From the Earth to the Moon (13 page)

“Ridiculous!” said J. T. Maston as he mounted his horse.

“Well, it’s safer,” said the Floridian.

“Thank you for your thoughtfulness, gentlemen,” said Barbicane. “And now, let’s go.”

The little troop set off immediately and vanished in a cloud of dust. It was five o’clock in the morning. The sun was already shining and the temperature was eighty-four, but the heat was softened by a cool sea breeze.

After leaving Tampa, Barbicane rode southward, following the coast until he came to Alifia Creek. This little stream empties into the bay twelve miles below Tampa. Barbicane and his escort rode eastward along its right bank. The bay soon disappeared behind a rise in the ground and the Florida landscape filled their whole field of vision.

Florida is divided into two parts. The northern one is more populous and less wild. Its capital is Tallahassee, and one of the main American naval dockyards is at Pensacola. The other part, pressed between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, is only a slender peninsula washed by the Gulf Stream, a tip of land, lost in the midst of a little archipelago, which is constantly being passed by the many ships on their way to and from the Old Bahama Channel. It is the advanced sentinel against the violent hurricanes that attack the Gulf. The state’s area is
38,033,267 acres, among which Barbicane had to find one that was located below the twenty-eighth parallel and suitable for his project; and so, as he rode along, he attentively examined the configuration and composition of the ground.

Florida, discovered by Juan Ponce de Leon in 1512, on Palm Sunday, was first named “Flowery Easter” in Spanish. It did not deserve this charming name on its hot, arid coasts. But a few miles inland the nature of the terrain gradually changed, and the region showed itself to be worthy of its name. It was interlaced with creeks and rivers, and studded with ponds and little lakes. The landscape was not unlike that of Holland or Guiana. Then the land began to rise and soon showed its cultivated plains in which all sorts of northern and southern crops were flourishing, its immense fields where the tropical sun and the water conserved in the clay of the soil did most of the work of cultivation, and finally its fields of pineapples, sweet potatoes, tobacco, rice, cotton, and sugar cane, stretching out as far as the eye could see, displaying their wealth with carefree prodigality.

Barbicane seemed glad to note the gradual rising of the ground. When J. T. Maston asked him about it he said, “It’s very important for us to cast our cannon on high ground.”

“So it will be closer to the moon?”

“No,” said Barbicane, smiling. “What difference would a few feet make? But on high ground our work will be easier: we won’t have to fight against water, and so we won’t need a long, expensive casing. That’s something to consider when you’re digging a hole nine hundred feet deep.”

“You’re right,” said Murchison. “We must avoid water as much as possible during the digging. But if we come to
underground springs it won’t bother us: we’ll either change their course or pump them dry with our machines. We won’t be digging a dark, narrow artesian well,
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where the drill, the casing, the sounding-rod, and all the other well-digger’s tools have to work blindly. No, we’ll be working in the open air, in broad daylight, with picks and mattocks, and with the help of blasting we’ll get our work done quickly.”

“Even so,” said Barbicane, “if the elevation or the nature of the soil spares us the trouble of dealing with underground water, the work will be done faster and better.”

“That’s true, Mr. Barbicane, and unless I’m mistaken we’ll find a good spot before long.”

“I wish we were ready to begin digging now!”

“And I wish we were ready to finish!” cried J. T. Maston.

“We’ll get there, gentlemen,” said Murchison, “and believe me, the Cold Spring Company won’t have to pay a cent for being late.”

“I hope not, for your sake!” said J. T. Maston. “Do you realize that a hundred dollars a day for eighteen years and eleven days, which is how long it will be before the moon is in the same conditions again, comes to $658,100?”

“No, I didn’t know that, and we won’t need to know it.”

By ten o’clock in the morning the little troop had ridden a dozen miles. The fertile fields were succeeded by a forest in which a wide variety of trees grew in tropical profusion. This almost impenetrable forest was composed of masses of vines and pomegranate, orange, lemon, fig, olive, apricot, and banana trees, whose fruit and blossoms rivaled one another in color and aroma. In the fragrant shade of those magnificent trees a whole
world of brightly colored birds were singing and flying. Among them were boatbills, whose nest should be a jewel case in order to be worthy of them.

J. T. Maston and Major Elphiston could not see that opulent forest without admiring its magnificent beauties. But Barbicane was insensitive to those wonders. He was impatient to move on. That fertile region displeased him because of its very fertility; although he was not a dowser, he sensed water beneath his feet, and he vainly looked for signs of incontestable dryness.

They rode on. They had to ford several streams, and this was not without danger, for the water was infested with alligators fifteen to eighteen feet long. J. T. Maston boldly threatened them with his formidable hook, but he succeeded in frightening only the pelicans, ducks, tropic birds, and other wild inhabitants of the banks, while the big red flamingos stared blankly at him.

Finally these wet-country denizens disappeared. The trees became smaller and less dense, until finally there were only isolated clumps of them on a vast plain where startled deer raced away from the riders.

“At last!” said Barbicane, standing up in his stirrups. “Here’s a region of pine trees!”

“And Indians, too,” said the major.

A few Seminoles had appeared on the horizon. They moved excitedly, rode back and forth on their swift horses, brandished long spears and fired rifles whose reports were muffled by distance, but they limited themselves to these hostile demonstrations. Barbicane and his companions were not alarmed.

They were now in the middle of a broad, rocky, sundrenched open space several acres in area. It was higher than the surrounding land and seemed to offer all the conditions required for the site of the Gun Club’s cannon.

“Stop!” said Barbicane, reining his horse. “Does this place have a name?”

“It’s called Stone Hill,” replied one of the Floridians. Barbicane dismounted without a word, took out his instruments and began determining his position with extreme precision. His companions, gathered around him, watched him in deep silence.

The sun was just then passing the meridian. A short time later, Barbicane quickly calculated the results of his observations and said:

“This place is 1800 feet above sea level, latitude 27° 7’ north, longitude 5° 7’ west.
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Its dryness and rockiness seem to indicate all the conditions favorable to our project, so it’s here that we’ll build our powder magazines, our workshops, our furnaces, and the houses for our workers, and it will be from here, from this very spot,” he said emphatically, stamping his foot on Stone Hill, “that our projectile will begin its journey through space to the moon!”

T
HAT EVENING
Barbicane and his companions returned to Tampa. Murchison went back on board the
Tampico
to go to New Orleans. He was to hire an army of workers and bring back the major part of the material. Barbicane and Maston would remain in Tampa in order to organize the preliminary work with the aid of the local people.

Eight days after her departure, the
Tampico
came back into the bay with a fleet of steamships. Murchison had collected fifteen hundred workers. In the evil days of slavery he would have wasted his time and effort, but now that America, the land of freedom, had only free men within her borders, they were willing to go any place where there were well-paid jobs. The Gun Club was not short of money; it offered its men high wages and generous bonuses. Any man who signed up to work in Florida could count on a considerable sum of money being deposited in his name in the Bank of Baltimore when the project was completed. Murchison therefore had a wide choice and was able to set high standards of intelligence and skill for his workers. There is every reason to believe that he filled his working legion with the finest mechanics, firemen, smelters, smiths, miners, brickmakers, and laborers of all kinds, black and white, without distinction
of color. Many of them brought their families with them. It was a veritable emigration.

On October 31, at ten o’clock in the morning, this troop landed at Tampa. It is easy to imagine the agitation and activity which reigned in that small town, whose population had been doubled in one day. Tampa was to gain enormously from the Gun Club’s project, not because of the workers, who were immediately taken to Stone Hill, but because of the influx of curious people who gradually converged on the Florida peninsula from all parts of the world.

During the first few days attention was centered on unloading the cargoes of the fleet; tools, machines, food supplies, and a large number of sheet-iron houses dismantled into numbered pieces. At the same time, Barbicane laid out the route of a fifteen-mile railroad between Tampa and Stone Hill.

The way in which an American railroad is constructed is well known: whimsical in its meanderings, bold in its slopes, climbing hills and plunging into valleys, it runs blindly, with no concern for a straight line. It is neither costly nor troublesome, but its trains jump the track with gay abandon. The line between Tampa and Stone Hill was only a trifle and required little time and money for its construction.

Barbicane was the soul of that little community of people who had answered his call. He communicated his driving energy, enthusiasm, and conviction to them. He seemed to be everywhere at once, as though he were endowed with the gift of ubiquity, and he was always followed by J. T. Maston, his buzzing fly. His practical mind turned out countless ingenious inventions. With him there were no obstacles, no difficulties, no perplexities; he had an answer to every question, a solution to every problem.
He carried on an active correspondence with the Gun Club and the Cold Spring Company. Day and night, with a full head of steam, the
Tampico
awaited his orders in the harbor.

On November 1 he left Tampa with a group of workers. The next day, a town of sheet-iron houses rose around Stone Hill. A stockade was built around it, and from its bustle and animation it might have been one of the biggest cities in the country. Life in it was regulated with discipline, and the work was begun in perfect order.

After careful drillings had revealed the nature of the soil, digging was begun on November 4. On that day, Barbicane called his foremen together and said to them:

“My friends, you all know why I’ve brought you to this wild part of Florida. We’re going to cast a cannon with an inside diameter of nine feet and walls six feet thick, surrounded by a layer of stone nineteen and a half feet thick, so the hole we’re going to dig will be sixty feet wide and nine hundred feet deep. It’s a big job, and it must be finished in a little more than eight months. You’ll have to take out 2,542,400 cubic feet of earth in 255 days, or about 10,000 cubic feet a day. That wouldn’t be hard for a thousand men working with plenty of elbowroom; it won’t be so easy in a rather tight space. But it must be done, and it
will
be done. I’m counting on your courage as much as on your skill.”

At eight o’clock in the morning the first pick struck the soil of Florida, and from then on that valiant tool was never idle in the hands of the diggers. They worked around the clock in six-hour shifts.

However colossal the operation may have been, it did not surpass the limits of human strength; far from it. How many undertakings whose difficulties were more real, and in which the elements had to be combatted directly,
have been brought to completion! To speak only of similar projects, it will be enough to cite “Father Joseph’s Well,” dug near Cairo by Sultan Saladin at a time when machines had not yet increased man’s strength a hundredfold: it descends three hundred feet below the level of the Nile. And then there is the six-hundred-foot well dug at Coblentz by Margrave Johann of Baden. All that Barbicane’s men had to do was to triple the depth of Saladin’s well and make it ten times wider, which would make digging easy. There was not one foreman or laborer who had any doubt about the success of the operation.

The work was speeded up by an important decision made by Murchison, with Barbicane’s approval. A clause in the contract specified that the cannon was to be reinforced by bands of wrought iron put in place while they were still hot. This was a useless precaution, because it was obvious that the cannon could do without those rings. The clause was canceled.