Germans Foiled at Fanning Island The story of the building up of an "All Red" cable route—one of the achievements of the war of which little has been heard—was told in a paper read to the London Telegraph and Telephone Society by Mr. A. Avery recently.
The route taken by the "All Red" route, said Mr. Avery, was from London to Halifax, by direct working, through automatic repeaters at Penzance and Fayal in mid-Atlantic; Halifax to Bamfield, in Vancouver, by Wheatstone duplex through eight automatic repeaters, being direct working across Canada; thence to Fanning Island, a small island on coral in the middle of the Pacific. From Bamfield to Fanning was the longest. single stretch of ocean cable in the world. The next. step was from Fanning to Suva, in Fiji, and then the route was via Norfolk Island to Auckland (New Zealand), and thence to Sydney, with an alternative route from Norfolk to Southports, near Brisbane.
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Fanning Island was one of the first cable points to be attacked by the German Fleet. One day near the outbreak of the war a German cruiser, accompanied by a collier, landed a party, which small everything at the cable station. They overhauled everything and discovered the place of concealment of the duplicate plant. which was destroyed. The officer in charge of the station, however, showed resource. Next morning, by means of a pickaxes, which he used as a grapnel, he picked up the ends of the broken cable. Improvizing a wooden raft, which he anchored, he fastened to it the broken cable ends and made a through connexion with a piece of covered copper. He then constructed a primitive telegraph set, and got into communication with Suwa and made known his plight.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.