2-982-335 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Filling the Napoleon Dock, Cherbourg, 1858. Inauguration and '...opening of the Great Basin, or Napoleon Dock, of the military port...in the presence of the Emperor and an immense concourse of people...The long-expected immersion, as a spectacle, was a total failure. The water was to have been let into the excavation in a great and sudden rush through one of the two locks that connect this inner basin with the two smaller ones between it and the sea...But, when the water was admitted up to the dam, either the flood was stronger or the barrier weaker than had been calculated. One end of it was washed away, the mine was destroyed, and it was too late to remedy the disaster. So the great coup of the day, the anticipated explosion, the sudden rush of the element, and its first dash and spread over the immense granite level were all lost. The actual ceremony of immersion, the subject of the longest official programme, was reduced to opening the sluices of another lock and admitting the external water in a volume equalling a millrace. The Ville de Nantes, which was built on one of the new slips of the Napoleon Dock, was safely launched on the evening of the inauguration'. From "Illustrated London News", 1858.