310 STJBMAEINE CABLE LAYING AND KEPAIRING. 



Looking back for a moment on the interruptions occurring 

 in the days of single cables it was the usual custom to bridge 

 over the period of interruption by sending the accumulated 

 " through" messages on by the first steamer leaving ; or if 

 none were about to proceed that way, by one chartered 

 specially. On the arrival of such a budget at a station there 

 Avas no small excitement to transmit the same onwards at the 

 utmost speed attainable by the operators' skill and the capacity 

 of the lines. Copies of all messages sent by steamer were, of 

 covirse, kept, because the cable might be put through while the 

 chartered vessel was on the high seas, and in that case she 

 would be landing a batch of messages already delivered at 

 their destination thousands of miles away, days ago. But it 

 often happened that an interruption lasted long enough to 

 allow several batches to cross each other by sea before com- 

 munication was restored. As concerned the "local" traffic, 

 or that immediately confined to the interrupted stations, 

 people either posted their messages by mail or by the char- 

 tered steamer, but it was curious to notice that some whose 

 news was of greater importance preferred to pay the piper 

 and gain the two, three, or four days, as the case might be, 

 by sending their messages round by another route. As the 

 result of this there was something inconceivably odd in trans- 

 mitting a message, say from Bombay to Aden, on its way 

 to London from Hong Kong, its ultimate destination being 

 Shanghai. 



The sender of such a message would probably gain three 

 days over the mail between these two ports in China. But it 

 is curious that in getting from one port to the other the 

 message would pass twice over the continents of Asia and 

 Europe by different routes, the return route being by the 

 Siberian lines and Viadivostock. The two ports in China 

 above mentioned have now triplicate communication, two cables 

 and one land line, and most lines are either directly duplicated 

 or the duplicate cable is taken by a different route in order to 

 call in at fresh places on the way. With such provision it is 

 extremely rare nowadays to hear that any important town or 

 colony is totally interrupted. Such can only be conceived to 

 occur in the event of a volcanic upheaval affecting cables lying 

 in the same region, as happened in the year 1890, on the night 



