Shooting Stars (14 page)
Authors: Stefan Zweig
Bankrupt again, John Augustus Sutter stares as if dazed at these enormous seeds of discord that have sprung up. First he tries digging with the others, and even with his servants and companions, to exploit the wealth, but everyone leaves him. So he withdraws entirely from the gold-bearing district, to a remote farm near the mountains, away from that accursed river and the wretched sand, to his farm hermitage. At last his wife and their three grown-up children reach him there, but almost as soon as she arrives she dies of the exhaustion of her journey. But he now has three sons, there are eight arms between them, counting his own; and thus equipped John Augustus Sutter sets to work as an agriculturalist. Once again, but now with his sons, he works his way up, a quiet
and tough man making use of the fantastic fertility of the soil. Once again he makes a plan, and he keeps it to himself.
1850. California has become one of the United States of America. Under the stern rule of the United States, discipline as well as wealth finally come to that part of the country, obsessed as it is with gold. Anarchy is under control, the laws of the land are enforced again.
And now John Augustus Sutter comes forward with his claims. All the land on which the city of San Francisco has been built, he says, is rightfully his. It is the duty of the state, he says, to make amends for all the damage he has suffered by the theft of his property, and he claims his own part of all the gold taken from its soil. A trial begins, of dimensions never before known to mankind. John Augustus Sutter is taking proceedings against 17,221 farmers who have settled in his own plantations, demanding that they vacate the land they have stolen, and he is asking $25 million compensation from the state of California for simply misappropriating the roads, canals, bridges, dams and mills that he built. In
addition
he wants another $25 million compensation from the United States as a whole for the destruction of his estates, as well as his share of the gold brought out of the ground. He has sent his eldest son, Emil, to study law in Washington so that he can take proper legal action, and he devotes the enormous income from his new farms to the sole purpose of
bringing this expensive lawsuit. He takes it through all the courts for four years.
On 15th March 1855 the courts finally decide on a verdict. The incorruptible judge Thompson, who is the highest legal authority in California, recognizes John Augustus Sutter’s rights to the land as fully justified and inviolable.
On that day, John Augustus Sutter has achieved his aim, and he is the richest man in the world.
The richest man in the world? No, once again the answer is no; he is the poorest and most unfortunate beggar in the world, he is a broken man. When news of the verdict arrives a storm breaks out in San Francisco and its surroundings. Tens of thousands band together, all the people who think they own property but are now under threat, a streetwise mob, a rabble that delights in looting. They break into the Hall of Justice and burn it down, they go in search of the judge, meaning to lynch him, and they set off in a vast throng to plunder all John Augustus Sutter’s property. His eldest son, threatened by these bandits, shoots himself; his second son is murdered; the third runs for it but is drowned on the way home. A wave of fire sweeps over New Helvetia, Sutter’s farms burn down, his vineyards are trampled underfoot, his furniture, collections and money are stolen and his entire vast property laid waste with pitiless fury. Sutter himself only just escapes with his life.
John Augustus Sutter never recovers from this blow. His work has been destroyed, his wife and children are dead, his mind is confused. Only one idea still flickers faintly in his now-stupefied brain: the law laid down at the trial.
For twenty-five years an old, feeble-minded and poorly dressed man still haunts the Hall of Justice in Washington. The “general” in his grubby overcoat and well-worn shoes, demanding the restitution of his billions, is a familiar figure in all the offices there. And there are always advocates, adventurers and crooks to be found ready to get the last of his pension out of him by persuading him to go to law again. Himself, he does not want money; he hates the gold that has made him poor, has killed his three children and wrecked his life. All he wants is justice, and he defends himself with the querulous embitterment of a monomaniac. He complains to the Senate, he complains to Congress, he puts his trust in all kinds of helpers who, going about the business in just the wrong way, put a ridiculous military uniform on him and drag the unfortunate man as their puppet from office to office, from one set of deputies to another. This goes on for twenty years, from 1860 to 1880, twenty wretched years of beggary. Day after day he wanders around the Capitol, a laughing stock to all the civil servants, mocked by the street urchins—he who owns the richest land on earth, and on whose property the second capital of the gigantic country stands, growing hourly. However, he is left awkwardly waiting. And there, on the steps of Congress, the heart attack that comes as a release strikes him down on the afternoon of 17th June 1880—and a beggar is carried away, dead. A dead beggar,
but one with a polemical treatise in his pocket ensuring a claim to the greatest fortune in history to him and his heirs.
No one has ever claimed Sutter’s inheritance, no descendant has come forward. San Francisco and all the land around stands on a stranger’s property. No one has ever stated the rights of the case, and only one writer, Blaise Cendrars, has at least given John Augustus Sutter what is due to a great fate: the right to be remembered by posterity with admiration.
For all the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years since that strange being known as man has walked the earth, there has been no other maximum degree of human
movement
than the pace of a horse, of a wheel going round, or of a ship propelled by oars or sails. All the wealth of technical progress within that narrow area illuminated by consciousness that we call the history of the world had yielded no noticeable acceleration in the rhythm of movement. Wallenstein’s armies advanced hardly any faster than Caesar’s legions; Napoleon’s troops were no swifter than the hordes of Genghis Khan; Nelson’s corvettes crossed the sea only a little faster than the pirate ships of Viking raiders and Phoenician trading vessels. Lord Byron on his journey as Childe Harold covers no more miles a day than Ovid on his way to exile in Pontus; in the eighteenth century Goethe does not travel in conspicuously more comfort or at greater speed than the Apostle Paul at the beginning of the millennium. Countries lie the same distance from each other in time and space in the age of Napoleon and under the Roman Empire; the resistance of matter still triumphs over the human will.
Only the nineteenth century brings fundamental change to the extent and rhythm of terrestrial speed. In its first and second decades, nations and countries come together faster
than for millennia before them. Railways and steamers enable people to cover what were once journeys of many days in a single day, previously endless hours of travel can be completed in time measured by quarters of an hour and minutes. But however much the triumphant new speeds achieved by trains and steamboats are appreciated by contemporaries, such inventions still lie within the sphere of what the mind can grasp. For all these vehicles do, after all, is to multiply
previously
known speeds five, ten, twenty times over; the outward sight and inner meaning of them can still be followed, and what looks miraculous can be explained. However, the first achievements of electricity, a Hercules still in the cradle, appear entirely unexpected, overturning all earlier laws, smashing all current dimensions. We who were born later will never feel the amazement of that generation faced with the first feats of the electric telegraph, the vast and enthusiastic astonishment on seeing the same small, barely perceptible electric spark—yesterday only just capable of crackling an inch up from a Leiden jar to the knuckle of your finger—suddenly gaining the demonic power to leap across countries, mountains, whole parts of this earth. Or grasping the idea, scarcely thought out yet to its end, that when the ink is still wet on a written word it can be received thousands of miles away in the same second, can be read and understood, and that the invisible current swinging between the two poles of the tiny voltaic pile can be stretched over the whole earth from one end to the other. Or the thought that the apparatus of the physics laboratory, apparently toy-like, that yesterday was just capable of attracting a few shreds of paper if you rubbed a glass plate,
can acquire the power of human muscular strength and speed multiplied by millions and billions, carrying messages, moving railway trains, filling streets and buildings with light, and like Ariel hovering invisibly through the air. Only this discovery brought the most crucial readjustment since the creation of the world to the relationship of space and time.
The year 1837—of such significance to the world, when the telegraph made it possible for previously isolated human experiences to be felt simultaneously—is seldom even
mentioned
in school textbooks, which unfortunately still think it more important to write about the wars and victories of individual nations and military commanders than what are the true triumphs of mankind, because they were achieved jointly. Yet no other date in recent history can be compared with it for the psychological effect of this readjustment of the value of time. The world has changed since it became possible to be in Paris and know simultaneously what is going on in Amsterdam, Moscow, Naples and Lisbon at that very minute. Only one last step has yet to be taken, and then the other parts of the world will also be included in that great connection and a common consciousness of all mankind will be created.
But nature still resists this last unification, still comes up against an obstacle. For another two decades all those countries cut off from each other by the sea will be separated. For a while, thanks to the insulating properties of porcelain, the spark can spring along telegraph poles unimpeded, water sucks up the electric current. But electric wiring cannot be laid through the sea until a means of entirely insulating copper and iron wires has been discovered.
In times of progress, luckily, one invention lends a helping hand to another. A few years after the introduction of telegraph lines on land, gutta-percha is found to be a suitable material for insulating electric cables in water. Now a start can be made on connecting the most important country outside the continent of Europe, Great Britain, to the European telegraph network. An engineer called Brett lays the first cable at the same place where Blériot, later, will be the first to cross the Channel in an airplane. A ridiculous incident intervenes to prevent immediate success: a fisherman in Boulogne, thinking he has found a particularly fat eel, tears the cable out after it has been laid. But on 13th November 1851, the second attempt does succeed. Great Britain is now connected to the Continent, and thus Europe truly becomes Europe, a being that experiences all that is happening with a single brain and a single heart at the same time.
Such a huge success within so few years—for what does a decade mean in the history of mankind?—must naturally arouse boundless courage in the generation that knows it. Everything that you try succeeds, and at dreamlike speed. Only a few years, and Great Britain in turn is connected by telegraph with Ireland, Denmark with Sweden and Corsica with the mainland, and attempts are already being made to connect Egypt and India to the network. One part of the world, however—the most important part—seems doomed to perpetual exclusion from the chain that spans the rest of the world: America. For how can the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, neither of which has anywhere to stop in its endless breadth, be crossed by a single wire? All factors are still unknown in
the infancy of electricity. The depth of the sea has not been plumbed yet, there is only a vague idea of the geological structure of the ocean, and no one has discovered whether a wire laid so deep could stand up to the pressure of so much water above it. And even if it were technically possible to embed so long a cable safely at such depths, where can a ship be found large enough to carry the weight of 2,000 miles of iron and copper cable? Or dynamos powerful enough to send an unbroken electric current over a distance that a steamer would take at least two to three weeks to cross? People of that time lack any relevant assumptions. No one yet knows whether magnetic currents that could divert the electric current circle in the depths of the ocean, no one has good enough insulation, proper measuring apparatus; all that is known so far is the first laws of electricity that have just opened human eyes from their centuries of sleep in oblivion. “Impossible! Absurd!” say scholars, vigorously rejecting the idea as soon as anyone even mentions a plan for telegraphy to span the ocean. “Later, maybe,” say the boldest of the technical experts. Such a plan seems a daring exploit with an incalculable outcome even to Morse, the man to whom the electric telegraph owes its greatest perfection so far. But he adds, prophetically, that if the exploit were to succeed, the laying of the transatlantic cable would be regarded as “the great feat of the century”.
For a miracle or something miraculous to be perfected, the first step is always the faith of an individual in that miracle. The naïve courage of someone whose mind is closed to reason may give a creative impulse where the learned hesitate to tread, and here, as usual, a simple coincidence sets the grandiose
undertaking going. In the year 1854 an English engineer by the name of Gisborne, who wants to lay a cable from New York to the easternmost point of America, Newfoundland, so that news from the ships can be received a few days earlier, has to stop in the middle of his work when his funds run out. So he goes to New York in search of someone to finance him, and there, by pure chance—the father of so many famous things—he meets a young man called Cyrus W. Field, son of a clergyman, who has done so well and so quickly in business that even at a youthful age he could retire to private life with a large fortune if he wanted. At present he follows no
profession
, but he is too young and too energetic for inactivity in the long run, and Gisborne seeks him out to arouse his interest in laying the cable from New York to Newfoundland. Cyrus W. Field is not—it is tempting to say that luckily he is not—a technologist or any kind of expert. He knows nothing about electricity, he has never seen a cable. But there is a passionate belief in this clergyman’s son, the energetic audacity typical of an American. Where the professional engineer Gisborne sees only the immediate aim of connecting New York to Newfoundland, the young enthusiast immediately looks further ahead. Why not connect Newfoundland to Ireland by a cable under the sea next? With an energy determined to overcome all obstacles—he crossed the Atlantic both ways thirty-one times in those years—Cyrus W. Field sets to work at once, firmly intent upon devoting everything in and around him to his purpose, thereby igniting the idea, thanks to which its explosive force becomes reality. The new, wonderful power of electricity has thus allied itself to the other strongest dynamic
element of life: the human will. A man has found his life’s work, and a task has found the man to carry it out.
Cyrus W. Field begins his work with improbable energy. He gets in touch with all the professionals, besieges governments with requests for concessions, leads a campaign in both parts of the world to raise the necessary funds; and so forceful is this entirely unknown man, so impassioned his personal conviction, so powerful his belief in electricity as a new miraculous force, that the equity capital of £350,000 was fully subscribed in Great Britain within a few days. Once the richest businessmen of Liverpool, Manchester and London have come together to found the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, the money streams in. However, the subscribers also include such names as those of Thackeray and Lady Byron, who have no secondary business aim in mind and want to support the work purely out of moral enthusiasm; nothing illustrates the optimistic attitude towards everything technical and mechanical that animated Great Britain in the age of Stephenson, Brunel and the other great engineers as well as the fact that a single appeal is enough to raise such an enormous sum of money for an entirely fantastic venture, from subscribers who cannot be guaranteed that they will recover their investment.
For the enormous expense of laying the cable is all that can be reliably calculated at the beginning of the enterprise.
There is no model for the actual technical method of
carrying
it out. In the nineteenth century, nothing of similar dimensions had ever been devised or planned before. How could spanning an entire ocean be compared with bridging the narrow strip of water between Dover and Calais? There, it had been enough to reel out thirty or forty miles of cable from the deck of an ordinary paddle steamer, and it unwound as easily as an anchor from its winch. And for laying a cable in the English Channel, you could wait for a particularly calm day, you knew the precise depth of the seabed, you were always within sight of one shore or the other and thus not in any danger; the connection could be made comfortably within a single day. But during an ocean crossing of at least three weeks constantly at sea, a reel of cable a hundred times longer and heavier cannot stay exposed on deck to all the rigours of the weather. Furthermore, no ship of the time is large enough to carry that gigantic cocoon of iron, copper and gutta-percha in its hold, or strong enough to carry such a load. Two ships at least will be needed, and these main ships must in turn be accompanied by others so that they can keep precisely to the shortest course and have help ready to hand in the case of any accident. It is true that the British government has made the
Agamemnon
available for this venture—one of its largest warships, a vessel that fought off Sebastopol—and the American government had contributed the
Niagara
, a frigate of 5,000 tons, the largest possible at the time. However, both ships must be specially converted first, so that each can carry half of the endless chain intended to link two parts of the world with each other. But the main problem remains the
cable itself. That gigantic umbilical cord between two parts of this earth is exposed to unimaginable stress. For one thing, the cable must be as strong and resistant as a steel rope, and at the same time elastic enough to be easily paid out. It must stand up to any pressure and any strain, and yet be as easy to tie off smoothly as a silk thread. It must be massive, yet not take up too much space; it must be solid, yet sensitive enough to let the slightest electric wave pass along it for 2,000 miles. The smallest tear in it, the least unevenness at any single part of this gigantic cable can wreck it on its fourteen-day journey.