The station of the Direct United States Cable Company is situated at Ballinskelligs Bay, Ireland (2).  Its cable was laid in 1874-5, and is 2,565 miles in length.  The terminal point on the other side of the Atlantic is at Halifax, Nova Scotia, from whence the cable is continued to Rye Beach, New Hampshire, a distance of 536 miles, and thence by a land line of 500 miles to New York (17).

The Commercial Cable Company’s station in Ireland is at Waterville, a short distance from Ballinskelligs (3).  It owns two cables laid in 1885; the northern cable being 2,350, and the southern 2,388 miles long.  They terminate in America at Canso, Nova Scotia.  From Canso a cable is laid to Rockfort, about thirty miles south of Boston, Mass., a distance of 518 miles (16), and another is laid to New York, 840 miles in length (15).  This company has direct communication with the Continent by means of a cable from Waterville to Havre of 510 miles (9), and with England by a cable to Weston-super-Mare, near Bristol, of 328 miles (8).

The Western Union Telegraph Company (the lessees of the lines of the American Telegraph and Cable Company) has two cables from Sennen Cove, Land’s End, to Canso, Nova Scotia (4).  The cable of 1881 is 2,531 and that of 1882 is 2,576 miles in length.  Two cables were laid November, 1889, between Canso and New York (14).

The Compagnie Francaise du Telegraphe de Paris a New York has a cable from Brest to St. Pierre Miquelon of 2,242 miles in length (5), from thence a cable is laid to Louisbourg, Cape Breton (12), and another to Cape Cod (13).  It has also a cable from Brest to Porcella Cove, Cornwall (11).

Those ten cables owned by the six companies named, of the total milage of 22,959, not counting connections, represent the entire direct communication between the continents of Europe and North America.

A new company, not included in the preceding statistics, proposes to lay a cable from Westport, Ireland, to some point in the Straits of Belle Isle on the Labrador coast (Map A32, Map B20).

The station of the Eastern Telegraph Company is at Porthcurno Cove, Penzance, from whence it has two cables to Lisbon, one laid in 1880, 850 miles long, the other laid in 1887, 892 miles long (12), and one cable to Vigo, Spain, laid in 1873, 622 miles long (13).  From Lisbon the cable is continued to Gibraltar and the East, whither we need not follow it, our intention being to confine ourselves entirely to a brief account of those cables communicating directly with Europe and America.  As already stated, this company has altogether seventy cables, of a total length of nearly 22,000 miles.

The Direct Spanish Telegraph Company has a cable, laid in 1884, from Kennach Cove, Cornwall, to Bilbao, Spain, 486 miles in length (14).

Coming now to shorter cables connecting Britain with the Continent, we have those of the Great Northern Telegraph Company, namely, Peterhead to Ekersund, Norway, 267 miles (15).  Newbiggin, near Newcastle, to Arendal, Norway, 424 miles, and thence to Marstrand, Sweden, 98 miles.