Enderby Wharf

The small house with the corner bay window is Enderby House, and it links two very different ways of reaching across the world. The first was whaling. Samuel Enderby & Sons was one of Britain's great whaling firms, with sixty-eight ships at sea by 1791. An Enderby ship was the first to hunt whales in the Southern Ocean, and an Enderby expedition gave its name to Enderby Land in Antarctica. The firm was famous enough for Herman Melville to write it into Moby-Dick. In chapter one hundred, Captain Ahab meets a London whaler called the Samuel Enderby, whose captain has lost an arm to the white whale. The second was the telegraph. From 1857 this wharf made cable to be laid on the seabed, and in 1858 the first cable across the Atlantic, partly made here, went into service. It lasted three weeks. Queen Victoria's greeting to the American President took sixteen hours to get through, and then the cable failed. In 1866 a new cable from this wharf was laid by Brunel's giant ship, the Great Eastern, and this time it held. News that had taken ten days by ship now crossed the ocean in minutes. The factory is still working, making equipment for the undersea cables that carry almost all the internet traffic between continents.