| Description | Letterbook for the Eastern Steam Navigation Company containing copies of letters to and sometimes holograph copies of letters from Isabard Kingdom Brunel regarding the running of the Eastern Steam Navigation Company and the building of the S.S. Great Eastern. The letters in general cover the specific details of the building of the ship. There is correspondence with Henry Wollaston Blake of the firm James Watt & Co regarding the construction and installation of the engines and boilers for the propeller screw, correspondence with the Lancefield Forge Co of Glasgow about the forging of a defective crank shaft for the engines. There is also a continuation of the correspondence with Professor C. Piazzi Smyth of Edinburgh over the manufacture of several devices for improving astronomical observations on board ship as well as many more requests by inventors and patentees for Brunel to use their inventions, apparatus and machines on board his ship. This volume also sees the beginning of preparations for the launching of the ship including the process of tendering for the building for the launching ways and correspondence with the City of London's Navigation Committee who had to authorise and inspect these works carried out on the banks of the River Thames.
Since the ship had not yet been named, where possible the cataloguing uses the term that the writer has used to describe or name the ship. Where the ship has not been specifically named, in general the phrase "Eastern Steam Navigation Company's great ship" is used. |