A beautiful image

A beautiful image, from 1874. Charles Albert Chomley was a passenger on the SS Great Britain, Brunel's iron ship which voyaged around the world 32 times. Variously an ocean liner, carrier of emigrants and cargo ship in its working life, she carried hundred upon hundred of sea-goers; she knew well the Atlantic, Cape Horn, San Francisco, Australia. Passengers spent day after day after day at sea. Perhaps it honed their poetic skills. Chomley wrote of the icebergs at Cape Horn that when the sun shone through them it was like 'a volcano of glass throwing out showers of diamonds'.