The first ever undersea cable in North America — and only the second one anywhere in the world — was built in the Maritimes, running from a New Brunswick spruce tree to a fencepost in Prince Edward Island.
In late October 1852, the side-wheel steamship Ellen Gisborne briefly stopped in Halifax on her way from Philadelphia to Charlottetown. “She is a very neat and snug little vessel of 50-horse-screw-propelling power,” wrote Nova Scotia’s newspaper of record, the Acadian Recorder. The Nova Scotian press didn’t seem to have much of an opinion on the Ellen Gisborne’s mission, which is a bit surprising, since the project she was working on was explicitly anti-Nova Scotian.
It was a decade and a half before Confederation, and the four independent Atlantic colonies didn’t always get along. This time, one of them — Nova Scotia — had annoyed the other three — New Brunswick, PEI and Newfoundland — so much that they were working together to build a telegraph cable to go around Nova Scotia.
Telegraphs offered the most high-tech, instant communication of the time. Nova Scotia had privatized its government-built telegraph network, and the new owners raised the prices so high that the other three provinces were building a whole new telegraph network threatening to cut Nova Scotia out of the network — the level of spite a scorned Atlantic Canadian can muster is really something to behold!
The Ellen Gisborne arrived at Charlottetown. The very next day, without fanfare, the Islander newspaper wrote that “the handsome little steamer” departed, towing behind her a brigantine (small sailing ship) named Eliza, which was carrying the massive spool of cable.
It was late October. There was no time for ceremony. The year was getting late, and the weather was growing worse.
Only one day later, the Eliza sailed back to port, alone. “The Ellen Gisborne has met with an accident,” the Gazette newspaper reported.
As the undersea cable was being spooled off the sailing ship Eliza, the metal propeller of the steam-powered Ellen Gisborne got caught in it. Fifty fathoms of cable were cut off and lost, and the propeller was damaged. The ships separated, with the steamship limping off to New Brunswick for repairs.
Most assumed that was the end of that dream — at least until the next Spring. But they didn’t know the man at the head of the project.
Twenty-eight-year-old Frederic Newton Gisborne wasn’t from some well-off background. Only seven years earlier, he had immigrated to Nova Scotia with dreams of becoming a farmer. Then he’d heard of a brand new invention that changed his life: Morse Code.
He became obsessed with the new telegraph communication.
After taking one single course in Morse code, he considered himself enough of an expert on the subject to attend a select committee discussion at the Nova Scotian Legislature. It was a contentious inter-colony debate — New Brunswick wanted to build a telegraph linking to Boston, while the Nova Scotian government wanted to link up with Quebec City. Gisborne the passionate audience member got involved, dominating the discussions. By the end of the debate, he had somehow been appointed head of the Nova Scotian project linking up with Quebec.
One year before laying the cable from NB to PEI, Gisborne was sent to Newfoundland to examine the feasibility of a cable linking to Cape Breton. He surprised everyone when he came back with an ambitious plan to build a cable from Newfoundland to Ireland.
Much to his own shock, though, he returned home to learn that Nova Scotia’s government-run telegraph had been privatized. The new private owners jacked up usage rates to exorbitant levels, causing outrage among the other three Atlantic colonies — and driving Gisborne to quit.
“The Prince Edward Island cable was the first link in the trans-Atlantic cable scheme,” wrote Gisborne in a lengthy letter to the New York Telegram newspaper in 1883. He was mad at the American newspaper because it had credited American citizen Cyrus Field as the first person to lay an undersea cable in North America. To say Gisborne was furious that some American was getting credit for his achievement was an understatement. He wrote: “Cyrus W. Field was a rag and a paper merchant and nothing more!”
Gisborne explained his cable linking Cape Tormentine to Borden Point (which came two years before Fields’ cable) was, for him, a simple stepping stone to something much bigger: “My plan was to connect New Brunswick with Prince Edward Island, and Prince Edward Island with Cape Ray via Newfoundland to Ireland.”
It was November 1852 by the time the Ellen Gisborne’s propeller was repaired. A storm was coming, but Gisborne paid it no heed, ordering the two ships to head back out to lay the cable.
The steamship’s American captain balked, refusing to sail into the brewing storm. Gisborne replaced him with Charlottetowner Archibald Kennedy, who would captain the ship.
They started on the New Brunswick side. Heavy rain began before they arrived.
When they got to Cape Tormentine, the ground team who was supposed to meet them to connect the cable to the grid was not there.
Undeterred, and with no time to lose, they tied one end of the cable to a spruce tree and headed further out into the Northumberland Strait. They could deal with the rest later.
As they went, the giant cable was slowly unspooled from the wooden sailing ship Eliza, as she was dragged by the Ellen Ginsborne.
It was slow work. Over the next eleven hours, they encountered what the Acadian Recorder delicately called “some difficulty owing to the tempestuous state of the weather” — the rain turned to snow.
As they neared PEI, Gisborne grew “apprehensive the cable would run short.”
Now well within less than a mile of PEI’s shore, the weight of the whole length of cable made it nearly impossible to pull any further.
Local farmers and their family members, watching in the storm, rallied on the shore, assembling a team of four oxen and four horses.
With this very literal extra horse (and ox) power, the other end of the first undersea cable anywhere in North America was hauled out of the water — and tied to a fencepost.
Those humble beginnings of an undersea cable going from a spruce tree in New Brunswick to a fencepost in PEI would, within only a few years, reach Newfoundland.
Gisborne’s vision of a cable reaching Ireland and connecting Europe and North America by instant communication for the first time in human history turned out to be much more complicated. Technically, the first transatlantic cable was finished only four years after this little Maritimes cable, in 1858. However, due to technological limitations and human error (which is to say an impatient individual running too much power through the cable to try to make it go faster), the first-ever transatlantic cable broke within days. A proper transatlantic cable linking Ireland to Newfoundland (one that actually worked) would only be completed in 1865, 13 years after this one crossing the Northumberland Strait.
But it started here.
