The Great Eastern, launched in 1858, was a huge steam ship designed by the brilliant engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, of Great Britain . This six-masted steam powered ship was designed to be the first ship large enough to carry enough coal for a voyage to India or Australia without stopping at coal stations on the way. The ship, with its sails, would be able to return home even if there was no coal at its destination. The ship was also designed to carry 4,000 passengers, or 10,000 soldiers if used to carry troops. The Great Eastern was built at the London yard of Scott Russell and company in Milwall. It was started in 1854 and completed in 1858, and in January of 1858 the ship set sail for Liverpool and arrived in New York ten days later. Although the design of the ship was brilliant, nowhere in the world were there docks and harbors big enough to handle a ship six times bigger than anything known before. Also, the ship never sailed on the long voyages that Brunel had planned. The opening of the Suez Canal meant that the long sea route to India around the bottom of Africa fell out of use. Instead, the Great Eastern was used as a passenger ship to cross the Atlantic to America , a much shorter voyage. However, although it was very safe, the rolling of the ship in the Atlantic storms put off passengers. Although the Great Eastern was unsuccessful as a passenger ship, it achieved fame by carrying and laying the Trans-Atlantic cable in 1866, the first telegraph cable to America.

1867 Mar 26, Great Eastern sailed for New York from Liverpool with 123 passengers among them Jules Verne and his Brother Paul. 1867 Apr 9, (14 days later) arrive in New York. Jules Verne and his brother Paul visit Niagara Falls on April 12, 1867. After Verne wrote the novel “Une Ville Flottante”, (a floating city).

 

The greek poet Andreas Embeirikos (1901–1975) wrote the eight volumes of his novel Great Eastern (Megas Anatolikos), considered by many his magnum opus. Only appeared in print between 1990 and 1992. In the novel, the New World is the destination, the steamship of the title is the floating paradise of sexual license that conveys its passengers and crew thither. The cosmopolitan passenger list includes Jules Verne, and the episodic and inexorably repetitive narration of the sexual gyrations of the characters aboard is couched in the formally polished style and archaic language into which Verne, along with other European ‘classics’, was translated in Greek in the late 19th century.

At one level, as Roderick Beaton writes, the Great Eastern is a gigantic parody, but the purpose of this obsessively sexual narrative is evidently serious. The great god Pan, symbol of sexual license in Embiricos’ earlier voyage in prose, Argo, or the Voyage of a Balloon (an expurgated version appeared during Embiricos’ lifetime, in 1964) is here seen to be triumphant on a scale unmatched in any other work by Embiricos.