Arts & Entertainment

The Great Eastern Steamship Returns To Montauk in Model Form

Eight-foot long model on view at the Montauk Lighthouse.

You may not ever heard of the Great Eastern Steamship which set out from London in 1858, but those familiar with Montauk geography will have heard of the Great Eastern Rock, about a mile off Montauk Point, which takes it name from the ship's 1862 collision there.

Though the ship survived the crash with an 83-foot long gash in its hull, the Great Eastern was scrapped in 1888. Now, 125 years later, the ship has returned as a scale model now on display in the lighthouse museum's ship wreck room.

Henry Osmer, lighthouse historian, described the ship as a "doomed to failure."

Though it was the largest ship ever built at the time of its first voyage, the ship — intended to bring passengers back and forth between London and New York — only turned a profit, Osmer said, "when it was used for scrap metal."

Built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, "a small man who dreamed big," the ship was a marvel for the era, deemed practically unsinkable with two hulls. It was outfitted with both steam and sail power, nearly 700 feet long, and with 10 boilers bed by 100 furnaces. It weight 18,915 gross tons. 

The model on display is eight feet long and was crafted in London sometime in the 1890s. One of countless ships that ran into trouble off Montauk's rocky coast, the Great Eastern affairs another distinction, as the only ship to lay the second transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866.


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