$889
Anglo/American School, 19th Century Diorama of the Six-masted Steam Ship GREAT EASTERN , indistinctly inscribed "Capt. F.A. Ge-tzen" l.l., the carved and painted wooden vessel with six masts and five funnels with wool "smoke," painted background and putty "sea," a typewritten description of the statistics of the vessel with a ghost story is affixed to the side of the sea area, a portion of which reads: "A Ghost story fastened up on the ship. It was said that a riveter, who was missing and could not be accounted for, had been sealed up alive in one of the hull compartments, this ghost was said to have jinxed the ship, for years [the] ship lay idle. In 1881 she was put on auction, [and] they sold the ship for scrap. The breaking up began in May 1889. After 18 months, the workman reached the double bottom. They were breaking a compartment in the inner shell when a shriek went up that stopped all work. The workers had found ...the skeleton of a riveter and his boy helper.," 15 x 27 in. overall. Note: The SS Great Eastern , a prototype of the modern oceanliner, was an iron sailing steam ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and built on the River Thames, England. She was the largest ship ever built at the time of her 1858 launch, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the world without refueling. She was later converted to a cable-laying ship, the first to lay the transatlantic telegraph cable in 1865.
Auctioneer:
Skinner
Date:
2010-03-07
