in Judge Allen’s letter of March 10, 1879, re- 
quired that if actual construction of a cable to Hawaii was 
not started within five years, the offer became invalid. Field 
gave the project all the encouragement that he felt justified 
in giving. In 1880 and 1881, when he and his wife traveled 
around the world, he spoke in favor of a cable in the Pacific 
ports that he visited, but received polite speeches rather than 
concrete help. 
As the years went on, Field tried to revive negotiations for 
the laying of a cable at least as far as Hawaii. In 1884 he esti- 
mated that this two-thousand-mile line—about the length of 
the Newfoundland cable—would cost three million dollars. 
In later years the revival of this project had political compli- 
cations, for in 1898 Hawaii was annexed to the United States. 
The publicity that Field had given the islands helped in dem- 
onstrating their importance to the politicians at Washington, 
who assisted in their annexation, very much as Perry Mc- 
Donough Collins’ project for an overland telegraph to Siberia 
by way of Bering Strait advertised Alaska to the United States 
Government, which thereupon bought the territory from 
Russia. 
Eventually Pacific cables were laid along the routes that 
Field had suggested, and the technique that made them pos- 
sible was the consequence of the experimental work that he 
had organized for the Atlantic cables. ‘The men who toiled 
through Newfoundland fogs and grappled in Atlantic seas 
led the way for the linking of all continents by “whispering 
wires.” ‘They were the pioneers who demonstrated what could 
be done. 
A striking demonstration of the conquest of the world by 
the telegraph was staged in 1871 in New York. Field’s old 
friend, the one-time artist and professor, Samuel Finley 
Breese Morse, died in 1872, at the age of eighty-one. About a 
