332 SUBJIAKINE CABLE LAYING AND REPAIRING. 



light tonnage, and carry no gear aft, being specially fitted 

 for repairing work, all operations being carried out from 

 the bows. 



The Home Government Cable Ships. — A peculiar intrinsic 

 interest attaches to the cables, past and present, connecting 

 Great Britain and Ireland and the British Isles with the 

 Continent ; not only because their history is of such significance, 

 in view of the incipient stages of the enterprise, but the whole 

 system of their maintenance in the present day, coming under 

 the control, as it now does, of the Government, must be of 

 interest to most Englishmen, whilst the manner of coping with 

 the special difficulties attending repairs near our coasts in 

 shallow water of great tidal force is of no small technical 

 interest. Of the cables touching our shores, with the exception 

 of those to Norway, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, America, and 

 their connections which belong to private companies, the whole 

 network of cables between Great Britain, Ireland and adjacent 

 islands, together with those across to France, Belgium, Germany 

 and Holland, are kept in repair by our own Government tele- 

 graph ships, "Monarch" and "Alert." The behaviour of the 

 " Monarch " under peculiar difficulties while laying the Channel 

 telephone cable through which London is now in direct speaking 

 communication with Paris attracted considerable public atten- 

 tion in the early part of 1891, and this vessel (illustrated in 

 Fig. 197), to which reference will be made presently, is in 

 build and fittings admirably designed for her special work. 

 First, however, the writer wishes to review some of the work 

 done by the pioneer vessel of that name, justly called the first 

 cable ship. This does not mean that she was the first vessel 

 from which a submarine cable was laid, for preceding her the 

 steam-tug "Goliath " laid the unsheathed cable to France in 

 1850, H.M.S. "Blazer" that in '51 over the same route (this 

 cable being still in good working order), the steamer "Britannia" 

 the first Irish cable from Holyhead in '52 and the second from 

 Scotland, and the steamer " William Hutt " the first cable to 

 Belgium in '63. But the *' Monarch " was the first ship that 

 grappled for a lost cable and successfully carried out a repair, 

 and on her was fitted the first picking-up machine ever made. 

 Besides this, her paying-out brake was the embryo of that in 



