The All-Red Route

By Jerry Hayes

The September 19, 1901 edition of the Victoria Times reported that the cable ship Colonia, having loaded supplies in Victoria, had begun laying a telegraph cable from the head of Barkley Sound near Bamfield. The Colonia was bound for Fanning Island, 4000 miles away in the South Pacific. The line between Bamfield and Fanning Island was the longest link in the "All Red Route", a globe-encircling telegraph circuit, which connected the British Empire. From Fanning Island a cable would be laid to Suva the capital of Fiji; then on to Norfolk Island, site of the infamous penal colony and finally Brisbane, Australia. At Norfolk Island there was a split, and a branch went to New Zealand. The Australian branch was connected to a line, which ran to the UK through India.

This cable across the Pacific was the culmination of a long process. Progress in the 19^th century had been dazzling on many fronts, but none more than the understanding and application of electricity. At the beginning of the century, electromagnetic phenomena were little understood even by the erudite. By its end, electricity lighted the great cities, telephone service was common and a telegraph network covered the earth.

Telegraph was the first application of electricity. Samuel F.B. Morse built the first landline in North America between Washington, DC and Baltimore in 1844.  It gained notoriety with the announcement that the Whig Party had nominated Henry Clay for president at its convention in Baltimore.  This was the beginning of a long partnership between telegraph and newspapers in the dissemination of news.

In 1850, a cable was successfully laid under the English Channel, but failed after a short time.  The story is that it was broken by a fisherman who thought that he had caught a golden serpent. Permanent service was restored in the following year, the first of a number of short submarine cable links.

The next great challenge, a cable across the Atlantic, was taken up by a retired paper manufacturer, Cyrus Field. In the course of this work, Field would suffer the discomfort and danger of over thirty trips across the Atlantic. It was Field's drive and enthusiasm that overcame all obstacles. Over the summer of 1858, a cable was laid from Ireland to Newfoundland.  This instantaneous connection to England was greeted with an outpouring of joy - songs of celebration, parades and fireworks. (The last set fire to New York's city hall.) Congratulations were exchanged between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan. Unfortunately, the cable failed after a month of shaky operation. Predictably some said that it had all been a hoax. The proof that a cable had operated was that it sent a message which cancelled a movement of troops to India to quell a mutiny. The potential of transoceanic telegraph was demonstrated, since this cancellation saved 50,000 pounds, almost the cost of the cable.

This and other failures led to a re-evaluation of cable technology.  One of the recommendations was to use a heavier and bulkier cable. Serendipitously, the right ship was available to carry the increased load; the Great Eastern, which was five or six times the size of anything else afloat, had just been launched. 

Armed with experience and new equipment, an expedition was mounted in 1865. All went well until there was a break 600 miles from Newfoundland. The position was carefully noted for future retrieval. Flaws were identified and rectified, and an expedition in the following year succeeded. The Great Eastern also grappled for and found the end of the broken cable. Thus, there were two fully operational cables!

Part 2

India, "Crown Jewel of the British Empire," was the next goal for telegraph expansion. The first connections to India, primarily over landlines with short underwater sections, were unreliable and slow. Furthermore, since the line passed though countries which were potential enemies, it was of limited value in wartime. An all-sea route was made possible by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. John Pender, a powerful businessman/ politician, led the project, which proceeded piecewise. Part of the system had been laid between Malta and Alexandria. A cable was laid from Cornwall to Gibraltar and on to Malta. Landline cables had already been installed between Alexandria and Suez.  The Great Eastern laid the final portions from Suez to Aden under the Red Sea and to Bombay under the Arabian Sea. Service from London to Bombay began in 1870. In succeeding years, service was extended to Singapore then to Darwin, Australia, through present-day Indonesia. A landline from Darwin to Adelaide and the rest of Australia was built through the forbidding Outback of Australia and service between Adelaide and London began in October 1872.

Completing the around-the-world circuit with cable across the Pacific presented formidable obstacles. Ocean depths were greater than previously encountered and the closest British possession to Canada was Fanning Island 4000 miles away. The physics of cable transmission is such that the maximum rate that messages can be transmitted decrease as the length of the cable increases. The rate of decrease goes as the square of the cable length. For example, a maximum of 100 words per minute over a cable 2000 miles long would be reduced to 25 words per minute over a 4000-mile long cable.

Economics played a major role: Who would pay for the initial system and for the operating costs? The latter was a problem since the reduced message rate reduced potential revenue.  The exchanges among Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK on the sharing of costs remind one of today's wrangles between the Ottawa and the Provinces.

Powerful forces were arrayed for and against the Cable. John Pender was a resourceful opponent since a Pacific Cable would break his company's monopoly on telegraph service to India and Australia. On the other side, the dominions had vital interests in direct trans-Pacific trade. Furthermore, military strategists valued an alternative route in wartime. Two individuals countered Pender's influence. The chief architect of the project was Sir Sanford Fleming, Chief Engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railroad Company. The champion who finally saw the project through was the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain (father of the later PM Neville). The Pacific Cable Act passed the British Parliament on August 16, 1901.

Work went smoothly once started. Since the amount of cable for the Bamfield-Fanning Island link was too large for any existing ship, it had been necessary to build the Colonia. The cable ship Anglia laid the other links of the system. Bamfield was connected to Vancouver and onto the rest of Canada through Port Alberni and Parksville. The Pacific Cable was opened to the public on December 8, 1902. To the delight of the engineers, performance was better than expected.

Part 3

The strategic importance of the Pacific Cable in time of war was demonstrated in 1914 when the cruisers Nurnberg and Leipzig of the Imperial German Navy visited Fanning Island. A landing party destroyed cable equipment, cut both side of the cable and dragged them out to sea. One end was not dragged far enough; consequently, a primitive connection was established and help was summoned. Normal operation was restored after several weeks.

We have mentioned the great men who played role in the development of the All-Red route; but those individuals who made the system work on a day-to-day basis also have a fascinating story to tell.  In an age long before electronics, the skill and training of the telegraph operators, who were the IT (Information Technology) workers of their day, were crucial. Several of the great inventors and scientists of the day began their careers as telegraph operators.  Perhaps, the best known is Thomas Alva Edison.  Not as well known is the eccentric British theoretician, Oliver Heaviside, who made fundamental contributions to the understanding of telegraph transmission. He is commemorated in the Heaviside Layer, a portion of the upper atmosphere that facilitates long-range radio transmission.

Telegraph operators needed a high level of skill because the electrical signal that comes through a long telegraph cable is exceedingly faint. William Thomson, a.k.a., Lord Kelvin, devised an ingenious mechanical technique for amplifying the cable output so that the operator could tell what was sent over the line.  The apparatus is simple: a light glass siphon, a pot of ink, a roll of paper tape and wires connecting the siphon to the cable output.  One end of the siphon is immersed in the ink. Its other end is positioned so that it deposits the ink on the tape running by it producing a continuous line. The siphon is also connected to the cable's electrical output in such a way that it is moved by the current coming from the cable.  The dots and dashes of Morse code are indicated by the line on the paper going up and down, respectively. To the untrained eye, the record of messages on the tape is just a wiggly line, but a skilled operator could read the message with a strikingly low rate of error. The siphon recorder left a permanent record and was the standard method for many years.

One of the skilled telegraph operators once lived in Victoria, the late R. Bruce Scott. Born in 1905 in Sydney, Australia, Scott left school at the age of thirteen to help support his family. His father had died prematurely from illness contracted during the Great War. After two years clerking in retail stores, including a stint on a button counter, Scott found his true vocation when he answered a want-ad for boys to learn submarine telegraph and to work overseas.  Stifling his disappointment in learning that the work did not actually involve submarines, he enrolled in a rigorous training course in telegraphy. At the age of eighteen he volunteered to serve on Fanning Island, and his great adventures began.

Bruce Scott wonderfully recounts his life as a telegraph operator on remote outposts in Gentlemen on Imperial Service, A Story of the Trans-Pacific Cable (Sono Nis Press, 1994). The Fanning Island cable station was a true colonial enclave, reminiscent of the stories of Somerset Maugham. Scott lived in the bachelor's quarters. Housing was also set aside for married couples. All were attended by Chinese and local native servants. A lively social scene with picnics and dances was fuelled by the supplies that arrived on the packet streamer.

In 1930, Scott moved to Bamfield, then an isolated fishing village, where he married and built a house with his own hands. In 1944, a daughter was born to the couple- an interesting tale. During WWII, backup submarine cable ran from Bamfield to Clover Point and then to an army base in Gordon Head. For possibly the only time that the cable was used, Scott contacted a fellow telegraph operator at the base for news of his wife who had travelled to Victoria for the delivery. His colleague called the Royal Jubilee Hospital and returned the news that mother and child were doing well. The family lived in Bamfield until 1960 when the cable station closed. Afterwards they returned for summers to run a B and B in the house he had built. His daughter now lives in Oak Bay.

In Bamfield, Scott fell in love with the wild West Coast of Vancouver Island, with particular affection for Barkley Sound. He hiked its trails and canoed its waters. After retirement Scott began a second career as an author and advocate.  His books centred on the West Coast, recounting tales of shipwrecks, life in Bamfield and the lives of the native people. (All are in the Victoria Public Library.) He also mounted a slide show on its wonders. His work was instrumental in establishing Pacific Rim National Park in 1971.

In this age of fibre optic cable and communications satellites, the day of telegraph cables and the All-Red Route is long past. The processing of messages is done by high-speed digital circuitry rather than human operators. The old Bamfield cable station now houses the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, which was established in 1972 by the Western Canadian Universities Marine Sciences Society (WCUMMS). Surely, Bruce Scott would have had a keen interest in its work.