The Old Frigate Iris with Her Freight of Cable Alongside the Great Eastern at Sheerness: The Cable Passed from the Hulk to the Great Eastern 1865

Robert Charles Dudley captured with watercolor the Great Eastern ship receiving a cable. Note the ship's paddlewheel, a dominant feature of nineteenth-century naval engineering. It resembles a wheel of fortune and evokes the relentless turning of time. Consider how the wheel, an ancient symbol, has been reinterpreted across cultures. From the Buddhist Dharma wheel representing the cycle of life to the Celtic wheel of the year, marking seasonal changes, the wheel is deeply embedded in our collective consciousness. Even in the modern era, we see its continued relevance, as we understand that every revolution is another repetition of the same drama. The cyclical nature of existence, with its inherent tensions between progress and repetition, finds a potent visual echo in the paddlewheel, where we see the mechanical representation of continuous movement and the timeless, unceasing wheel of fate.